June 10, 2016

Delaware

Coastal Point
From Houston to Michigan: IR Hall of Fame inductees ask grads to serve others
When students graduate from high school, they have decades of life still ahead of them. Indian River High School is again honoring alumni who have made the IRHS family proud with the 2016 Hall of Fame inductions. Usually, there is just one inductee each year, but this year, two alumni were honored for their service to the community: Vincent E. Mumford (1983) in sports leadership and V. Graig Temple (1993) in emergency services.

Newark Post
Glasgow Lions award scholarships
The Glasgow Lions Club recently presented $1,000 scholarships to two local high school seniors. Madison Smith was the recipient from Glasgow High School. Included among her many school activities are the marching band color guard, FFA, drama club and serving as captain of the varsity soccer team. She has volunteered in the community with many 4-H sponsored activities, Lums Pond Cub Scout Day Camp and the Cecil County Fair.

National

Chalkbeat
City unveils new report cards for schools serving high-needs students
Schools serving thousands of New York City’s highest-need students will get public report cards Thursday, after being left out of the first two rounds of annual reports under Mayor Bill de Blasio. The “School Quality Snapshots” are meant to give families a clear sense of the quality of each New York public school, and will for the first time include transfer schools, which enroll drop-outs and students who fell behind at traditional high schools, and schools in District 75, which serve students with more severe disabilities.

Education Week
One student’s quest to reshape schools
As Andrew Brennen crisscrosses the country listening to high school students, he is trying to build a huge wave of sound: the sound of students raising their voices to make school better. Brennen, 20, is on a national tour to engage 10,000 high school students in conversations designed to help them claim powerful roles in their education.

NPR
More than 6 million U.S. students are ‘chronically absent’
It’s one of the oldest issues in school improvement: Getting kids to show up. If students miss 10 percent of the school year — that’s just two days a month —research shows they are way more likely to fall behind — even drop out. Today, the U.S. Education Department is releasing a report on the first national data set on chronic absence — defined as missing 15 or more days of school a year.

The Hechinger Report
The 7 steps to making a statewide test
Who designs the state tests that spread a blanket of silence across the hallways and classrooms of Massachusetts schools each spring as students scratch away at paper with No. 2 pencils? A) A phalanx of drill sergeants who would ban recess if they could B) A coven of witches who feed on the sweat and tears of small children C) Dozens of PhDs and former teachers who spend their days in cubicles in Dover, New Hampshire The answer is C.

The New York Times
Choosing a school for my daughter in a segregated city
In the spring of 2014, when our daughter, Najya, was turning 4, my husband and I found ourselves facing our toughest decision since becoming parents. We live in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a low-income, heavily black, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of brownstones in central Brooklyn. The nearby public schools are named after people intended to evoke black uplift, like Marcus Garvey, a prominent Black Nationalist in the 1920s, and Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black History Month, but the schools are a disturbing reflection of New York City’s stark racial and socioeconomic divisions.