June 27, 2016

Delaware

Department of Education
31 educators, college students join department as summer fellows
The Delaware Department of Education recently welcomed 31 summer fellows. All are promising future leaders and current educators who have a passion for education and want to gain hands-on exposure to policy work. Fellows are charged with important projects critical to Delaware’s policy agenda.

Dover Post
Dover High looks to constables for better security
Administrators at Dover High School want to increase security with professionally trained and armed constables in response to community complaints about safety and a statewide rash of robocall bomb threats. A public meeting on the topic is July 5 at 7 p.m. at the district offices.

Newsmaker: Nicole Roberts
Nicole Roberts found out early on that teaching wasn’t for her. What she did find was an affinity for helping students with special needs. The Hartly Elementary School teacher tries not to limit herself to the classroom. In her own time she teaches yoga classes and coaches “Girls on the Run,” a nonprofit that instills confidence in young girls. This passion for teaching resulted in her being 2016’s Delaware Psychologist of the Year.

Office of the Governor
Governor’s Weekly Message: Expanding access to high-quality early learning programs
In his weekly message, Governor Markell highlights the efforts of the state to give all Delaware families access to high-quality early learning programs.

The News Journal
Young chemists compete in national contest
Three dozen middle school students from across the country competed for scholarship money and the glory of winning a chemistry contest last week. The competition, which was held this year at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, is set up more like a spelling bee than a science fair, with students each answering the same science question.

National

The Brookings Institution
Are school internet connections fast enough to support personalized learning?
Blog post by Joshua Bleiberg, PhD student at Vanderbilt University
Education technologies like personalized learning have tremendous potential to help students learn. To maximize the value of personalized learning, the public and private sectors must increase their investments in training, infrastructure, hardware, and curriculum. Unfortunately progress in each of these areas is uneven.

Education Week
1 in 4 teachers miss 10 or more school days, analysis finds
More than 6.5 million students in 2013-14 attended a school where at least half of teachers missed 10 days of school or more, according to the most recent estimate from the U.S. Department of Education. Now, a new analysis by the Education Week Research Center adds some context to those numbers.

Teachers in high-poverty schools less confident about ed tech, survey finds
Teachers who are most confident about educational technology tend to work in low-poverty and suburban schools, bringing their students a wide range of experiences and potential benefits that other young people may lack, concludes a survey released today by the Education Week Research Center.

The New York Times
Amazon unveils online education service for teachers
Just ahead of the back-to-school season, Amazon is making a major foray into the education technology market for primary and secondary schools, a territory that Apple, Google and Microsoft have heavily staked out. On Monday morning, Amazon said that it would introduce an online marketplace with tens of thousands of free lesson plans, worksheets and other instructional materials for teachers in late August or early September.

The Washington Post
Court rules D.C. underserves and under identifies preschoolers with disabilities
The D.C. government is appealing a federal court ruling that said the city is providing inadequate services to young children with special needs who have yet to enter the school system. The appeal is the latest turn in a long-running legal battle over whether the District government is complying with federal education laws and doing enough to address disabilities and developmental delays among preschoolers.