June 27, 2017

Delaware News

The News Journal
Delaware school district task force takes open-ended approach
Opinion by Representative Earl Jaques
Delaware is facing another challenging budget year. The rising costs of educating our children and providing Medicaid to residents who need it most have been pushing our expenditures higher and higher, forcing us to look at different ways to be even more efficient with state spending. One area where Delawareans routinely point to as a way to reduce spending is to consolidate the number of school districts.

The Washington Post
Delaware lawmakers eye gender identity protections
Democratic lawmakers have introduced a resolution calling for Delaware’s Department of Education to develop regulations with specific guidelines to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or expression. The resolution says state employment policies and guidelines mandate that government employees not be discriminated against based on gender identity or expression.

Town Square Delaware
Nativity Prep: A Wilmington education success story
Rising sixth-grader Jasyn Truitt just wrapped up his first year at Wilmington’s Nativity Prep, calling the experience “awesome.” His schoolmate Christian Mezquita-Medina was so impressed with his seventh grade math class that he remarked, “I learned about things I used to believe only a genius could learn.”

Milford Live
Students graduate DE College Scholarship program
On June 17, parents, faculty, and supporters gathered alongside Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester to celebrate as 31 rising college freshmen graduated from the rigorous Delaware College Scholars program. Milford resident Jessica Creigh, who is attending University of Delaware next year, is one of the graduates.

Education Week
This was recently a white-hot education dispute, but ESSA plans barely mention it
The Common Core State Standards are alive and well and on the books in thirty-six states and the District of Columbia. But you’d basically never know it from reading states’ new plans to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act, Of the states still using the common core, eight—Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, and North Dakota—only mention the standards once in their applications, or not at all.

National News

EdSurge
Teachers at ISTE share their definitions of personalized learning…and they’re all different
Perhaps it was the soft jazz playing in the background, or the tranquil turquoise blue accenting all the signage. Or maybe the frenzy of testing is finally over, giving way to a chance to relax and unwind. Whatever it was, for an event with more than 1,400 booths, sessions and workshops and 21,000 attendees, ISTE’s annual conference kicked off with more of a breeze than a bang.

Education Week
Here’s why you can’t understand your state’s new plan for education
You know it when you see it. That’s right: We’re talking about education jargon, those terms that might signify something very important, but are often utterly mysterious to people who don’t spend their days wading through school policy. And there’s definitely quite a bit of jargon in the plans submitted by 17 states so far for the Every Student Succeeds Act. So with the help of a few self-aware wonks, we selected 12 pieces of jargon and tracked how often they occurred in those ESSA plans.

The News & Observer
Potential teachers may get a full ride – if they teach the right subject
College tuition could come free of charge for students headed for careers teaching science, math, or special education in North Carolina classrooms. State lawmakers are headed toward reviving – in more limited form – the N.C. Teaching Fellows Program that offered forgivable loans to education students until 2015. It’s a program that helped educators like Shanta Lightfoot. Coming to N.C. State University in Raleigh from her home in Elizabeth City, Lightfoot said she had some initial fear of how big the university was.

The New York Times
How Silicon Valley pushed coding into American classrooms
At a White House gathering of tech titans last week, Timothy D. Cook, the chief executive of Apple, delivered a blunt message to President Trump on how public schools could better serve the nation’s needs. To help solve a “huge deficit in the skills that we need today,” Mr. Cook said, the government should do its part to make sure students learn computer programming. “Coding,” Mr. Cook told the president, “should be a requirement in every public school.”

NPR
School vouchers get two new report cards
t is the education debate of the Trump era. With the president and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos using policy and the bully pulpit to champion private school vouchers, supporters and critics have tangled over the question: Do low-income, public school students perform better when they’re given a voucher to attend a private school?