May 1, 2015

Delaware News

Sussex County Post
Sen. Carper visits Indian River’s APELL Program
This voluntary program accommodates English Language Learners (ELL) who require a more intensive form of instruction than the traditional ELL programs at the district’s two high schools can provide. Most APELL students are from Guatemala, although a few hail from Honduras, Turkey and Haiti.

UDaily
Flexible classrooms, successful students
University of Delaware English professor Steve Bernhardt incorporates problem-based learning (PBL) and team-based learning into his classroom. One of his goals has been to create spaces where writers could benefit from immediate feedback and real-time coaching.

National News

Education Week
Education is political. Can teachers afford not to be?
Even teachers actively trying to influence policy can be reluctant to call themselves political. Some aren’t sure teaching and politics can even coexist.

Federal aid formulas a sticky issue in ESEA debate
“Formula changes are difficult because senators are elected to represent a particular state, and unless there is new money on the table, formula changes tend to be zero-sum games,” said Catherine Brown, the vice president for education policy at the Washington-based Center for American Progress.

KQED
Does Common Core ask too much of Kindergarten readers?
For states adopting Common Core, the new standards apply to kindergarten, laying out what students should be able to do by the end of the grade. Kindergartners are expected to know basic phonics and word recognition as well as read beginner texts, skills some childhood development experts argue are developmentally inappropriate.

The Associated Press
Despite agreement, new PARCC policy is not official
Gov. Chris Christie’s top education official and Democratic lawmakers have expressed agreement on how much the results of new statewide standardized tests will count in teachers’ performance reviews. But Education Commissioner David Hespe stopped short Tuesday of agreeing to carry the policy currently in place into next year.

NC lawmakers may change how schools given A through F grades
The state House approved a change that would shift how future A-to-F scores for public schools are calculated. The change would put equal weight on skills students learned and how much they’ve learned in an academic year. Student proficiency now determines 80 percent of the grade that schools are given for their performance.