May 24, 2017

Delaware News

Cape Gazette
Mariner student Emadah White wins technology state championship
Emadah White, an eighth-grader at Mariner Middle School, won the state championship title at the recent Delaware State Technology Student Association Competition. All students were asked to create a car out of a wood balsa block. The car had to adhere to strict weight and size guidelines in order to qualify.

Newsworks
Wilmington students creating glittering tile mural for elementary school lobby
A yearlong arts project at Stubbs Elementary School on Wilmington’s East Side is creating a lasting and glittering ceramic tile mosaic for the school lobby. The project, done in collaboration with the Creative Vision Factory, is truly ambitious — 3,500 unique designs mixed with pieces of mirror and broken contractor tiles. Arrayed in a snakeskin design, the mural will run the length of the hallway, a 9-by-60 foot stretch.

Wilmington kids left out in bill that expands Newark Charter preference zone
For the 16 years Newark Charter School has been in existence, the high-performing institution has given preference to students who live within five miles of the campus. Using that formula, the school has grown and thrived, and this year became a National Blue Ribbon School for the second time. It’s now Delaware’s biggest public school, with 2,330 students from kindergarten through 12th grade. Another 3,000 are on its waiting list.

Delaware 105.9
Sussex County schools could suffer under Gov. Carney’s budget cuts to education
Delaware schools could soon be hearing the word “cut” perhaps more times than on a movie set. $37 million would be cut from public education under Governor John Carney’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year. So how would this affect schools in Sussex County?

Rodel Blog
Tribute to a global teacher
Blog post by Paul Herdman, president and ceo of the Rodel Foundation of Delaware
Last Friday, a friend and colleague, Lee Sing Kong, passed away from an apparent heart attack at the age of 65. See a story about his passing here. He was both a horticulturist and an educator. I knew him as the latter in his role as the director of the National Institute for Education (NIE). He was a master educator. He not only helped build Singapore’s system into one of the best in the world, but he was incredibly generous in sharing everything he was learning to help other educators and policymakers from around the globe improve their practice.

Digging Deeper: Student need grows as budgets shrink
Blog post by Shyanne Miller, policy associate at the Rodel Foundation of Delaware
Delaware’s budget crisis has taken quite a toll on education and the state as a whole. At the same time, student needs are growing, with some of our highest-need populations (low-income students, English learners, and students with disabilities) increasing at a faster rate than ever. With changing demographics and the expanding role of the public school system, students are going to need all the resources they can get.

National News

Education Week
What are states doing about charter schools in their ESSA plans?
States so far are making little mention of charter schools in their federal Every Student Succeeds Act plans, instead lumping charter and traditional public schools together in accountability proposals, according to a new report. The Education Commission of the States this month released a policy brief, called Charter School Accountability Under ESSA, that examines how states and the District of Columbia are addressing charter schools in their plans to the U.S. Department of Education on the new federal law.

The Record-Courier
$6.37 billion K-12 education budget approved by Nevada Legislature
Lawmakers on Thursday gave tentative approval to a K-12 education budget totaling $6.37 billion over the biennium. Roughly half that total — $3.16 billion — is money directly from the state — a 7 percent, or $210 million, increase over the current budget. The rest of the money comes from the Local School Support Tax portion of the sales tax that’s expected to generate $2.75 billion in the coming two-year cycle and from the 25-cent property tax dedicated to K-12 that’s projected to generate some $451 million.

The Washington Post
Black parents use Civil War-era law to challenge Mississippi’s ‘inequitable’ schools
The Southern Poverty Law Center is using a novel legal argument in an attempt to address what it describes as gross inequities between public schools serving majority-white and majority-black populations in Mississippi. In a lawsuit filed in federal court Tuesday, the organization alleges that poor academic outcomes for black students in Mississippi are a direct result of the state’s failure to live up to the terms of its readmission to the Union following the Civil War.

The 74 Million
The key to effective personalized learning: Rigorous content, standards, and experiences
My colleague and I recently visited a middle school science classroom. Students, outfitted with safety glasses, were organized into groups of three to four. The room was lively but not disorderly as each group worked on its own experiment. As we walked the perimeter of the room, we saw many of the hallmarks of a personalized learning classroom: Small groups worked independently; each worked on an activity that they had chosen; the teacher engaged with small groups of students.