November 18, 2015
Delaware News
Delaware Public Media
New criminal justice reform task force underway
Officials from the state’s executive, judicial and legislative branches formed a new task force to try and overhaul Delaware’s criminal codes and sentencing guidelines. Chairman Sen. Harris McDowell (D-Wilmington North) describes it as a “system in failure.” “Something is radically wrong when a nation that has one of the best public education systems in the world has to end up with such a high percentage of their population involved in criminality,” McDowell said.
WHYY
Wilmington redistricting plan released
A long-awaited plan released Tuesday proposes major changes to Wilmington’s education landscape. The biggest item in the Wilmington Education Improvement Commission’s 162-page interim plan is a redistricting proposal that calls for one of the city’s four school districts to be dissolved into another. Effective summer 2018, the Christina School District would cede its roughly 2,500 Wilmington students to the neighboring Red Clay Consolidated School District. Christina would continue to operate schools in and around Newark, Delaware, where most of its students live.
The News Journal
School realignment plan calls for property tax changes
In order to make a sweeping overhaul of Wilmington’s education system work, the Wilmington Education Improvement Commission says Delaware needs to make drastic changes like re-assessing property tax values.
Free tuition won’t help students. These investments in community colleges will.
Opinion by Chenny Ng, education policy researcher at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University
However, free tuition will not solve today’s real problem: the gap between enrollment and graduation. Nearly 90 percent of high school graduates enroll in college within eight years, but graduation rates are another story, hovering around 39 percent for community colleges.
Dover Post
Dover hosts Delaware’s first high school powwow
The 16-year-old Dover High School student has since channeled that frustration to form and lead a Native American Club. And now, thanks to her initiative, the school will host a Native American Powwow on Nov. 21. According to Chief William Daisy of the Nanticoke Tribe, this is Delaware’s first high-school sponsored powwow.
National News
Associated Press
Massachusetts education board approves new hybrid test
Massachusetts students will soon be facing a new standardized test after the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted to combine elements of the existing MCAS test with another test aligned with Common Core state standards.
EdSource
‘Destined for great things’: Low-income students ask educators to believe they can succeed
“I am a leader.” “I am not ghetto.” “I am not incapable of being interested in mathematics and the sciences.” “I am destined for great things.” As part of a new school reform campaign, a statewide coalition of students from low-income families is posting statements on Twitter and Facebook that are both poignant and backed by research about system change: If you want schools to improve, they say, believe in us. The student statements are one element of a campaign to upend stereotypes, support teachers who work with students from diverse backgrounds and urge schools to create communities where it is understood that all students can succeed.
The Hechinger Report
Hold on tight: Innovation in education requires support and connections if it is to survive
“We are here to cross-pollinate ideas,” Susan Patrick, president and CEO of iNACOL, said to a packed ballroom of attendees during opening remarks Monday. Unlike many other education technology conferences, the annual iNACOL symposium stands out for the sheer number of classroom-level participants. It’s an important audience. These are the people tasked with making the magic happen every day. The conference serves as a place where they can meet, ask questions and take a peek behind the scenes into what’s happening in the classrooms of schools far away from their own communities.
Education Week
New tools help track Common-Core learning
What do PARCC and Smarter Balanced offer in addition to their year-end tests? If you gave teachers across the country a pop quiz on that question, you’d probably get a lot of bewildered looks. Many educators don’t know about the teaching tools that those two groups of states built as part of their projects to design end-of-year assessments for the Common Core State Standards. But when the U.S. Department of Education awarded the consortia $360 million five years ago, it sought more than summative assessments in English/language arts and math. It demanded “systems” of assessment that allowed teachers to gauge student learning in real time and adjust instruction accordingly.