November 6, 2015

Delaware News

Newark Post
ASPIRA Academy settles into expanded space
ASPIRA employs a dual-language-immersion program, in which students from kindergarten through fifth-grade spend one day learning in English and the next day switch to another classroom to learn in Spanish. The result is that the students, who come from both English and Spanish-dominant households, are fluent or nearly fluent in both languages. ASPIRA recently purchased the building and will eventually take over the remaining space, which it currently leases to Delaware Sportsplex. By fall 2018, the school will serve 800 students and have a preschool.

WMDT
DSU Allstate Ambassador discusses scholarship opportunities
November is national scholarship month and one student at Delaware State University is on a mission to share how the public can get involved in furthering someone’s education, specifically at historically black colleges and universities.

The News Journal
UD using high-tech new teaching lab
The Laboratory Preschool is a place where UD’s College of Human Development is adding technology its leaders hope will improve the hands-on experiences they give future teachers. Traditionally, students have worked alongside master teachers in a classroom, but a new pilot program has placed the master teacher in an observation room and placed “bugs” in the students ears. “They know [the master teacher] is there watching them and they’re still getting the feedback, but they can’t lean on them,” said Cynthia Paris, the lab school’s director. “They have all the responsibility themselves, which is an important thing to adjust to.”

A look at zero-tolerance policies
Opinion by Drew Serres, a member of the Coalition for Fairness & Equity in School
Implementing restorative justice policies will require effort. We will need the buy-in of all members of the community. That’s why I’m part of the Coalition for Fairness and Equity in Schools, which is composed of parents, teachers, politicians, and a wide range of non-profit and community leaders. The goal of the coalition is to bring an effective model of discipline into schools so they can be safer and more productive centers of learning. We call on school administrators and Delaware legislators to continue supporting our schools by backing policies that would eliminate the use of suspension for low level offenses and by providing schools with the resources they need to effectively implement restorative justice practices.

Dickinson High staff makes heroic difference
Editorial
It would be wonderful to know that teachers don’t come to school every day preparing for gun violence.

But, as we know all too well, such preparation – for teachers, staffers and students alike – is a requirement of the job. We saw an example of that recently, when Dickinson High School reported a pair of incidents in which guns were found on campus. As we learned Thursday, the staff at Dickinson – specifically Trish Seeman, Kathy Sheehy and Steven Caufield – “acted heroically to protect our students and to diffuse the situation,” according to a report from the Red Clay Consolidated School District.

Disruptive students hurt high achievers most
Opinion by Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, research fellow at the Hoover Institution and executive editor of Education Next
Our public schools are intended to help all students achieve their potential. By all means, we need to find ways to better serve disruptive students, who are often dealing with horrendous situations at home. But the bulk of the attention can’t go just to the toughest cases. Poor children who are ready to learn, follow the rules, and work hard deserve resources and opportunities to flourish.

Education World
Study finds teacher and principal evaluations need reform to be effective
The National Council on Teacher Quality has released an up-to-date state-by-state report on the current state of teacher evaluations. Of the more interesting findings from the study: most states require evaluations be at least in part based on student test scores, and most evaluations are still not differentiating performance as most teachers are ranked effective or highly effective. In order to fix teacher evaluations to make them more effective, the report said that performance-based evaluations need to “connect the dots,” using “evaluations of teacher effectiveness in policies of consequence for teacher training, professional development, improvement planning, compensation and accountability” as is done in Delaware, Florida and Louisiana.

WHYY
University of Delaware says there’s a plan to improve diversity
After several years of receiving criticism for a lack of campus diversity, the University of Delaware is discussing ways to make the student body, faculty and staff more diverse. The University’s College of Arts and Sciences said $1 million of its budget has been committed to the issue. In addition, the state is making plans for an independent diversity study of the university.

Cape Gazette
Parents rally against early elementary start times
Cape Henlopen parents have organized a petition campaign to reverse a recent change in school start times. In October, Cape Henlopen school board changed its earlier decision and decided to start the district’s elementary schools before secondary schools.

Cape educators, district sign four-year contract
Cape Henlopen educators have ratified a new contract that one union official calls the best teacher contract in the state. “I would say on most parts we have the best contract in the state of Delaware, bar none,” said John Dean, president of the Cape Henlopen Education Association. Dean said only one CHEA member voted against ratifying the contract for a final vote of 209-1.

State approves Cape’s plan for elementary schools, consortium
Cape Henlopen School District is set to move forward with plans to renovate or build new elementary schools after state officials approved the plans. Officials also approved a plan to build a new facility for Sussex Consortium.

Dover Post
School resource officers emphasize empathy
Dover High School’s Demetrius Stevenson sees being a school resource officer as a calling, and a way for him to give back to his community. Stevenson has been an SRO at Dover High for the past four years. He said the key to being effective is communicating with students and developing relationships with them. “I can relate to a lot of these students,” Stevenson said. “Coming up not having it so good, I understand the nature of these students and why they act out the way they way do.”

WBOC
Milford School District discusses selling middle school
The Milford School District is considering selling the abandoned Milford Middle School, pending approval from the Board of Education. The building, which used to be Milford High School built in 1929, has sat empty since 2012 after deteriorating below state standards.

National News

The Brookings Institution
Can city schools address the achievement and opportunity gap?
In a recent report, we looked at how public education is delivering on the promise of educational opportunity in 50 mid- to large-sized cities in the United States. This report is not the first to present evidence of deep achievement and opportunity gaps between racial and socio-economic student groups. But the report also suggests that inequity is not inevitable. Some cities are addressing inequity, by finding ways to give more students access to challenging curriculum, reducing the use of disproportionate exclusionary discipline, and improving access to the best schools.

USA Today
Biden: Local government key to education solutions
Solutions to the nation’s daunting infrastructure and education issues will start at the local level, Vice President Joe Biden told thousands of city officials from around the country on Thursday. Solutions to the nation’s daunting infrastructure and education issues will start at the local level, Vice President Joe Biden told thousands of city officials from around the country on Thursday.

The Los Angeles Times
Teachers need more time, money and prestige, report says
Changing the teaching profession by making it more prestigious and giving teachers more planning time are just two proposals that are part of a new report from the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington. The report, which was provided to The Times and is being released Tuesday, calls for a comprehensive overhaul of the pipeline for becoming a teacher and staying in the classroom.

Education Next
Principals go to school to learn management savvy
A new cadre of school leadership programs emphasizes knowledge of practices from the business world. “Our view is that our principals need to be more than instructional leaders on campus,” said Andrea Hodge, the executive director of the Rice University program. “The principal needs to be the chief executive. What we try to do is give principals exposure to more holistic organizational-management concepts that are not covered to the same degree in most schools of education.”

The Washington Post
An educator’s list of what’s really hard in public education today
Column by Valerie Strauss
Bailey, who wrote the 2013 book “Misguided Education Reform: Debating the Impact on Students,” challenged Melinda and Bill Gates to spend “some serious time in poor public schools” to learn what is really hard in education for teachers and students — and to “spend time with the many moms of students with disabilities who home-school not because they want to, but because schools have cut special education services.” Here is a shortened version of her admittedly incomplete list of what’s really hard in education.

CNN
Mark Zuckerberg outlines education philanthropy plans
Zuckerberg and his wife are focused on “unlocking human potential” and “promoting equality”. Priorities include giving money to new schools that promote “personalized learning,” a style of teaching that adapts to the learner, and giving money to existing public school projects, such as the Education Super Highway, which aims to provide Internet access in every classroom.