October 26, 2015

Delaware News

The News Journal
Opinion by Gary Stockbridge, president of Delmarva Power.
Vision Coalition helps students to see their potential
Whatever you like to do, wherever your passion lies, now is the time to extend that lifeline and share it with Delaware’s students. Step up and help prepare our kids for a lifetime of success. If you want to join the conversation or find more ways to get involved, I urge you to attend the Vision Coalition’s Eighth Annual Conference on Education on Oct. 28 at the University of Delaware’s Clayton Hall.

Delaware Public Media
Exploring bilingual education in the First State
Education was the conversation of the day at this year’s second annual Delaware Latino Summit earlier this week. Specifically, the summit focused on training more First State teachers to be culturally competent. Andrea Flores is an example of what that could look like. Flores is bilingual and teaches first grade at La Academia Antonia Alonso Charter School. Her bilingual classroom is a model leaders like Gov. Jack Markell (D-Delaware) and Hispanic Commission co-chair Javier Torrijos want to replicate.

Gov. Markell touts First State progress in early childhood education
Markell spoke this week from Christina Early Education Center in Newark, which was just given the state’s 100th five-star rating — the highest in the Delaware Stars ranking system for early childhood education. Markell said the state has made progress in getting more low-income children into the best preschools and daycares: “More than 58 percent of the state’s most vulnerable children are enrolled in highly rated Stars programs. That’s up from just 5 percent in 2011. That’s thousands more low-income kids getting a great start,” said Markell.

WHYY
Grading the graders: Delaware releases new scorecards on teacher prep programs
The Delaware Department of Education released a new ratings system Friday for the state’s teacher prep programs, despite strenuous objections from the state’s higher-education community. The new scorecard groups each teacher prep program into one of four tiers, with tier one being the highest and tier four the lowest. It takes into account the quality of incoming students; the number of graduates who serve in Delaware schools; whether or not those graduates stay in Delaware and how well graduates perform once they’re placed into jobs.

Education Week
Setting bold course, Delaware serves up info on teacher-prep performance
Blog by Stephen Sawchuk
On these reports, Delaware’s accounting includes data on how students taught by program graduates fare; program selectivity and the diversity of the prospective teachers; and whether graduates make it through the first three years of teaching. In fact, these measures aren’t terribly far off from what the federal government wants to see in its pending regulations for teacher preparation. Each of these has a target performance level, and points are distributed according to how close the program came to meeting it.

Department of Education
Press release
Education preparation program reports now available
Building on a comprehensive effort to strengthen educator preparation programs in Delaware, including a significant increase in state funding and other supports, the Delaware Department of Education today released its first annual reports on the state’s teacher and specialist educator preparation programs, providing information ranging from the diversity of programs’ candidate classes to student performance outcomes of graduates to job placement and retention within the state.

Office of the Governor
Governor’s weekly message: Ensuring every child has the best opportunity to succeed
In his weekly message, filmed at the Christina Early Education Center, Governor Markell highlights the state’s progress in ensuring access to quality early childhood education for all Delaware students.

National News

New York Times
Obama administration calls for limits on testing in schools
Faced with mounting and bipartisan opposition to increased and often high-stakes testing in the nation’s public schools, the Obama administration declared Saturday that the push had gone too far, acknowledged its own role in the proliferation of tests, and urged schools to step back and make exams less onerous and more purposeful. Specifically, the administration called for a cap on assessment so that no child would spend more than 2 percent of classroom instruction time taking tests. It called on Congress to “reduce over-testing” as it reauthorizes the federal legislation governing the nation’s public elementary and secondary schools.

Politico
Education Department: Too much testing, partly our fault
The Education Department took some of the blame for the sometimes stressful, excessive and time-consuming testing at many schools and said Saturday that it hasn’t done enough to help states tackle the problem.

NPR
Teaching teachers to teach: It’s not so elementary
What Deborah Ball is trying to model at the University of Michigan is a system where future teachers have to demonstrate they can do some core things — like present a math problem, and lead a discussion about it — before they’re safe to practice.

Thomas B. Fordham Institute
If national test scores are down, blame the recession
By Michael J. Petrilli, a President at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
The next batch of results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is due on October 28. Pundits of all persuasions are gearing up to jump on the news and promote their spin. But that’s for amateurs, I say. Why wait for regular old mis-NAEP-ery when you can practice pre-NAEP-ery?

Governing
Want better education policy? There’s a checklist for that.
If you’ve been active in education policy lately, you’ve likely heard something like this: “It was a good policy, but the implementation just didn’t go well.” While that may be true in some cases, frequently it was the policy that wasn’t well thought out. Education policy can advance student learning, but as education becomes much more politicized and specialized, policymakers may benefit from taking a step back and thinking about the root causes of the problems and the theory of change behind every policy solution. Hence, the Education Commission of the States’ and the Aspen Institute led the development of this new checklist.