September 19, 2014

Local News

The News Journal
New charter will meet needs to poorly served students
An op-ed by Kia Childs, Executive Director, Great Oaks Charter School – Wilmington
In addition to the New York school there are Great Oaks schools in Newark, New Jersey, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, and in the fall of 2015, Great Oaks will come to Wilmington – my hometown. While neither of my parents graduated from college, they made my education a priority and because of their sacrifice, I fared better than most of my African-American peers in the city’s schools. While my peers struggled, I attended AP classes. There were very few students of color in those classes. I applied to 12 colleges, got accepted to all, and went on to graduate from Hampton University.

Newspaper side with elitists in school reform debate
A commentary by Connie Merlet and Nancy Willing, Newark
You, The News Journal, should be ashamed of your constant propagandization of your school reporting. You have damaged education by going along with the governor, the lieutenant governor, the charter lobbyists, Vision 2015, Education in Delaware 25, and the others whose columns constantly “grace” your opinion pages. These groups and individuals, which bedevil our public schools showing their one-sided views for reform which don’t actually reform anything but do fill their pockets, are changing public education and hurting all of our students.

Sussex Countian
Strong start for new Georgetown Kindergarten Center
The Georgetown Kindergarten Center entered its second year of existence this month with high expectations, according to Principal Janet Hickman. The center’s first year was a “solve-as-it-occurs kind of year,” Hickman said, referring to the Indian River School District’s introduction of full-day kindergarten, as well as the new center’s role as a centralized kindergarten.

National News

New Jersey Newsroom
Jersey legislation aims to boost school breakfast programs
Legislation to boost breakfast programs in New Jersey schools, particularly for underprivileged children, in order to help give them a leg up on academics advanced in the Senate.

Dayton Daily News
Grading system focuses on students meeting standards
Increasingly, Ohio school districts are looking to gauge if a child has reached certain standards by using number grades — rather than letter grades — that assess mastery of material within each subject.

Inside Higher Ed
High impact, low participation
Community colleges now have solid data on which strategies work best to help students get to graduation. While more colleges are using those techniques, far too few students are benefiting from them.

Education Week
Texas district tests new R&D model with novice teachers
The 86,000-student Austin, Texas, district is part of an unusual research partnership intended to solve school-level problems quickly, while also helping school leaders and policymakers step back and take the time to study how day-to-day issues fit in a larger system. In the first major test of “improvement science” for K-12 education, Austin schools have overhauled the way they support and improve teachers in their first, most challenging years of instruction.

Funding doesn’t follow national praise for civic education
Between 2011 and 2013, three separate organizations released reports lambasting the state of civic education in the United States. The latest, published last November by Stanford University and the University of Washington, Seattle, lamented that, “Students are not finding inspiration in civic values as taught in schools today, nor are they gaining a sense that they are able to engage effectively in civic and political domains.”

Urban districts develop Common-Core guide for teaching ELLs
Some of the nation’s biggest school districts have banded together to answer those questions and provide guidance to the teachers moving headlong into teaching the standards to a diverse array of learners who face new, and tougher, common-core-aligned tests this school year. The Council of the Great City Schools, a Washington-based organization of 67 big-city districts, recently finished work on an instructional guide, or “framework,” for educators grappling with how to infuse language learning at all proficiency levels with their teaching of rigorous English/language arts standards, such as reading complex texts and crafting arguments from evidence.