Posts Tagged ‘Teacher Evaluation’

Daily Education News – 5/15/13

Posted by rodel

Here are several stories in today’s news about Delaware education and from across the nation:

Local News

The Cape Gazette
Parents, teachers protest Milton school split
Superintendent Robert Fulton presented a proposal at the April board meeting to reconfigure the Milton elementary schools by placing kindergarten to second-grade students in H.O. Brittingham Elementary School and third- to fifth-grade students in Milton Elementary School after board members had expressed interest in resolving inequities at the two schools that lie less than a mile apart. Board members appeared open to the idea of a grade split for the Milton schools until a contingent of parents and teachers from Milton Elementary came out against the plan. “I heard from my constituents, and I’ve heard them loud and clear,” said board member Sandi Minard.

WDEL
School board election results
Seven unofficial winners in Tuesday’s school board elections in the New Castle County districts. Kelly Wright won Appoquinimink’s at-large seat over three other candidates, while in Brandywine, Joseph Brumskill, Cara Stanard and Ralph Ackerman were all victorious. In Christina, Harrie-Ellen Minnehan is a winner, and the winners in Red Clay include Adriana Leela Bohm and Kenneth Woods.

WDDE
Bill streamlining Delaware’s school choice program poised to become law
A bill streamlining the state’s school choice program met little resistance in its quick trip through the General Assembly. Senators wasted little time in unanimously passing the measure Tuesday, only asking for a few clarifications.

National News

Governing Magazine
Florida teacher lawsuit could spread to other states
The lawsuit filed by seven Florida teachers last month, challenging the constitutionality of the state’s new teacher evaluation system, was touted as the first of its kind, but it’s unlikely to be the last. The teachers’ complaint, backed by the state’s largest teacher union–the Florida Education Association–and the National Education Association (NEA), centered on one fact: the new system, which required student performance to make up a certain percentage of a teacher’s annual performance review, led to teachers being evaluated based on the test scores of students they had never taught. Sometimes, they were judged by the test scores of students from another school altogether. The lawsuit alleges that this method of assessment infringes on the teachers’ due process and equal protection rights under the U.S. Constitution, because the Florida law allows evaluations to be used in personnel decisions, including raises and terminations.

The Seattle Times
Seattle high schools can omit MAP exams
Teachers protesting the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) tests in Seattle won a big victory Monday, as Superintendent José Banda announced that high schools don’t have to give the tests after this spring. The decision will be up to each high school’s leadership team, Banda said in a letter to staff. All other schools in the district must continue to give MAP reading and math exams at least twice a year, despite the call from hundreds of teachers and parents to scrap the test altogether. But high schools, where the MAP boycott has been strongest, can be free of the exams if they choose, although they will be required to come up with some other way to track the progress of students who are behind.

Education Week
New attack on Common Core from Pennsylvania Democrats
Upset about what they see as the “sham” the Common Core State Standards will become without adequate funding to support it, a group of Pennsylvania Democratic state senators are claiming that the new standards will only bring misery, in the form of greatly damaged graduation rates, if major changes aren’t made.

Kansas Common Core critics voice concerns
Critics of the Kansas Board of Education’s decision to adopt national standards for math and reading urged the board to reconsider its decision to join the education program. Opponents of the Common Core standards, which were developed by a national consortium, spent nearly two hours criticizing the standards during a hearing Tuesday.

The Washington Post
U-Va. MOOC finds high attrition, high satisfaction
Ordinarily, a professor would worry if only one out of every 10 students passed a class. But University of Virginia historian Philip Zelikow seems enormously pleased with such results from the course he just finished teaching on the history of the modern world. About 10 percent passed his class. That works out to nearly 5,000 of roughly 47,000 who registered. Much is made of the gargantuan number of students who sign up for massive open online courses, or MOOCs. After all, that is why they are called massive. Coursera, the Web platform that hosted Zelikow’s MOOC and many others, has drawn more than 3.5 million registered users. EdX, another MOOC platform, has more than 890,000.

Daily Education News – 5/14/13

Posted by rodel

Here are several stories in today’s news about Delaware education and from across the nation:

Local News

The News Journal
Indian River School District to put guards in all schools
The Indian River School District will hire enough security officers to patrol every school in the district as a “proactive safety measure,” and is considering arming all of them. The district’s school board voted to add the officers at its May 8 meeting. “We feel as if the way things are in this country today, we want to provide the safest environment we possibly can,” School Board President Charles Bireley said. Superintendent Susan Bunting said it may not be possible to arm security officers who are not working police officers. “Our information that we’ve been able to research so far says they cannot be armed,” she said. “For now, we are saying that they will not have firearms.”

National News

National Review
Two Moms vs. Common Core
Indiana has become the first state to retreat from the Common Core standards, as Governor Mike Pence has just signed a bill suspending their implementation. A great deal has been written and spoken about Common Core, but it is worth rehearsing the outlines again. Common Core is a set of math and English standards developed largely with Gates Foundation money and pushed by the Obama administration and the National Governors Association. The standards define what every schoolchild should learn each year, from first grade through twelfth, and the package includes teacher evaluations tied to federally funded tests designed to ensure that schools teach to Common Core.

Education Week
Top jobs opening up in nation’s school districts
Districts across the country, including some of the nation’s largest, are facing a spate of superintendent vacancies. Schools chiefs or interim superintendents will be leaving this year or next in at least 17 well-known districts, including Baltimore; Boston; Clark County, Nev.; Indianapolis; and Wake County, N.C.

TFA finds climate ripe to train more pre-K teachers
Seven years after Teach for America (TFA) expanded its training program to include preschool teachers, the organization has produced 800 instructors in 22 high-poverty sites around the country. The organization’s leaders see the current climate as ripe for further expansion. With President Barack Obama’s interest in early childhood education, TFA aims to be an increasing part of the mix.

The New York Times
Schools Chief blasts mayoral candidates over remarks at education forum
Dennis M. Walcott, the New York City schools chancellor, lashed out at the Democratic candidates for mayor on Monday, saying that he did not believe any of them had a compelling vision to lead city schools and that they had been pandering to gain the support of the teachers’ union. In unusually caustic terms, Mr. Walcott said he was “appalled” by the remarks of five Democrats at a forum on Saturday, in which the candidates denounced Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s focus on test scores, charter schools and the closing of low-performing schools.

Denver Post
Financial issues dominate Colorado Legislature’s education agenda
Colorado lawmakers enacted groundbreaking education measures this session. The Colorado ASSET bill will allow students who arrived in the country illegally to pay the much less expensive in-state tuition rate. The Future School Finance Act would overhaul pre-K-12 funding, but voters must approve $1 billion dollars in revenue for the formula to take effect. Lawmakers also passed bills on sex education, school breakfasts, and teacher evaluation oversight.

Daily Education News – 5/13/13

Posted by rodel

Here are several stories in today’s news about Delaware education and from across the nation:

Local News

The News Journal
Hearing set over Race to the Top funding feud between Christina School District, Delaware
The Christina School District will get a hearing in front of a mediator on May 22 regarding its feud with the state over $2.3 million in federal Race to the Top money. The state wants Christina to give $20,000 over two years to a few of its highest-performing teachers. District officials say that program will be ineffective, and would prefer to give smaller bonuses to more teachers or use the money to boost technology in low-income schools.

Making school choices simpler
When Tiana Hodges was about to move up to middle school, her parents had a choice. If they didn’t take any action, Tiana would go to her feeder school, Fifer Middle. But her mom, Terri, did some research and found that Postlethwait Middle School, also in Caesar Rodney School District, had programs that could help Tiana improve her math skills. “We just thought that Postlethwait would be a better fit,” Terri Hodges said. Delaware has school choice, so Hodges applied to go to Postlethwait. But the family ran into roadblocks.

National News

Inside Higher Ed
Season of the crunch
Two new papers suggest that summer counseling for low-income college-bound high school graduates can have a major impact on their freshman year of college. One possible reason that legislative efforts to increase enrollment by low-income students have not always succeeded, one paper says, is that the government has “overlooked the summer after high school as an important time period in students’ transition to college.”

The New York Times
Seeking teachers’ support, mayoral candidates pledge education reform
They cooed about the importance of paying teachers fairly. They took turns skewering charter schools. One candidate went out of his way to say the president of the teachers’ union would go down in history as a “great leader.” With an eye toward winning the endorsement of the United Federation of Teachers, one of New York City’s most powerful unions, candidates for mayor on Saturday said they would depart radically from the approach of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in leading the public school system. At a forum sponsored by the union in Midtown Manhattan, several candidates pledged to scrap signature policies of Mr. Bloomberg, including his A-through-F grading system for schools and his support for housing charter schools inside existing school buildings.

New Orleans Times-Picayune
Jindal pre-K education overhaul approved by Louisiana House panel
The Louisiana House Education Committee passed legislation backed by Gov. Bobby Jindal to enforce new accountability standards for early childhood education programs. Senate Bill 130 would create the network authorized by Act 3, a law passed last year to consolidate all pre-kindergarten and day-care programs into one network and give them letter grades.

Education Week
Diversity at issue as states weigh teacher entry
Slowly but surely, a growing number of states are eyeing policies to select academically stronger individuals for their teaching programs as one avenue to improve the quality of new teachers. Underneath the attention such plans are attracting, though, run deep-seated fears about their potential consequences—particularly whether they will result in a K-12 workforce with fewer black and Latino teachers. On nearly all the measures states are considering, from GPAs to licensure-test scores, minority candidates tend to have weaker scores than their white counterparts.

EdSource
Common Core test is on track, State Board told
Four states have encountered serious glitches and system meltdowns over the past several weeks as they have moved their own state assessments online. But the head of the state-led consortium creating the Common Core tests for California and two dozen other states expressed confidence Wednesday that his organization is working closely with states and taking precautions to avoid significant problems. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium is one of two state consortiums – the other is PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) – that is committed, under a federal contract, to introduce the much-anticipated computer-based assessment in the spring of 2015. Students in grades 3-8 and grade 11 will be tested in English language arts and math. “We are on schedule and ready to roll,” Smarter Balanced Executive Director Joe Willhoft said in an interview after testimony before the State Board of Education.

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