I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
By now everyone who follows public education knows Delaware and Tennessee won the first round of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top contest. The Christian Science Monitor (CSM) has a story about how those states aced the test.
It appears that Delaware and Tennessee both have strong “data” systems, the paper said, which I can only imagine means that each state has the potential to measure a student’s progress — if such a thing can truly be measured — as well as a teacher’s performance in more detail than in the past.
In addition, Tennessee plans to intervene in failing schools by grouping them together in what it is calling an Achievement School District, the paper reported. Delaware, meanwhile, will begin requiring “strong demonstrations” of student growth for a teacher to be considered effective.
Both states also are ready to roll out their plans as broadly as possible, meaning they aren’t mere pilot projects to be tested in a few districts and then adopted statewide after some fine tuning, the paper noted.
“The biggest distinguishing thing for me is that the two state winners were touching 100 percent of their students,” CSM quoted U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan as saying on a conference call with reporters. “This is about systemic change.”
Also of consequence was the “buy-in” each state’s plans had from school districts and teachers’ unions, the paper said.
U.S. World & News Report (USWNR) added additional insight into the federal government’s decision to select Delaware and Tennessee as first-round winners in a post today.
USWNR attributed part of the reasoning to both states’ past efforts in the area of educational reform. It noted that Delaware had narrowed the “achievement gap” between white and minority students in math and reading scores in various grades in recent years. Tennessee, meanwhile, had pioneered what the magazine called “value-added testing” that linked student growth to his or her teachers and the school the student attended.
All these details just increase my interest to see who wins federal dollars in the next round of the federal contest. More than $3 billion has yet to be awarded in the Race to the Top program, and New Mexico is in the hunt for some of that lucre. The state didn’t make the finalists’ cut in the first round.
Let’s hope for a better result in the next round.
