State officials have their fingers crossed that evaluators at the U.S. Department of Education will find favor with a plan to overhaul major parts of Delaware’s school system.
In January the DOE will begin the process of deciding which states will receive the first batch of grants from the Race to the Top fund, a $4 billion pot of federal stimulus money to be distributed among all 50 states according to student population and the strength of each state’s education reform plan.
Delaware Secretary of Education Dr. Lillian Lowery hopes Delaware’s plan, unveiled Dec. 1, is strong enough to win as much as possible of the $75 million the DOE says it and states of similar size could be eligible for.
A first round of grants will be awarded in April, but those states that don’t win will get feedback from DOE and can revise their plans for a second round of funding in the fall.
The Delaware plan, which aligns with Race to the Top standards, includes possible new rules for curriculum uniformity, teacher evaluations and turning around schools that fail to show academic progress. It is based on an education reform package proposed by Gov. Jack Markell at the beginning of his term.
Lowery said the new curriculum standards would conform to an emerging national model proposed by a consortium of education leaders from across the country and designed to measure students against their peers worldwide.
“Forty-eight states and three territories have signed on to consider adoption of common core standards that would be multistage and benchmarked internationally. Since our students and our graduates now compete worldwide, we want to make sure that our children are being prepared to be as competitive as they possibly can,” Lowery said.
In terms of measuring teacher performance, the plan proposes a major change to the evaluation system that would add a uniform determination of student progress.
Teachers whose students meet their progress benchmarks would be rewarded with bonuses, especially those who work in struggling schools. If a teacher’s students don’t demonstrate a year’s worth of advancement after a year’s worth of instruction, that teacher’s rating suffers and he or she is required to work with highly-rated colleagues and school administrators to come up with a plan for improvement.
Lowery said she’s confident in the new evaluation model, despite arguments that teachers shouldn’t be held responsible for students who have difficulty achieving because of other factors, like undiagnosed disabilities or home and family problems.
To ensure a comprehensive gauge of student progress, Lowery said the state will come up with a variety of measures in addition to standardized test scores.
“We’re certainly never going to take a position that it’s OK to give up on a kid,” she said. “We understand that some students are going to be more challenging than others, that’s why we’re going to come up with different indicators so there is a cumulative assessment and we can look at different data points.”
Also included in the plan are more comprehensive rules governing consistently low-performing schools.
The changes outline specific paths to turning around those schools, which total approximately 25 statewide.
Schools that slip below performance indicators for one or two years will have to organize committees of staff, administrators and the community to develop a strategy for getting back on track. But, schools that lag behind for several years face more drastic measures like reorganizing a public school as a charter school, sacking school administration and teachers and closing a school outright.
Until now, the state has rarely strayed from the school-based improvement plan model, but Lowery is hopeful the districts containing such schools will see the new rules as a hand up.
“This is a positive for them, now they can do some of the things they need to do and they want to do,” she said.
In order to score highly on the DOE’s Race to the Top rubric, states need to establish significant agreement with their plans among their local school districts. The DOE will require memorandums of understanding from districts that support the plan and want access to the funding.
“One of the biggest baskets of points is for what we call ‘state success factors,’ capacity,” said Justin Hamilton, DOE press secretary. “It’s not enough to have a plan, you have to demonstrate that you have the political will, community support and ability to carry out the plan.”
Dr. Dan Curry, superintendent of Lake Forest School District, said he, like most administrators, supports the ideas articulated in the state’s plan, but wants more details before urging his school board to sign anything.
“These are drafts, these things take on a little different form after they’ve been aired out, we still have a ways to go,” he said. “They’re on a pretty tight timeline, but without the [memorandum of understanding] in hand, the exact language, we’re not going to sign anything.”
U.S. Department of Education Race to the Top funding estimates, based on share of nationwide population of students age 5 through 17.
Category 1, $350-$700 million: California, Texas, New York, Florida
Category 2, $200-$400 million: Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey
Category 3, $150-$250 million: Virginia, Arizona, Indiana, Washington, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Missouri, Maryland, Wisconsin
Category 4, $60-$175 million: Minnesota, Colorado, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Puerto Rico, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Oregon, Connecticut, Utah, Mississippi, Iowa, Arkansas, Kansas, Nevada
Category 5, $20-$75 million: New Mexico, Nebraska, Idaho, West Virgnina, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming, District of Columbia
Source: www.ed.gov
Email Doug Denison at doug.denison@doverpost.com.
