Rocky Mount Telegram, March 12, 2019, by Amelia Harper

One Phillips Middle School teacher received the surprise of a lifetime Monday when she was told she had just won a $175,000 grant for herself, her school and for Edgecombe County Public Schools.

Casandra Cherry is in her second year as the math multi-classroom leader at  the school. She previously taught math at South Edgecombe Middle School for eight years. On Monday, she learned that she is one of five North Carolina teachers to win the Career Award for Science and Mathematics, a $175,000 grant provided by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Read the full article…

Christensen Institute, March 7, 2019, by Thomas Arnett and Julia Freeland Fisher

In a recent post, we shed light on the difference between blended learning—an instructional modality that describes integrating technology to deliver some content—and personalized learning—a philosophy that believes in a combination of modalities and goals for better and (and in some cases, new) outcomes for students.

Though the definition of personalized learning could encompass many modalities, there are innovative classroom design and support components outside of standard pedagogical approaches that are often missed. Here, research reveals three considerations that go beyond the curriculum to help educators make students’ personalized experiences more effective. Read the full article…

EdNC, March 6, 2019

Public Impact, which created and leads the national Opportunity Culture initiative, updates the Opportunity Culture dashboard annually and today released the latest results from 2018–19, showing that student learning continues to benefit, and teachers want to keep and grow Opportunity Culture.

The national Opportunity Culture initiative extends the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within schools’ recurring budgets. Each school’s design and implementation team, which includes teachers, determines how to use Multi-Classroom Leadership and other roles to reach more of their students with high-standards, personalized instruction—one hallmark of great teachers. Read the full article…

EdNC, March 4, 2019, by Analisa Sorrells

After recruiting, training, and inducting a teacher, what does it take to keep them in the classroom? Answering that question was the focus of the Governor’s Commission on Access to Sound Basic Education during its meeting last week. The commission heard from teachers, principals, district leaders, and policy experts about first-hand experiences with teacher retention, the research behind retaining high quality teachers, and six districts that are piloting advanced teaching roles and career pathways.

Created by Gov. Cooper in 2017, the commission has been working since Nov. 2017 to determine what it will take for North Carolina to meet its constitutional commitment of providing equal educational opportunity to all students. According to litigation in the decades-long Leandro case, part of that commitment is staffing every classroom with a “competent, certified, well-trained teacher” who provides “differentiated, individualized instruction, assessment and remediation” to students. In previous meetings, the commission addressed teacher preparation and recruitment, along with other aspects related to the Leandro commitment like school funding, early childhood education, the principal pipeline, and school support personnel. Read the full article…

American Enterprise Institute, February 8, 2019, by Frederick M. Hess and Amy Cummings

Frustration with teacher pay is widespread. This is true even considering that school spending (per pupil, adjusted for inflation) has grown by more than 30 percent since 1992. A big part of the challenge is that it’s tougher to pay teachers more when school systems keep adding bodies. In recent decades, schools have added staff at a faster rate than they have added students. Between 1992 and 2015, for instance, student enrollment grew by 20 percent – but the teacher workforce grew faster still.

Today, there are more than 3.1 million teachers in the United States. The sheer number of teaching positions makes it not only difficult to pay well, but also to recruit as many talented educators as we’d like. Each year, schools race to hire more than 300,000 new teachers, even as U.S. colleges award just 1.8 million bachelor’s degrees across all fields. In other words, current circumstances mean that schools need to hire one out of every six graduates – simply to plug attrition. The very shape of the teaching profession has made it increasingly difficult to recruit or compensate educators in a fashion that both attracts and retains talent. Read the full article…

EdNC, February 6, 2019, by Liz Bell

When children come to the first day of kindergarten, they come with a variety of needs, personalities, abilities, and backgrounds. The most important thing in those first few weeks is building a routine, said Annette Kent, a kindergarten teacher at Coker-Wimberly Elementary School in Edgecombe County.

“Routines are very important in kindergarten and building that stamina that they need when we start the reading process,” Kent said. “I really need them to be focusing and being on task the entire time and not losing any of their instructional time. So we’re trying to drill that importance of just being able to stay on that one task and keep that one task.”

The routine leads to more time to dive into academics.

“Kids now are expected to be able to read, write, answer comprehension questions, [in] their mathematics, they’re solving problems. I think people still think kindergarten is just counting, and it’s not,” said Coker-Wimberly Principal Katelin Row. “They’re doing addition, they’re doing subtraction, they’re doing almost everything. They’re doing foundations in geometry and working with 3-D shapes. Six year olds are doing 3-D shapes right now, and that’s not what kindergarten was 20 years ago, 30 years ago.” Read the full article…

Post-Crescent, February 1, 2019, by Jen Zettel Vandenhouten

During his first State of the State speech last week, Gov. Tony Evers announced several education priorities he’d like to address in the next state budget.

They include $600 million more for special education, restoring two-thirds funding to Wisconsin’s K-12 schools, closing the achievement gaps for low-income students and students of color, expanding early childhood and summer school grant programs and increasing mental health funding.

To make any of these priorities a reality, Evers and his fellow Democrats will need to work with Republicans, who control both houses of the Legislature. Read full article…