Cooke Chronicle: Dec. 2, 2016

Posted December 2, 2016 | By Cooke Foundation Staff

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Dec. 2, 2016 – Here’s our weekly roundup of education news you may have missed. Scholars discuss improving diversity and accountability for talented K-12 students with financial need. Higher ed supports for undocumented and under-served students were also popular topics.

 

Elementary & Secondary Education:

  • Gifted programs often do not reflect the diversity of their communities. The Atlantic describes how New York City is trying to diversify enrollment, and The Post and Courier explains one South Carolina school district’s experiment to reach underrepresented students by using gifted-and-talented teaching strategies in all classrooms.
  • A new book from Jonathan A. Plucker and Scott J. Peters – “Excellence Gaps in Education: Expanding Opportunities for Talented Students” – draws strategies from national and international research to lay out a plan for addressing the needs of high-potential students from traditionally underserved backgrounds.
  • The Thomas B. Fordham Institute remarks on the finalized accountability provisions for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): “States can now create accountability systems that measure student achievement at multiple levels—not just “proficient”—using a performance index.” Previously, states often devoted more focus to ensuring progress only for low-performing students, states Fordham, which is “a particularly pernicious problem for high-achieving poor and minority children, whose schools generally serve many struggling students.”

 

Higher Education:

  • Inside Higher Ed outlines new federal guidance on how agencies can better “coordinate public benefits so that low-income students can access and complete college.” Similarly, new findings from RAND Education recommend that institutions provide a “one-stop shop” for benefits and wraparound services in order to increase student outcomes.
  • Some universities are making additional efforts to support their undocumented students. As The Christian Science Monitor explains, “revoking DACA would mean America’s failure to capitalize on students it has educated from K-12, and whose youth and resilience would be integral to the nation’s prosperity.” Resources and advice for undocumented students are available from the National Immigration Law Center.
  • New America reports that “student parents are more likely to stay in school and to graduate, when they have access to child care on campus.” As colleges close campus child care centers across the nation, The Hechinger Report notes that such services for are essential in order to reach national higher education attainment goals.

 

Cooke Foundation Highlights:

  • “Providing adequate funds to educate students can change their lives for the better,” says Executive Director Harold O. Levy in The 74 Million. “Failing to meet our responsibility to children today will cause irreparable harm to them and our nation far into the future.”
  • Levy also keynoted PASSNYC’s Collective Impact Summit. Watch a short video recapping the event.
  • Cooke Scholar Maria De Abreu Pineda received Bergen Community College’s Rising Star Award, reports The Paramus Post.
  • The Wilmington Star News celebrates Andrew Wishon’s recent Cooke Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship.

 

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