June 4, 2010 -- HAMPTON, Va., June 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Twenty three New Orleans middle school teachers will get the opportunity next week to strengthen their math and science teaching skills at a NASA-sponsored education workshop.
NASA is sponsoring the workshop as part of its outreach effort to improve STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education in the nation's schools. The workshop, "Clouds, Dust and Sunshine: Enhancing Our Understanding of Weather and Climate," will be held June 7 ? 9 at the Lusher Charter School in New Orleans. The workshop is being sponsored by NASA's Earth Science program.
Teachers from the Recovery School District and the parishes of St. Charles, St. Tammany, Jefferson and Orleans will take part... Read full press release
June 2, 2010 -- Louisiana’s second bid for “Race to the Top” dollars will be aided by a law enacted last week that overhauls the way public school teachers are evaluated, state Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek said Tuesday.
“We are well positioned, and I think our prospects are very good,” Pastorek said.
The deadline for second-round applications was Tuesday.
The state lost out on its initial bid for some of the $4.4 billion in federal dollars.
The contest has been touted by federal officials as a way to award education innovation... Read full article
June 2, 2010 -- WASHINGTON — U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, D-La., today congratulated the students and teachers of Louisiana’s Recovery School District (RSD) on their strong performance on the state LEAP tests. Preliminary data released earlier this week revealed that overall performance levels in the RSD’s direct-run and charter schools rose by six percent, compared to a one percentage point increase overall for the state. For the third straight year, RSD schools have outpaced the state’s growth in LEAP scores at every grade level
“The Recovery School District’s improving test scores are particularly impressive, considering that this special district was designed to work with the lowest-performing schools in the state,” Sen. Landrieu said. “These unprecedented test scores show that the RSD is fulfilling its mission – to transform underperforming schools into successful schools, where all children can receive a superior education. I congratulate the teachers, administrators, students and parents on raising the bar and demonstrating that a quality education in public schools is not only attainable, but a reality in New Orleans.”
From 2009 to 2010, LEAP scores in the RSD improved significantly. This year, 4th grade students in the RSD passed the LEAP exam at a rate of 58 percent, up from 54 percent in 2009. Eighth grade students made even greater gains, with the LEAP pass rate growing from 41 percent in 2009 to 50 percent in 2010.*
June 2, 2010 -- BATON ROUGE, La. -- State lawmakers are being criticized for cutting funding for early childhood education. Young children were put in the street to block traffic by adults who say they want all 4-year-olds to have access to Pre-Kindergarten classes. Members of the Tambourine and Fan organization gathered its young children in the midday heat to block traffic on North Rampart Street. The club was created to teach children about dance, culture and heritage, and to keep them off the streets away from drugs and crime... Read article of watch video
June 1, 2010 -- This summer, the New Orleans Recreation Department has room for only about 700 grade-school children in its four full-time day camps. Other children can swim in NORD's six open pools or take dance lessons a few hours a day, although information from City Hall was until last week spotty and often inaccurate, due to new NORD leadership that's scrambling to get up to speed without a director and other key staff. Perhaps as a result, only about half of the available slots were filled Tuesday, the camps' first day.
NORD is partly constrained by its $1.25 million summer budget, said Greg St. Etienne, deputy mayor of operations, who emphasized that the new administration has been in place for only a month... Read full article
June 1, 2010 -- The Recovery School District has made a last-minute change in leadership at the new L.B. Landry High School in Algiers, just months before the $54 million facility opens its doors for the first time.
Last week, Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas announced his decision to replace principal Eric Richard, who had been at the helm of the fledgling school since the fall, according to Bambi Hall, a spokeswoman with the Landry Steering Committee, which is helping the RSD oversee the school. Vallas told the group he was going in "different direction" and had already chosen an interim replacement for Richard, Hall said... Read full article
May 31, 2010 -- Washington (CNN) -- If at first you don't succeed, try, try again -- especially if the end result is a portion of $3.4 billion to be used for education in your state. The second-round applications for the government's "Race to the Top" program that will divide up that education money are due Tuesday. So a representative from the Louisiana Department of Education will go to Room 7041 at the U.S. Department of Education in Washington to drop off the state's application first thing in the morning... Read full article
May 31, 2010 -- Louisiana officials will make a second attempt at netting millions in federal education dollars after losing out to Delaware and Tennessee in the first round of the Race to the Top grant program.
The state chose not to alter the fundamentals of its application after finishing 11th in the first round, a ranking that surprised many analysts who had predicted Louisiana would win, or at least make the top five. Instead, officials focused on shoring up a few areas of the application where they felt the state unnecessarily lost points, said State Superintendent Paul Pastorek. Revised applications are due Tuesday... Read full article
May 29, 2010 -- For schools across the West Bank, the test scores released by the state this week represented a mix of modest gains and declines, signaling a departure from the almost across-the-board improvement from last year.
And while officials emphasized positive progress among fourth-graders, eighth-grade scores emerged as an area of concern for many schools, causing administrators to call for increased attention on middle school students next year. Read full article
May 29, 2010 -- Today, Governor Bobby Jindal announced that he has signed HB 1033 by Rep. Frank Hoffman into law which enacts the use of value-added data to improve teaching, student achievement, and communication about school performance.
Governor Jindal said, “Louisiana has taken a huge step forward today in ensuring that every child is taught by an effective teacher and that every public school is led by effective instructional leaders. This groundbreaking law will incorporate student growth data as a component of teacher and administrator evaluations – and this evaluation system will enable school districts to identify and reward highly effective teachers and deliver targeted professional development to teachers and school leaders who need it. The data used in this evaluation system will also account for a portion of schools’ performance scores in our accountability system, giving credit to all schools for the hard work they have put into improving student achievement"... Read full article
