Delaware's State Committee, called the Delaware Education Support System (DESS) Leadership Team, is made up of SEA directors from across programs and divisions including School Improvement (Title I, and Title III are included under this division), Exceptional Children and Early Childhood Education, Curriculum Development, Assessment and Accountability, and Education Technology.

Among the roles and responsibilities of the DESS Leadership Team are the design and coordination of the technical assistance the state education agency provides to districts and charter schools identified as in need of improvement. MACC staff are members of this team, and consult with team members to create annual technical assistance plans aligned with state priorities.

MACC's work focuses on assisting the DESS Leadership Team to meet its objective to build the DESS Leadership Team’s collective knowledge and skill to develop and implement a differentiated approach to state TA/PD for schools and districts in different stages of improvement.

This project has three long term goals:

1. to support the implementation and monitoring of the new district planning process (which will merge the special education and the consolidated planning processes into a single process) by providing comprehensive needs assessment information;
2. to help create district guidance (previously referred to as the district handbook) on how to conduct good consolidated planning; and
3. to provide critical friend feedback to SEA staff at design meetings as well as information about district planning and monitoring processes in other states.

In Delaware, district planning for special education has been done separately from the consolidated process. Furthermore, many district plans have demonstrated neither a thoughtful planning process that engages stakeholders, nor a realistic set of activities that would lead to the achievement of improvement goals.

We anticipate that the record of how this team reinvents the consolidated planning process for districts will be useful for other states and the U.S. Department of Education. The documentation of the development of a new planning system in Delaware will capture the rationale, goals, history, and the work of the Action Team to change the way districts plan, fund, monitor, and report on school improvement. It will also provide a source of information for the creation of guidance for districts on how to conduct consolidated planning.

The Delaware SEA is addressing the need to improve the mathematics achievement of its students, particularly in middle and high school, by developing a default statewide mathematics curriculum to which all districts must either align existing mathematics curricula or adopt the new state curriculum. Along with the curriculum, the SEA is planning a statewide system of professional development for mathematics teachers that is aligned with state standards and the statewide curriculum content strands. The overall goal of this project is for the Delaware SEA to have an institutionalized, ongoing, statewide professional development system for math teachers aligned with state standards and differentiated based on the needs of schools and districts.

During Year 2, the DE DOE Director of Curriculum and Instruction conducted a pilot rollout of the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum with 10 DE schools.  For Year 3 that number will increase to 20.

The results of the surveys have yet to be fully utilized by school staff, and principals currently do not have the capacity to lead their staff in professional development on this topic.

In response, DE DOE plans to create a notebook for school leaders to assist them in maximizing the usefulness of this survey. MACC will contribute to this effort by providing a template for a professional development session on the implications for instruction and curriculum that principals can customize for their school sites.

Assist the DE
SEA to
Determine
Patterns of
Teacher
Distribution
Statewide

In order to ensure that students in Delaware have equal access to highly qualified teachers, the DE SEA has asked MACC for help in studying patterns of teacher deployment across the state.

Questions to be considered include:

• Are highly qualified teachers clustered in affluent schools and districts while the most vulnerable students are stuck with the least qualified and less experienced teachers;
• do highly qualified teachers get assigned to teach only the higher level classes, while lower achieving students are taught by new or unqualified teachers; 
• what motivates teachers to move from one position to another; and,
• do they move for higher pay or for less challenging students and better work environments.

It’s expected that this information will help enable the DE SEA to take more informed action in its efforts to improve the equitable distribution of teachers.

Migrant
Education
Program
Comprehensive
Needs Assessment

MACC is assisting the DE DOE in the completion of a comprehensive needs assessment (CNA) process that is designed to assist them in improving the quantity and quality of data collection on their migrant students, and help them to identify the special educational needs of migrant children and determine the specific services that will help migrant children achieve the State’s measurable outcomes and performance targets. The CNA is a statutory requirement of the NCLB Act (Title I, Part C, Sections 1304(b) and 1306(a).

For more information regarding MACC’s work in Delaware please contact MACC’s Delaware State Coordinator Barbara Hicks at bhicks@ceee.gwu.edu or Team Member Kristina Anstrom at kanstrom@ceee.gwu.edu