Delaware Projects Year 3
2007-2008
Support for the Delaware State Support Leadership Team
MACC's work in Year 3 focused 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.
Education Success Planning and Evaluation System
In Year 3 this project focused on three long term goals:
1. to support the implementation and monitoring of the new district planning process (which merged 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.
MACC anticipated that the record of how this team reinvented the consolidated planning process for districts would be useful for other states and the U.S. Department of Education. The documentation of the development of a new planning system in Delaware captured 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 also provided a source of information for the creation of guidance for districts on how to conduct consolidated planning.
Support to the Delaware Mathematics Coalition
In Year 3, MACC continued to focus on its overall goal of this project 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.
Assist the DDOE 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 asked MACC for help in studying patterns of teacher deployment across the state.
Questions considered included:
1. 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;
2. do highly qualified teachers get assigned to teach only the higher level classes, while lower achieving students are taught by new or unqualified teachers;
3. what motivates teachers to move from one position to another; and,
4. do they move for higher pay or for less challenging students and better work environments.
MACC’s goal was to 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
In Year 3, MACC assisted the DDOE in the completion of a comprehensive needs assessment (CNA) process designed to assist them to improve 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 to help migrant children achieve the State’s measurable outcomes and performance targets.