Will Delaware Met Get The Formal Review Recommendation On Thursday?

I’m hearing buzz that if it does happen, it could go down at the State Board of Education meeting on Thursday.  It has been very quiet and there hasn’t been much news coming out of this school since the explosive events of two weeks ago.  If they do go on formal review, it’s hard to say what it would be for.  Academic would be tough since they just opened.  Organizational or financial or both would have to be the reason.  Not much has changed on their website and they seem to have put a hush on information coming out of the school.  Meanwhile I’m hearing of a new issue but I’m not able to write about it just yet.  This school either needs to get it together yesterday or close today.

Four Delaware School Districts On The BrINC Of Massive Data Sharing

I’ve been meaning to write about this consortium for a while now, but other matters kept pushing it to the side.  BrINC stands for Brandywine, Indian River, New Castle County Vo-Tech and Colonial, the four school districts that are part of the BrINC Consortium.  What is BrINC?  It is a massive personalized learning initiative.  And they are using the very same company that has hundreds of other companies under its data sharing umbrella.  The Delaware Department of Education and Rodel love this little group.  Rodel especially has been pushing personalized learning for a couple years now.  I can see why.  It’s a cash cow for education technology companies.  Especially IMS Global Learning Consortium who delivers all these wonderful toys to BRINC.  Think of IMS as a big huge cloud.  It houses all the data, and members pay a hefty fee to be a part of that cloud.  But it looks like Indian River School District, a member of IMS’ elite group of hundreds of other companies, school districts and universities, pays the bills to IMS.

Indian River loves the DOE, and the DOE loves them.  New Delaware State Board of Education member Nina Bunting said at their State Board Retreat last month “When the DOE says jump, we say how high.”  Current Superintendent Susan Bunting was in the running for Mark Murphy’s slot a few years ago.  So that leaves the other three districts: Brandywine, Colonial and New Castle County Vo-Tech.  Brandywine’s Mark Holodick has been hypnotized by the Vision Coalition (Rodel), Governor Markell loves the NCC Vo-Tech schools like Howard High School, and Colonial…things are fairly quiet with them.  Although I do like Colonial’s Superintendent.  Anyone who tells the DOE he wishes he could just “blow it up” when talking about the DOE’s school report card fiasco is okay in my book!  They don’t make a lot of noise.  Not like Christina and Red Clay.  Just think of the geography with this.  All the Wilmington school districts that aren’t a large part of the redistricting efforts and the biggest tourist area in the state.

To see what BrINC is all about, read their grant application below:

Wilmington Redistricting Update

The Wilmington Education Improvement Commission is in full swing.  This group has more meetings than Governor Markell says the word education or the DOE says the word rigor.  It’s hard to keep track of it all.  Luckily, WEIC has made two very good summaries of the whole thing up to date for their presentation to the Delaware State Board of Education on Thursday, October 15th.  If you plan on attending the meeting, you could probably read this first and skip that part and take a drive down to Rehoboth and watch the tide come in and out, drive back to Dover, and Dan Rich will still be talking.  But I digress…