Two town hall meetings on Saturday will focus on public education topics, including funding, accountability and curriculum issues.
The town halls are being held by Texas Senator Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth).
(Davis at a 2011 education town hall at Paschal High School/Joyce Marshall)
Update: Spelling bee champ is 12-year-old Ansun Sujoe, a sixth grader at Parkwood Hill Intermediate School in the Keller school district. Check out this video by the Star-Telegram's Paul Moseley.
The championship word, in the 26th round of competition, was eschewal, meaning shunning or avoidance.
Holding his trophy, he gave interviews to television stations and newspaper reporters. He wins an expenses paid trip to Washington, DC for the national spelling bee.
Second place went to Ben Benjadol, 11, of Wilshire Elementary in the Hurst-Euless-Bedford school district, a previous area spelling bee winner. (Right: ST photo: Joyce Marshall)
Many more pics by Joyce Marshall from the event on the Star-Telegram's website.
Update 11:35 a.m.
Just five spellers remain at the North Texas regional spelling bee as they head into the 16 round. Kailey Choi, the youngest speller in the contest at age 8, was eliminated in round 14.
Many parents remarked at the break that they not only did not know how to spell many of the words the students were given to spell, they didn't know what they meant.
At one point, somone's cell phone sounded and the audience was reminded to turn them off.
Original post
Returning to the stage after a break at the regional spelling bee at TCU, round 7 proved tough for several of the young spellers. The words are getting more difficult.
Officials have asked the crowd not to publish words given to the students during the competition because other regions have not held their bees yet.
Four of 14 students were eliminated during round 7. The contest started with 25 students from across North Texas who qualified for the event by winning their campus and district or area bees.
The youngest student, an eight year old from Mansfield schools, is still in the competition, powering through her words without asking for additional information, such as the word's language of origin.
Writing and mailing letters may be a bit of a foreign concept to the text and tweet generation. But teenagers at Fort Worth’s Trimble Technical High School learned all about stamps at a Black History Month presentation last week.
Students hosted Beverly Baugh, U.S. Postal Service district manager, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that slaves in Confederate states were free.
Last month, the Postal Service issued a stamp honoring the 1863 proclamation, the first of three marking milestones in the fight for civil rights. A stamp of Rosa Parks, a Montgomery, Ala., woman who launched a bus boycott in 1955 after refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger, was issued Feb. 4.
Students are being encouraged to write letters to improve their skills and express themselves, said Kyev Tatum, who helped establish the campus’s Brilliant Bulldog Center, which provides tutoring.
“We partnered up with the post office to encourage students to talk about it and write letters and get stamps as a keepsake,” he said. “And you don’t just get on a stamp because you did something. You have to have made a tremendous difference.”
Glenn O. Lewis, chairman of the Texas Southern University board, spoke about the “legacy of excellence” at historically black colleges and universities.
UPDATE:
Ninth graders who failed the STAAR end-of-course standardized tests in their initial go around did better during retakes, the Texas Education Agency announced.
Here's a link to an Associated Press report.
An excerpt: "Students who retook those tests as 10th-graders this year saw their scores in all subject areas improve dramatically, according to Education Commissioner Michael Williams.And here's Tuesday's news release from the Texas Education Agency.
ORIGINAL POST:
The majority of Texas students who took the state’s new standardized exams last year passed it, results show.
Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams released results Tuesday from elementary and middle schoolers who took the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) tests in spring 2012.
In a news release, Williams said the passing rates for most of the tests were 70 percent or higher. Third and fourth graders posted passing rates of 68 percent on the math test.
And eighth graders posted a 59 percent passing rate on the social studies test. Education officials attributed that to new curriculum content and use of more primary sources in test questions. Eighth graders posted the highest passing percentage on the tests, with 80 percent passing the reading exam.
The new tests are designed to be harder than the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) exam. That program is being phased out.
(r: 9th grader works in STAAR end of course remedial class in June 2012. ST/Ron Jenkins)
Students took STAAR tests in the same subjects that were tested on the TAKS. For grades 3 through 8, students must take tests in math and reading. Students are also tested in writing at grades 4 and 7, science at grades 5 and 8, and social studies at grade 8.
“I recognize there has been a lot of anxiety surrounding STAAR tests, but I believe these are encouraging passing rates for the first year of a new more rigorous test,” Williams said in a statement. “Clearly, we still have work to do, but I remain optimistic that passing rates will rise this spring in the second administration of the STAAR, just as they have traditionally done in the second year of a new testing program.”
Several greater Tarrant County school districts, including Fort Worth, Mansfield, Arlington and Grapevine-Colleyville, did not release scores for their students on Tuesday. Some officials said administrators want to share the scores with school trustees before releasing the data.
Fort Worth schools officials received the last of their scores from the state on Saturday, said Clint Bond, a spokesman.
“They haven’t been reviewed or analyzed. We just got some of them. The superintendent hasn’t seen them and the board hasn’t seen them,” Bond said.
This year, exam results will be used to create accountability performance ratings for school districts and campuses. No ratings were issued in 2012 as the state made the transition to the new test.
High school students must get a passing average on 15 end-of-course STAAR tests to graduate. There are three exams each in math, science, social studies, reading and writing. This year, ninth and 10th graders took the tests. Other students continue to take the TAKS. Williams has suspended a requirement that the scores count as 15 percent of the course grade.
