Carpe Diem Indiana announced Monday that opening the Fort Wayne campus, Carpe Diem-Summit, will be postponed because of delays in finalizing a lease agreement. Despite the delays, the school still hopes to locate at The Summit, a building on the former Taylor University campus, at 1025 W. Rudisill Blvd.
Carpe Diem-Summit was approved to model Carpe Diem-Meridian located in Indianapolis. The school would be run by Carpe Diem Learning Systems, an education management company based in Arizona. The Indiana Charter School Board approved the application for the Fort Wayne campus earlier this year with one key condition.
The school serving grades six through 12 was to show evidence by July 15 that its enrollment would fall between its break-even point and its goal of 130 students for the first year. The break-even number would likely be about 100 students. Continue Reading →
Zach Chatham, 24, graduated from Indiana University with degrees in business foundations, economics and policy analysis in December. He's since worked at a restaurant and a bank.
This post was written by Rachel Hartog, an Indiana University journalism student and WTIU intern.
But students who don’t use vocational education as a stepping stone to a higher degree may find themselves competing for jobs with overqualified college graduates who can’t find work in their chosen fields. As many as 53 percent of people under the age of 25 with bachelor’s degrees are unemployed or underemployed — and they’re taking jobs traditionally occupied by high school graduates.
Emily Kitchen graduated just one year ago from Indiana University in Bloomington but has already applied to more than 60 job openings without landing more than a temporary position at a trade association in Washington, D.C.
“It’s hard after a long day to come home and apply to jobs,” says Kitchen. “They say that applying to jobs is a job in itself, and it’s true. It can get very discouraging and disheartening very quickly.” Continue Reading →
Facilities Manager Darren Hess and Snider High School Principal Deborah Watson explain Fort Wayne Community Schools' plan to renovate 36 buildings.
As a rule of thumb, for every ten cents a school corporation asks for when proposing a tax levy increase, it knocks a percentage point off the number of voters supporting the referendum.
“In a close election, that could make the difference,” says Purdue agricultural economist Larry DeBoer. “Though most of these elections haven’t been that close.”
Before 2008, Indiana school corporations could levy up to $2 million without asking for taxpayer approval. But changes to how schools are funded have sent an increasing number of districts to the ballot box in the last five years. Only 16 of the 40 districts that have pursued major construction projects have succeeded.
That has DeBoer and others who study school finance curious about the future of facilities maintenance in Indiana schools.
“Will it be the case that some school corporations find that they can pass the referendum and therefore they can keep their facilities up to date and have new buildings and better facilities,” he says, “while other school corporations perhaps cannot?” Continue Reading →
In response to a question from StateImpact during a speech to the Education Writers Association, Duncan suggested this week’s glitches in Indiana, Oklahoma and Minnesota represent a learning opportunity. Here’s what he said:
We should have competition. We should be transparent — I don’t know who that company is, I don’t want to pre-judge — but if that company can’t deliver, there’s an opportuntiy for someone else to come in and do something very, very different… We should not have one problem and then say we should go all the way back to pencil and paper, that doesn’t make sense to me. Continue Reading →
But in this post: What does the contract say about penalties the state can impose if it has problems with the testing services CTB provides? Continue Reading →
After technicians solved Monday’s problem — a lack of memory on the servers — Ritz says another problem arose Tuesday. She added she will review testing company CTB/McGraw Hill’s contractual obligations and address the “high stakes issue” of whether to consider the results of the exam as valid ”at some point.”
“Our first goal is to just get through the actual testing window and make sure all the students will be taking the test,” Ritz said.
CTB’s online status monitor showed a “green flag” through the school day, although Ritz had asked schools to cut their testing loads by half. State officials announced students had completed more than 300,000 testing sessions as of Wednesday afternoon. Continue Reading →
State superintendent Glenda Ritz leads a study session at a meeting of the State Board of Education.
Members of the executive panel that oversees Indiana education echoed the frustrations of teachers and local school officials after two straight days of widespread problems for students taking ISTEP+ exams online.
State superintendent Glenda Ritz kicked off the State Board of Education’s study session Wednesday with discussion of the issues as schools statewide were resuming testing, although on a limited schedule. Here are a few of the comments on the problems with ISTEP+ testing board members made during Wednesday morning’s study session:
Dan Elsener: “Because of the impact to so many people, and leadership’s responsibility when we do evaluated. I want to know what the department can do, what the schools are going to have to have in terms of training. Our vendor, we want to evaluate that too, but we have to look at all parties — not for blame, but this is disastrous. Our educators need better leadership on this thing.” Continue Reading →
“Suddenly there was an image on everyone’s screen of a computer with a line connecting it to the globe,” Sink wrote on our Facebook page, “which I assume means connection to server/internet lost… They had to restart all the computers, but after several tries the principal told them they’d have to stop and do the test another time.”
As Indiana schools enter their third day of testing, state education officials hope they’ve seen the last of the ‘Please Wait’ screens. They’ve given the go-ahead for testing to resume Wednesday, but are asking schools to cut their testing loads in half, a request that could extend ISTEP+ testing through the month of May.
But the directive also deepens the logistical challenge for local educators in setting up online exams — we reported on that on Monday — with many districts’ school years coming to a close and other students needing to take exams other than ISTEP+. Continue Reading →
Let’s compare this to paper-and-pencil testing for a moment. Students were booted out of the test, at times in the middle of reading a passage, and not allowed to log back in. Officials are saying testing will resume as normal on Tuesday and Wednesday. How do you expect a child, who is already feeling immense anxiety over the test, to have valid results?
In essence, this would be like a teacher taking a testing booklet from students at random during testing, and then having them continue the next day. With no warning, with no explanation. Continue Reading →
Laptops set up with pencils and scratch paper at the ready in a temporary testing lab at Tecumseh Junior High in Lafayette.
UPDATED, 7:35 p.m. — Server errors at the company charged with administering Indiana’s online ISTEP+ exams ground testing to a halt for a second straight day, prompting state superintendent Glenda Ritz to ask districts Tuesday to stop administering the exams.
By late Tuesday, officials had given the go-ahead for schools to resume testing on Wednesday. But they asked schools to cut their testing load in half, promising in a statement to “work with local schools to ensure that they have the time they need to fairly administer the test.”
“I am greatly disappointed to learn that Indiana schools had their ISTEP+ testing interrupted,” state superintendent Glenda Ritz said in an earlier statement. “Like all Hoosier parents, students and teachers, I find these interruptions frustrating and unacceptable.”
As of this update, the online ISTEP+ status page from testing company CTB/McGraw Hill shows a similar “red flag” message to the one that stopped assessments on Monday.
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