Category Archives: Accountability

Something happened last night. I was already in bed, of course, but I could hear strange shouting downstairs. I couldn’t quite make it out, but it sounded like someone saying, “Wisconsin?! What?!” This morning I found my dad still awake, sitting in an arm chair with bleary eyes and a strange expression that I’m not sure I’ve seen on his face before. It was weird. It was really, really weird. I am, of course, referring to Donald Trump’s utterly astonishing victory over Hillary Clinton in last night’s presidential election. He deserves a hearty congratulation for defying the political odds and, in the end, pulling off exactly the kind of map-changing, crushing victory he said he’d accomplish. Truthfully, I never thought I would write the words “President-elect Trump.” But here we are.

It’s no secret that I am deeply skeptical of the opt-out movement and its true motivations. I worry that the movement’s leaders are pushing (or maybe have already pushed) us down a road that is ultimately designed to lead to less choice, less change, and less opportunity for students. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are legitimate concerns buried down in the opt-out conversation, and those concerns should be the focus of our conversation. As I’ve often said, we should be careful about using an unpopular testing instrument (PARCC) that has failed to deliver on its promises as a way to argue that no measurement is needed in the enormous government enterprise that is public education. Similarly, we can acknowledge the power and importance of providing parents, educators, and taxpayers with reliable, valid data on educational performance while still recognizing that there are major issues in the current accountability system that need to be addressed. Sadly, I rarely see anyone attempt to find the reasonable middle ground in these conversations. Many folks are either vehemently opposed to everything or desperately trying to preserve the current system. That’s why I was so pleased yesterday to read a Chalkbeat op-ed […]

It’s been a while since we’ve had to talk about testing and/or opt outs. I bet you’ve enjoyed that break as much as I have. Sadly, though, the break’s over. I saw an article this morning that I feel compelled to pontificate about, and so pontificate I shall. If the thought of another testing-related blog post makes you feel physically ill, I won’t judge you for excusing yourself now. I opened my email this morning (yes, five-year-olds have email) to discover a story from Chalkbeat Colorado about how low state test participation rates have called school and district ratings into question. From that article: State education department officials putting together the latest annual school quality ratings have flagged more than half of the state’s districts and one-third of its schools for test participation below the federally required minimum of 95 percent. The ratings are preliminary, and districts and schools may appeal before they are finalized this winter. While districts that fell below that participation mark will not face negative consequences under Colorado law, state officials are urging the public to proceed with caution in considering ratings in places with high testing opt-out rates. Some school leaders and advocates are crying foul, however, […]

Growth is exciting. I love watching my mom and dad mark another notch on the wall every year, and it’s been crazy to watch my favorite little puppy grow into a full-size dog almost as big as me. Education wonks get excited about growth too, although the growth you often hear policy nerds talking about has nothing to do with how tall someone is and everything to do with how much academic progress he or she is making. Academic growth sparked a wave of nerdy jubilation yesterday when the Colorado Department of Education (finally) released growth data for our viewing pleasure after the switch to the PARCC assessment. All those juicy numbers are just waiting for you to explore them—assuming, of course, you can successfully navigate the department’s notoriously terrible SchoolView site. For those of you who would rather peruse curated information presented in a more digestible way, Chalkbeat Colorado’s Nic Garcia put together a helpful story that includes some interactive spreadsheets and charts. You should definitely head over there and see how your school and/or district stacked up. Those of you expecting me to do a deep dive into the growth scores of various schools and districts are about […]

Happy Friday, fellow policy explorers. I usually try to let you off easy on Friday afternoons when it comes to policy discussions, but this week’s ridiculous distractions in Douglas County forced me to push back a post I’ve been meaning to do for a while about ESSA and how it relates to high-performing students. With the next ESSA Hub Committee meeting scheduled for this coming Monday, it seems appropriate to talk about that interesting issue sooner rather than later. Plus, there’s no such thing as a bad day for policy discussions! A big focus of the ESSA conversation has been on accountability systems. What will we measure? For whom? How? When? What about weights? In Colorado, we just had a major conversation about the notion of combined subgroups and what they might mean for accountability systems. All these discussions tend to revolve around how we best help lower-performing kids, schools, and districts. And don’t get me wrong, that’s an incredibly important question for those of us who view education as an opportunity to provide every kid with a chance at a fair fight and an opportunity to build his or her own success story. But what about the other side […]

If there’s one thing I look forward to most every year, it’s the release of new survey data on education opinions in America. I’m just kidding. I obviously look forward to Christmas most. But new survey data is a close second. About this time last year, we were gleefully digging through the results of the 2015 Education Next and Gallup/PDK education surveys. The latter poll, you may remember, is not really one of my favorites when it comes to fairness and a general lack of bias. We’ll have to wait a bit longer to see if this year’s version is a little more credible. In the meantime, we can chew on the generally more convincing Education Next results for 2016. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Education Next poll, it gathers a nationally representative sample of adults (about 4,000 this year) and asks them questions about just about everything you could ever imagine related to education. There is tons and tons of useful, interesting information buried in this year’s results and the accompanying narrative summary and interactive graphs, but we’ll just focus in on the big stuff for today.

I’ve talked a fair amount over the last couple of years about the “weaponized waivers” employed by the Obama administration under the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the previous iteration of which was called No Child Left Behind. The newest iteration of the act, now called the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), passed back in December of last year. As of yesterday, ESSA officially ushered NCLB waivers down the path of the dinosaurs. That’s great news for those of us who think that the federal government has little business dictating education policy to states.

The last few days have been relatively quiet on the education news front, which means we don’t have a lot of really heavy stuff to discuss. That’s probably a good thing after yesterday’s enormous post on some recent voucher research finding negative academic impacts for participating students. Still, we should never let a good blog post go to waste. There’s always good policy meat to chew on. And as it turns out, the Independence Institute Education Policy Center has been plenty busy doing exactly that despite the summer doldrums. Today we’ll play a little catch up and cover some fantastic work on the part of one of the Institute’s summer interns, who decided to tackle a critical but often ignored aspect of education policy in Colorado: financial transparency.

Passed in 2010 with bipartisan support, Colorado’s Senate Bill 191 is a big law that includes a lot of different timelines. Frequent delays in the law’s implementation only add to the confusion. But despite all that messiness, the law is beginning to do its work. At its core, SB 191 is a tenure reform law. Okay, okay, legal nerds, a “non-probationary status” reform law. Previously, Colorado teachers earned non-probationary status after three years of teaching. That status provides near-absolute “due process” job protections that could force school district leaders to navigate legal requirements all the way to the steps of the Colorado Supreme Court should they decide to fire a non-probationary teacher. Under SB 191, teachers earn non-probationary status after three years of effective teaching. As an important corollary, those same teachers can lose that status after two years of ineffective teaching. We’ve discussed the ins and outs of these reforms at some length in the context of the union-led assault on legislative authority that is the Masters case, which deals with SB 191’s lesser-known mutual consent provision. We’ve also covered the Independence Institute’s arguments about why the union is way off base legally in that case. We won’t beat those […]

Mondays are good days to roll up our sleeves and bury ourselves in education policy arcana. This Monday is a particularly good day to do that; on Wednesday, the Colorado State Board of Education will decide the fate of a complicated but important proposal related to our state’s school and district accountability system. The proposal deals with the use of “super subgroups” (also called “combined subgroups”), which aggregate subgroups of students—minority, at-risk, English-language learner (ELL), and special education—into a single bucket for accountability purposes under Colorado’s school and district performance frameworks (SPFs and DPFs). Pushed by some school districts, interest groups, and the Colorado Department of Education, the shift toward combined subgroups is strongly opposed by a large, diverse coalition of organizations from across the political spectrum. Careful observers will note that one of those organizations is the Independence Institute, which I happen to be rather fond of. Why is the Independence Institute involved? To understand that, you have to understand the issue in a little more detail. Brace yourself, thar be wonkery ahead.