Category Archives: Denver

A great classic novel my big friends tell me I need to read someday starts with a famous line. I’m talking about Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way. I’m told Dickens was contrasting conditions in the major cities London and Paris during the tumultuous French Revolution more than 200 years ago. On a more modest scale, one could do a lot to distinguish Colorado’s two biggest education stories this year based on a pair of new public opinion surveys. Read on to find the information and draw your own conclusions.

There are a few possible explanations for all those shouts of “May Day” Coloradans may have heard yesterday. Some might have been the annual calls for an imaginary workers’ paradise, while others might have been desperate pleas of displaced Texans and Californians calling for relief from the late-season snow. In my education policy wonk world, though, “May Day” was code for a noteworthy coincidence. Have you heard? As Ed News Colorado reports, the state legislature yesterday put the finishing touches on Senate Bill 213, the new school finance bill tied to some form of a billion-dollar tax increase initiative. Finishing its partisan course, the senate approved house amendments by a party-line 20-15 tally. Every legislative vote cast for SB 213 has come from Democrats; every vote against has come from Republicans. The Governor, also a Democrat, has given every indication of signing it into law. The strict partisan divide may have something to do with all the bill’s missed reform opportunities, including continued inequities for charters and only a tiny share of total funds assigned to student “backpacks” (and in the final version of SB 213, pgs 139-140, even that small amount of principal “autonomy” is subject to district-level review). […]

Often it’s very easy to get bogged down in a big education policy debate like Colorado’s SB 213 school finance reform proposal. Then along comes a Denver Post op-ed piece by a motivated citizen that exhales a breath of fresh air: Colorado currently spends about $10,600 per student per year on K-12 education. You can get a pretty good private education for that. Sen. Johnston wants to increase school spending to nearly $12,000 per student. But without changing the design of the system, why should anyone expect different results? Let’s stop funding the education establishment and instead fund parents and children. In a state-regulated environment, let’s give that $10,000 to parents for each child they have in school and let them decide how and where the money used to educate their children should be spent. The author is Littleton’s own John Conlin, founder of the small nonprofit activist group End the Education Plantation. True fans may recall his appearance several months ago in an on-air interview with my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow.

For those who long have rolled up their sleeves to try to improve student learning, the cause of urban high school reform remains one of the most daunting tasks. Even in areas where the most concentrated and sustained efforts at reform have taken place, the promising results have been very limited. Enter a brand new report by A-Plus Denver, titled Denver and Aurora High Schools: Crisis and Opportunity. Author Sari Levy gathered and analyzed student performance data from Colorado’s two large urban school districts, and the picture painted is not a very rosy one: Based on ACT test scores, “about a third of students in [Denver Public Schools] and [Aurora Public Schools] would not qualify for basic military service” On a day when Colorado college graduates are encouraged to show off their alma mater, it’s disheartening to see the rates of DPS and APS students needing college remediation are steady or rising Denver’s level of success on Advanced Placement (AP) courses lags well below the national average In a number of DPS schools, students in poverty have just above a zero chance of earning a 24 or higher on the ACT, which would place them at the average of their […]

In case you haven’t been following me on Twitter (which raises the question: Why not?), you may not have noticed that the big education bill of the 2013 Colorado legislative session has made its way through the State Senate. As a new Ed News Colorado story by Todd Engdahl highlights, Senate Bill 213 has advanced as a purely partisan piece of legislation: The Senate approved Senate Bill 13-213 on a 20-15 preliminary vote, which is expected to be the same party-line total when a final vote is taken later. That final vote occurred earlier today by the same 20-15 margin. And thus the 174-page legislation motors on over to the House now. Still not really much choice or backpack funding at all. Changing from a single count date to average daily membership is great, but not worth a billion smackeroos. As the Education Reform Bulletin proclaims about SB 213, raising taxes trumps reform.

While the big school finance reform legislation at the Colorado State Capitol explores reshuffling the dollars in a 20th century system — and dashing my youthful hopes along the way — other states continue to plow ahead with the idea of course choice. Students are enabled to customize their education by choosing courses regardless of school and district boundaries, mainly through the use of digital technology. Well, count Florida among the states seriously looking at revamping a system to promote flexibility and reward student mastery, rather than just continue to fund learning based on seat time. With Utah and Louisiana already pioneering in this area, it’s great to hear redefinED’s Ron Matus talk with national blended learning guru Michael Horn about the new world where the change might lead us and speculate how it might unfold:

When it comes to the world of K-12 education in Colorado — you know, what keeps my little eyes busy watching — today (this week!) is all consumed in the political debates over Senate Bill 213, the big school finance overhaul tied to a billion dollar tax increase. So I invite you to follow the clever, quippy (is “quippy” a word) Eddie on Twitter today starting at 2 PM Colorado time. Or just tune into the hash tag #CoSchoolFund. At this point, I hardly know what to expect. After nearly two years of a School Finance Partnership predicated on the idea of a “Grand Bargain”, it comes down to the introduced legislation‘s first big committee hearing this afternoon. With 174 pages of legislation and billions of dollars to be allocated, you can be sure of lots of witnesses, questions, and discussion. Here are a not-so-dirty dozen questions I hope to see answered (in no particular order):

Yesterday, some attorneys got up and argued an important case affecting K-12 education before the Colorado Supreme Court. The hearing was about an appeal of the Denver district court’s Lobato decision, previously referred to by the Denver Post as the “Super Bowl of school funding litigation.” Judge Sheila Rappaport granted judgment for the plaintiffs, contending that an additional $2 billion-plus a year would be needed to fund the K-12 system. Where the money is supposed to come from, who knows? Before the state’s highest court, the lawyer for the State of Colorado questioned one of Rappaport’s key findings: [Jonathan] Fero, an assistant attorney general, repeatedly argued that having a thorough and uniform educational system doesn’t mean creating a system where every child is equally successful.

I am going to be catching my breath all day, I’m so excited by this fantastic news from the Colorado Court of Appeals today: DENVER—The Independence Institute, Colorado’s leading pro-freedom policy voice, praised today’s decision to restore a groundbreaking school choice program previously struck down by a Denver judge. The Colorado Court of Appeals today overturns an August 2011 ruling that permanently enjoined the Douglas County Choice Scholarship Program. A majority of the three-judge panel ruled that plaintiffs “failed to carry their burden of proving the unconstitutionality of the CSP beyond a reasonable doubt” and that they lack standing to make their case. (A copy of the opinion is posted at https://bit.ly/WjOq3S.)

A powerful research report released today from a big study confirms what anyone paying attention to the urban charter school movement already should have noticed. KIPP produces big gains for students: KIPP middle schoolers learn significantly more than comparison students, concludes a report by Mathematica Policy Research on 43 schools in 13 states plus the District of Columbia. Three years after enrollment, the average KIPP student gained an extra 11 months in math, moving from the 44th to the 58th percentile, and eight months in reading, moving from the 46th to the 55th percentile. Science gains equalled an extra 14 months and social studies an extra 11 months. Following up on research released in the summer of 2010, Mathematica confirmed earlier findings that KIPP doesn’t benefit from attracting more gifted students than those left behind in surrounding schools. Mike Feinberg, the cage-busting co-founder of the national, no-excuses charter school network, notes among other findings: