Category Archives: Education Politics

As you all know, I love policy field trips. And I especially love those field trips when they are about something as fun as school choice. Maybe that’s why I had so much fun at today’s Senate Education hearing. Well, the very end of it, anyway; I showed up a little late. My little legs can only carry me so fast! So what exactly happened in Senate Ed today? The committee heard Senator Kevin Lundberg‘s bill on tax credits for private school tuition, which is known to political nerds as SB 045. Feel free to read the bill if you’d like (it differs significantly from the tax credit scholarship programs we’ve talked about before), but here’s the quick and dirty version: The bill would allow taxpayers enroll their children in a private school (or who provide a scholarship for other children to do so) to receive a tax credit in return. It also would allow credits for parents who use home-based education for their children. As one might expect, the bill drew its fair share of fire. Democratic senators Andy Kerr, Michael Merrifield, and Michael Johnston all offered amendments to the bill. These included a requirement that private school students […]

Hopes were a little high last May when I offered K-12 online pilot program ideas in the wake of House Bill 1382’s adoption. My Education Policy Center friends have been talking about the promise of Course Choice and course-level funding for a few years now. It sure would be nice to see Colorado take even a small, clear step in the direction of greater flexibility and student access to learning opportunities. But reading the recently released HB 1382 task force report and its underwhelming recommendations gave me the deep sense that even my modest hopes may have been misplaced. Sigh. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again…. It’s hard for a kid my age to be patient and persist rather than to quit.

Every now and then, an op-ed drops from the sky like one of those whistle bombs in the movies. The resulting explosion gets folks all riled up, and usually leads to some highly entertaining (though not terribly productive) conversations. Today is one of those days, with a Denver Post op-ed that sees Jeffco’s Tom Coyne outlining one of Colorado education’s biggest issues: The difficulty of removing ineffective teachers from the classroom. Coyne smartly argues that despite spending enormous amounts of money, Colorado districts haven’t been able to achieve their academic goals. Coyne quantifies these shortcomings in Jeffco at some length using some pretty convincing data. As he puts it: As taxpayers, we spend an enormous amount of money each year to achieve these goals. For example, based on the most recent Colorado Department of Education data, in the 2012-13 school year, total revenue per student in Jeffco was $10,420, or over $260,000 for every classroom of 25 students. In aggregate, total revenue in Denver’s most affluent suburban school districts (Boulder Valley, Cherry Creek, Douglas County, Jefferson County, and Littleton) was about $2.5 billion in 2012-13. Despite this spending, we aren’t coming close to reaching our student achievement goals.

As you may know, last night was the SOTU. I spent more time than one might expect attempting to convert that into a funny, education-related acronym, but had little success. For the record, I blame my failure on my age and innocent youth. Regardless, no joke for you today. But hey, maybe I don’t need to be cracking jokes. After all, the president’s State of the Union address is pretty important. It hints at future battles, helps set the tone for the year, and provides a little more detail on potential policies in the pipeline.  Most importantly, it outlines the president’s priorities. Maybe that’s why I found it so noticeable that K-12 education—and particularly the massive ESEA reauthorization fight brewing in D.C.—received little more than a rhetorical nod. Oh, and in case you missed the address, the video is below. If you aren’t interested in the full hour-long speech, Education Week put together a decent synopsis that you may find helpful.

Not too long ago, John Ford of the Jefferson County Education Association told us that “the fight would start in January” (I humbly contend that the fight started back in September and that JCEA already lost the first round). I wrote about his inspiring speech recently, but here’s the video in case you forgot: And if that weren’t enough to get this little guy scared, Complete Colorado broke the story that he’s been discussing the “unique opportunity to beat these bas***** back” with his “brothers and sisters” in Boulder Valley (yeah, I find that language creepy too).  I’m still not too sure what that blanked-out word is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not friendly. Jeffco’s board meeting last night was supposed to be the big kick off, or the opening bell, or some other vaguely applicable sports metaphor. Instead, the effort flopped harder than Shamoo in a lap pool.

I love flashlights. I can remember many nights spent reading under my Batman sheets with a flashlight well past the time I should have been asleep. And just last week, I used a flashlight to hunt down the final Lego block I needed to finish my replica Millennium Falcon. It had fallen under the bed. As an added bonus, I also found three socks, two pennies, and a Superman action figure while I was down there. As useful as real, physical flashlights are, though, I think metaphorical flashlights are even more powerful—especially when they’re used to shed light on political processes. That’s I celebrated when my Independence Institute friends successfully opened the door on district-union negotiations with Proposition 104 this past November. The proposition passed with a 70% yes vote, which to me says that Coloradans really, really value transparency in government. Who can blame them? But district-union negotiations are only one part of the puzzle. School boards conduct a lot of business that falls well outside direct interactions with local unions. And although Colorado’s Sunshine Law requires school boards to provide “full and timely” notice of public meetings, a recent story from the Colorado Springs Gazette highlights the fact […]

My little legs are tired from my various policy field trips this week, so I’m going to sit down, rest, and use the brief respite to catch you up on the most interesting piece of education news this week: Yesterday’s unexpected motion and surprising vote by the Colorado State Board of Education. I may also pound down a quick snack. I’ve got to keep my strength up for the coming heavy-weight bout in Jeffco, after all. Yesterday, the State Board sat down to do its thing, which you may be unsurprised to learn consists of voting on stuff related to education. Normally, this can be a fairly dry process. This meeting turned out to be a little different, as newly appointed board member Steve Durham brought forward an unscheduled motion to allow school districts to waive out of the first portion of state-mandated PARCC testing. For those who don’t know, PARCC has two parts: A performance-based assessment administered in March and an end-of-year assessment administered in late April or May. The legality of the motion was swiftly challenged by Senior Assistant Attorney General Tony Dyl, who told the board members that despite wide latitude to waive certain portions of state […]

My Grandpa occasionally likes to watch boxing on TV, something he once told me was a “stress reliever.” My dad says when he was younger, he used to have a punching bag in the basement that he would use for working out, maybe for some of the same purposes. I’m still only 5 years old, but beginning to think that maybe it’s time for this little edublogger to don the gray sweatsuit and do some jump-roping or running through the park. Why? Because John Ford, the president of the Jefferson County Education Association (JCEA), said “the fight’s going to start in January”:

Two months ago, I celebrated the end of what I like to call the election silly season. Despite mammoth efforts by seemingly panicked teachers unions, proponents of education reform at both the state and federal levels won big in November. Much dancing and kazoo blowing ensued in education reform camps around the country. But the election was really just a prelude to the real party, which is only just now getting started. The 114th United States Congress began yesterday, and is now beginning to wrestle with issues ranging from the Keystone XL pipeline to gas taxes to—drum roll please—ESEA reauthorization. Regular readers will remember that I recently highlighted the somewhat awkward alliances that an ESEA reauthorization effort could create, but I’m not sure I could have predicted the speed at which the effort would move. Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, the new chairman of the U.S. Senate Education Committee, has signaled that he intends to get an ESEA authorization through committee by Valentine’s Day. Yikes. I hope everyone is wearing their seat belts. Air bags might also be helpful; previous efforts have crashed in rather spectacular fashion.

Yesterday, we embarked on a fun little tour of your favorite policy explorer’s best 2014 blog posts. Knowing that you’re still trying to work through all the holiday tryptophan, however, I limited myself to covering just the first half of the year. (Fun make-you-sound-smart-at-your-next-holiday-party factoid: The turkey-tryptophan thing is actually a myth.) As promised, we’ll wrap up the rest of 2014’s highlights today. Without further ado, I present Little Eddie’s favorite blog posts from July through December 2014: