Category Archives: Public Charter Schools

Maybe this isn’t the best time to bring up the subject — what, with the hot summertime sun baking our brain cells and the new school year still many weeks away for most kids. But I wanted to let you know about a Colorado nonprofit group creatively working to bridge an important gap sometimes overlooked in the world of education policy. Listen to Cognitive First Children’s Campaign founder and executive director Larry Hargrave explain on an iVoices podcast how his group seeks to make brain skills testing and intervention resources more accessible to Colorado students:

This news from the Goldwater Institute’s Matt Ladner about the basic civic illiteracy of Arizona high school students is depressing, especially a week before our nation’s birthday. A simple 10-question quiz failed by the overwhelming majority of students. Apparently, charter school kids did better than other public school kids, and private schoolers did even better. No group did well, though. I have to wonder: What about homeschoolers? (Maybe there weren’t enough of them to tally the results.) The big people in my life insist that basic civic literacy is absolutely crucial for the Republic to survive in the future. You know, my future? Let’s pay attention, people. Anyway, here are the 10 questions, taken directly from the U.S. Citizenship exam:

Next week I’ll be on vacation at the beach, and blogging won’t be high on my priority list. But before taking off, I want to leave you with a glimpse into a school model based on the “rock star” teacher idea. This doesn’t mean bringing in real-life rock stars to teach. To my mom and dad, that probably would be some guy named Bon Jovi. To my gramps, maybe some ancient dude named Elvis I’ve heard him talk about. But they’d all be wrong. In a nutshell, the idea is to free up funds to pay the best teachers more by allowing for larger class sizes. The question is: Will it work? Over at Jay Greene’s blog, Dr. Matt Ladner has written about the “rock star” teacher idea several times. The latest highlights a New York Times story about a Washington Heights school scheduled to open in the fall that will pay its eight teachers each $125,000 a year, with a chance to earn more in performance incentives.

Updated for accuracy (6/9) For 15 years we’ve had charter schools around in Colorado. By giving strong accountability along with a new level of freedom, our state has been one of the leaders in fostering innovation through charters. Going along with that, charter schools have now established themselves with strong bipartisan political support. Witness our own Democrat lieutenant governor Barbara O’Brien, who offered testified before a Congressional committee on Thursday. Denise at Colorado Charters highlighted the factors O’Brien pointed out as reasons for charter school success. But I thought this was the most interesting part of what Lt. Gov. O’Brien had to say:

I don’t have time for a long post today. But my Education Policy Center friends wanted to let you know that they have only well wishes for the success of Denver’s new innovation school (not really a traditional district school, not really a charter): Math and Science Leadership Academy. The school is going to be run by teachers through the Denver Classroom Teachers Association (DCTA), the local union. The outgoing DCTA president Kim Ursetta explains on her blog some of the reaction that the new school is getting because DCTA is taking the unusual step of not having a principal: In talking to some administrators (central and building) today, they still don’t understand what we’re trying to do. One principal said, “Yeah, but who is the administrator?” Another said, “Good luck with your charter school.” My favorite is the principals who asked what I’ll be doing now, and I tell them about the school. They just stared… and walk away. I didn’t know that math and science, to start, was THAT out of the box. Unorthodox? Yes. But I hope for the academic and all-around well-being of the students who are enrolled to attend there, that the teachers there find […]

Update: The good people of Ed News Colorado have also written about The State of Charter Schools in Colorado (PDF), breaking down some of the key information if you don’t have time to dig through the whole report. Do you need a good reference digest of important information on charter schools in Colorado? Well, my friend and Education Policy Center senior fellow Krista Kafer has done it again, joining Dr. Dick Carpenter to co-author another valuable report for the Colorado Department of Education. The brand new report is called The State of Charter Schools in Colorado (PDF). Skim through it, and you’ll see there really is no such thing as an average charter school. As the movement has grown in our state over the last 15 years, both the number and the diversity of charters has increased.

Not long ago my friends in the Education Policy Center went to visit the Denver School of Science and Technology, an innovative and successful public charter school in the city’s Stapleton neighborhood. Ninth and tenth graders at the Denver School of Science and Technology meet for their morning assembly to share announcements, accountability for tardiness and other infractions, and a special performance by school faculty and staff You can’t leave DSST and a meeting with head of school Bill Kurtz without a clearly unique understanding of how brain science research is applied to design the school’s program and classroom instruction. As an example, teachers are drilled in understanding the human mind’s 10-minute attention span and formulating lessons and activities accordingly to get the most out of every minute from each student.

Forgive me if I act a little sleepy today. I stayed up past my bedtime last night to watch the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. And after that, I was too excited to go to sleep. When I’m old enough, I want to be on ESPN and national TV, too — competing for the top prize as spelling champion. Think I can do it? For now, I look forward to rooting for Tim Ruiter in 2010. The homeschooler from Centreville, Virginia, finished as runner-up this time around. (Next year, maybe Colorado spellers will advance farther, too.) I like Tim’s attitude. He told the Washington Post: Tim said that he plans to be back next year and that he’ll take only a short break — “I’ll go to bed” — before he resumes word study. “I’m glad that she won, because this was her last year,” he said.

Yesterday a couple of my Education Policy Center friends had the privilege of visiting a local charter school with a special program to serve a particular group of kids with special needs: Rocky Mountain Deaf School (RMDS). RMDS is located in Jefferson County, but about half of its 61 students live in surrounding districts. That’s a sign of a school having success connecting with deaf and hearing-impaired kids and improving their learning horizons. The RMDS vision statement highlights the clear focus and special status of the school: As a high performing, innovative educational program for students who are deaf, we are deeply committed to providing a rigorous, standards-based curriculum. We prepare each deaf student to be literate, academically successful, and technologically competent. We provide a linguistically rich learning environment through the acquisition of American Sign Language and English both inside and outside the classroom.

One of the main things my friends here at the Education Policy Center do is to shed light on the public debate with information. It’s good to see in scientific terms that information makes a difference with people’s opinions about important policy issues related to education. The new issue of Education Next highlights the research of University of Chicago Professor William Howell and Brown University Professor Martin West — who tested this idea in the area of whether schools should receive more funding. Here’s a sample of what they learned: The average per-pupil spending estimate from respondents to the 2008 Education Next/PEPG survey was $4,231, and the median response was just $2,000; but for these respondents, local average spending per pupil at the time exceeded $10,000. When told how much the local schools were spending, support for increased spending dropped by 10 percentage points, from 61 percent to a bare majority of 51 percent. Howell and West find that these differences in opinion based on exposure to key information are consistent across a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, views about the local public schools, and political ideologies. “It’s clear that the American public is quite willing to update its views […]