Category Archives: Elementary School

Sometimes a little edublogger sees two small interesting stories to cover, and leaves it to insightful readers like you to figure out the connection. Today is one of those somewhat interesting occasions. Let’s start over at Education Week, where a recent post by Liana Heitin caught my attention. A newly published study of 15 rural Colorado elementary schools show that changing the school week from five days to four brought about clear improvements in math and likely has the same sort of effect on reading. (It may even help student attendance, but those results weren’t definitive.) The average person’s reaction to such news might be a true head-scratcher. The research doesn’t provide any real insights into what causes this counterintuitive result. All these schools are still providing the required instructional hours, just packing them into longer days and extending the weekends. Some complementary research from Idaho released a couple months ago shows that making the shift to the shorter school week yields no savings, and in a few cases, actually incurs extra costs. Crazy, huh?

It’s much better to have a light touch, rather than a heavy hand, from the state to exert efforts to improve schools. Colorado has its share of schools and districts in need of turnaround, with some serious options on the table (but delayed one year by a 2015 state law). Whenever possible, I always like to highlight successful examples of struggling schools that really turn the corner and improve dramatically. Colorado Public Radio recently talked to Zach Rahn, a principal called in a few years ago to help turn around a low-performing Denver school: He says, at that time, the school was on a downward spiral. But, through special programs, community outreach and new practices, the school has shown improvement — both in its culture and the students’ academic performance. Rahn’s big lesson learned is worth heeding:

It’s often been said “you can’t argue with success” (or Success). But that doesn’t stop some from trying. Last year, I pointed out the collective jaw-dropping that took place when test results came back from students in the Harlem Success Academies, a New York City charter network that overwhelmingly serves poor and disadvantaged families. Just to revisit for the record: Seven out of the state’s 15 top-scoring schools on math proficiency tests this year were Success Academy charter schools….An astounding 93.9 percent of Success students passed the Common Core math exam and 64.5 percent passed the English proficiency test…. After a closer look at the results, all that critics and skeptics were left to stand on was the suggestion that the astounding, off-the-chart scores for poor kids in the Big Apple must have been some kind of a fluke. With the release of the latest achievement scores, as reported by Reason blogger Jim Epstein, that line just became a lot harder to defend.

Yesterday the Colorado Department of Education released CMAS science and social studies test results. It’s only the second year the test has been given (science to 5th and 8th graders, social studies to 4th and 7th graders), so you can’t read too much into the trend lines. The bottom line is that scores are up slightly (except for 8th grade science), but overall Colorado students are not on track in these areas. Colorado Public Radio also notes that, as in other tested areas, there is a sizable achievement gap among ethnic groups. The overall trend of small gains in 3 of the 4 subject areas generally seems to hold locally in places like Denver, Boulder, Loveland, and Grand Junction. (Thanks to Chalkbeat, you can search scores for individual districts and schools.) But that’s all just prelude to (finally!) Friday fun time.

Apparently, there has been some rampant speculation that little Eddie is actually little Eddies, that there is more than one of me. At least that’s what I’ve been told. Now I find that sort of talk a little disturbing. Who am I anyway? Maybe someone has seen my doppelganger out there. I’d also given consideration to the possibility that my parents have locked an evil Eddie twin in a basement closet, only to be let out at inopportune times. Let me here and now assert my firm belief that such a notion was nothing more than the phantom of an overactive imagination. Still, my curiosity is piqued at the potential boon to educational research that having a twin would provide. The National Council on Teacher Quality today brought my attention to a pair (!) of studies — one in the Netherlands, one in the United States. The idea? Take a set of twins and put them in different teachers’ classrooms to test the effect.

What kind of a holiday is Presidents Day anyway? For many kids, it’s just a great excuse to stay home from school. Speaking of which, yours truly decided to dig up eight little factoids about Colorado public schools named after former U.S. presidents: Hardly a shock, “Lincoln” is the most popular presidential school name with 10 across the state. The most recent president so honored is John F. Kennedy, for which a Denver high school is named. Denver also has high schools named after George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, which come in as the next most popular choices. Colorado Springs 11 has a slew of elementary schools named after former presidents: James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Woodrow Wilson.

December is an exciting month for me. For starters, I’ve got some cool presents coming my way next week. In the meantime, I’ve got plenty of fun education stuff to keep me busy. Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of highlighting some standouts among CDE’s annual award winners. This week, I have the honor of presenting the newest report card from Colorado School Grades. Some might wonder why I’m so excited about school grades. All the data is out there anyway, right? Those people have probably never experienced the sheer horror of navigating performance frameworks on CDE’s website. The information is there, and those with some level of knowledge and experience can find it without experiencing irreversible brain damage. Others who may want or need information on school performance—parents, for instance—are likely to find the system too onerous to be worth the effort. Colorado school grades rectifies that problem by putting everything into easily understood letter grades. But don’t let the simplicity fool you; all of the variables used by CDE are wrapped into those grades using a complex formula developed by the University of Colorado Denver.  Pretty cool if you ask me. I’ll let you play around with […]

There’s nothing to be proud about narrowly avoiding failure. It makes me nervous just to think about how Colorado still teeters on the edge when it comes to the quality of our teacher preparation. We know how important the role of the classroom instructor is for helping students learn, so the latest release of the National Council on Teacher Quality’s State Teacher Policy Yearbook hardly inspired confidence. NCTQ’s yearbook has been more or less an annual tradition in recent times. The overall project grades states comprehensively on five key areas:

Unfortunately for you, faithful readers, I’m operating on a bit of a time crunch today. Because of that, we will forgo our usual lofty education discussion in favor of something a little different: Drawing. I can’t say I’m sad about the diversion; drawing happens to be one of my favorite pastimes. Besides, I’m sure you all need a break after yesterday’s very, very exciting event at the Colorado Supreme Court. I like to consider myself a titan in the world of little guy art. Fire-breathing dragons, Play Doh monsters, aliens—you name it, I’ve drawn it. But as it turns out, my drawings may reveal more about me than my somewhat nerdy inclinations. A new study from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill indicates that the drawings of six year olds may offer important hints into what’s going on in those children’s lives.

It’s Friday, time to stick to something a little lighter and perhaps more upbeat. This week the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) publicly celebrated its annual award winners. While 27 districts, including Douglas County, earned recognition for topping the state’s accreditation system, today I particularly would like to bring attention to the school-level results from 2013-14 in three major categories: