Category Archives: Federal Government

What are the best and worst developments in K-12 education for 2010? You can chime in and make your selections on a poll sponsored by Education Next — based on a list released by Stanford University’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education. Ten items are available for you to rate either as one of the two best or two worst developments. Included as possible choices are items I’ve written about over the course of 2010, including:

Colorado is a truly interesting place when it comes to education reform. If you follow this blog at all, you know what I mean. But seriously, how many states have a State Board of Education chair who is such a bold spokesman for empowering students and parents rather than propping up politics and the current system? Bob Schaffer isn’t your everyday education official. Don’t believe me? Check out what the former Congressman and Senate candidate (and current charter high school principal) wrote in his latest entry of the National Journal “experts” blog when asked about the turnaround process and the U.S. Department of Education’s school improvement grant program. Here’s an excerpt for the flavor: Only from behind the haughty parapets of Washington, D.C., would anyone consider it “good news” that taxpayers of a bankrupt government are dropping heaps more of yet-to-be-printed money on 730 failing public schools. It’s a bizarre stratagem, unashamedly rewarding failure with billions more of other peoples’ hard-earned cash. How otherwise sane people can actually expect the long-term outcome of this audacity to be anything but more failure is beyond the rest of us out here in the commonsense parts of the country.

I’m super busy working on a new Lego project today, so forgive me for keeping this one short. But I wanted to bring your attention to an investigative piece by Greg Campbell at the online Colorado news service Face The State. The story? “Stimulus funds lavished on special ed – even where the need is in decline.” Apparently, the $150 million in special education dollars kicked down from D.C. to Colorado in the 2009 stimulus (aka the magical money tree) isn’t necessarily paying attention to where the special education students are: In the Sheridan School District in Arapahoe County, for example, enrollment in special-ed programs fell 22 percent from 2005 to 2009. And yet the amount of federal money the district can spend on such programs ballooned by more than 105 percent between 2009 and 2010, thanks to an infusion of cash from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Likewise, Colorado Springs School District 11 saw its enrollment in special ed decline by 12 percent from 2005 to 2009, but the amount of federal money available to run such programs increased by 114 percent from 2009 to 2010. The same is true of several other districts, large and small, including […]

It’s the day after a late night election. There are some yawns and droopy eyes around here. But I did want to share you with some initial reactions. Let’s start in Colorado. First, we learned that Republicans won the state house and closed the gap on the Democrats’ state senate majority. Democrats hold on to the governor’s office, with John Hickenlooper taking the place of Bill Ritter. Alan Gottlieb opines in this morning’s Ed News Colorado commentary that a Hickenlooper administration will be “more in tune with the Obama administration and Democrats for Education Reform than with traditional Democract [sic] influencers, including teachers’ unions.” I sure hope he’s right.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about the federal government’s “magical money tree.” Funny how we forget so quickly about $100 billion of borrowed taxpayer funds shipped around the country to prop up the K-12 status quo. Or have we forgotten? Rich Lowry at National Review writes a column today that takes a big-picture view of stimulus education funding from the perspective of someone outside the education field. Sometimes it takes that kind of perspective to provide needed wisdom: The stimulus bill devoted $100 billion to education (about $80 billion of it for K–12). As Reason magazine notes, that’s twice the Department of Education’s annual budget. “Race to the Top” is less than 5 percent of this staggering gusher of money. It’s not “Race to the Top” that is the Obama administration’s signature education initiative, but spending that the teachers’ unions would only have dreamed of two short years ago. These funds have kept school systems from having to undertake wrenching changes, or any changes at all….

This morning President Obama spent a 30-minute live interview on NBC’s Today Show talking about education. The headline from the President’s remarks, including in the Denver Post‘s featured AP story, was that money alone can’t solve education problems. True enough, and hats off to the President for acknowledging what has become abundantly clear to those studying the long-term trends in American K-12 public schooling. As my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow has noted on the Ed News Colorado blog, the challenge today is how we are going to stretch the school dollar. In his interview, President Obama also touted a longer school year, his Race to the Top grant program to states and a newly-proposed initiative to recruit 10,000 new teachers from the math, science and engineering fields. That’s all well and good up to a point. But sometimes it’s hard politically to get beyond the soft-sell. What most caught my attention was this section from the AP story:

Two days ago I commented on the big splash Denver Post story about a new study calling into question teacher performance pay. Today the Post‘s big headline touts that “Jeffco schools to increase some teachers’ pay to more than $100,000”: Top-level teachers in select Jefferson County schools could be paid more than $100,000 a year under a pilot program funded by a new $32.8 million federal grant…. Jefferson County and Colorado Springs District 11 learned Thursday that they were among 62 winners in 27 states of the federal Teacher Incentive Fund grants, which support performance-pay plans in high-need schools. [link added] More excellent coverage is available from Nancy Mitchell at Ed News Colorado, which proclaims “Jeffco launches teacher performance pay.” So given the previous news, is the state’s largest school district barking up the wrong tree?

Update, 10:30 AM: And surprise of surprises, more evidence emerges that the figures of teaching jobs lost — used to promote the Edujobs bailout — was wildly overblown (H/T Education Intelligence Agency). A couple weeks ago I told you about how the ill-advised Edujobs bailout discriminates against charter schools. So you’d think the national news service wanting to do a story on this would give little Eddie a call, right? Okay, not exactly. Last week Family News in Focus talked to my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow about this issue. You can listen to the brief news story with select interview clips, or read the story on Citizen Link: Ben DeGrow, education policy analyst for the Independence Institute, said that charter schools should not be discriminated against by public schools. “The education jobs bailout is reckless and fiscally irresponsible policy,” DeGrow said. “But, if the money is going to be spent, it should be given to public schools and public school teachers on a even playing field.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ben did write that op-ed on the Edujobs bailout in the Denver Post last month, so I guess he’s qualified and smart enough to make the comment. Maybe even […]

Flash back to last September. Remember the big brouhaha about President Obama’s speech to schoolchildren? I commented on it a few times. To me the big deal was the creepy notes created by the Department of Education for teachers that promoted a sort of worshipful, service-oriented attitude toward the President. But no need to rehash the past. Did you even notice President Obama spoke yesterday to school children across the country? Probably not, and that’s a good sign. Look at a copy of his remarks (H/T Sean Cavanagh, K-12 Politics). I like the heart of the President’s message, delivered at Philadelphia’s Julia R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School: But here’s your job. Showing up to school on time. Paying attention in class. Doing your homework. Studying for exams. Staying out of trouble. That kind of discipline and drive – that kind of hard work – is absolutely essential for success.

Hey, remember Edujobs? The $10 billion chunk of federal taxpayer change doled out to states for the express purpose of hiring and re-hiring teachers and other employees affected by a nationwide trend of crippling layoffs. What could be wrong with that? (Besides being fiscally irresponsible?) Yesterday, the inimitable Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency highlighted even more evidence — including data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — to undercut Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s claims that the money was needed to save 161,000 jobs: