Category Archives: Independence Institute

That last Brown Bag Lunch back in April — the one with Marcus Winters, author of Teachers Matter — was such a success that my Education Policy Center friends are excited to introduce the second Brown Bag Lunch, coming soon: This year’s signature education legislation, the Colorado READ Act, has shined the light on the need to boost early childhood literacy in our state. One of the nation’s great literacy champions is coming to the Mile High City to share his compelling story and his insights on this timely and critical issue. Please join us at the Independence Institute Freedom Embassy (727 E 16th Avenue, Denver, CO 80203) on Thursday, August 2, to hear from our special guest speaker, John Corcoran, president and CEO of the John Corcoran Foundation.

Friday means I’m taking it easy, and leaving the work up to Choice Media TV‘s Bob Bowdon, who interviewed Jeff Kwitowski of K12, Inc., to talk about online education in this 8-minute video:

Not many people out there get the joy out of school funding figures, but understanding them clearly is crucial to the debate. Part of the problem? Depending on which source you look at, per-pupil spending and revenue data don’t always line up, something my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow pointed out in his 2006 backgrounder Counting the Cash. Last month, when the U.S. Census Bureau released its Public Education Finances report (PDF) for the 2009-10 school year, the Business Journals Network dryly proclaimed, “Public schools spending rose in fiscal 2010.” Interestingly enough, that’s not as much of a “dog bites man” headline as it would be for most years. Thinking back to 2009-10 (I was 5 then… big shock), and the recessionary effects of the financial crisis on tax revenues, it’s somewhat remarkable that spending rose nationwide. Of course, the borrowed spending of federal stimulus dollars chipped in. When are we going to be able to pay for it all? That’s another story for another day. Anyway, somewhat less shocking is the response analysis of the Colorado School Finance Project (COSFP), a group that makes a living off habitual claims that Colorado K-12 education is underfunded. Their latest output […]

For the record, it’s been more than three weeks since I’ve mentioned anything here about Douglas County. (So yes, I was gone for about two weeks of that, not blogging at all, but anyway….) In the meantime, quite a bit has happened — such as the 60,000-student school district became the state’s largest without a recognized teachers union. As of July 1, when the collective bargaining agreement expired, Dougco also stopped collecting dues for the union and its political activities. On June 21, receiving a clear signal that the reform-minded Board of Education wasn’t going to back down on its key proposals, the Douglas County Federation of Teachers (DCFT) sent a letter to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE) requesting state intervention. Read for yourself, but as best as my Education Policy Center friends can tell, union leaders’ argument boiled down to this: The Board made big changes to its proposals midway through the renegotiation process, right before open bargaining sessions began [without noting that the union’s very same request for intervention included several points in which the union was backing out of previous agreement]; We’ve had this monopoly bargaining power for 40-plus years; Our exclusive representative status […]

I left you with a school choice summertime smile, took a couple weeks to bask in the sun, only to return to find a host of good news on which to report: A bipartisan group of New Hampshire legislators overrode their governor’s veto to enact a brand-new tax credit scholarship program — the Cato Institute’s Adam Schaeffer highlights a couple of novel features that support parental choice to provide home education and allow the program to expand automatically to meet growing demand; Pennsylvania not only expanded its decade-old tax credit scholarship program for low- and middle-income families but also created a new program that expands choice for students in the lowest-performing 15 percent of schools; A June 27 bill signing by Gov. Bob McDonnell added Virginia to the growing number of states with educational tax credits, a move that offers opportunities to low- and middle-income families and many disabled students; and Mississippi became the 11th state to create a private school choice program for students with disabilities, in this case benefiting those with dyslexia. So yours truly leaves town for a couple weeks to get some fun and sun, and four states introduce or expand school choice. Do you think […]

I am young and energetic, and have pretty keen eyes. But sometimes things slip past me. I admit it (or maybe I just could cast the blame on my Education Policy Center friends… they have pretty big shoulders). In this case, it slipped through during Colorado’s recent legislative session. House Bill 1240 was advertised as “clean-up” legislation for various education laws, to get up with the times, or something like that. The final version of HB 1240, which Governor John Hickenlooper signed into law two weeks ago, included a provision that means one less thing for the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) to do, namely that they no longer must “post copies of all of said current collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) on the department’s web site.” [link added] But I just noticed it this week! Colorado’s 2001 School Collective Bargaining Agreement Sunshine Act was perhaps the first of its kind in the nation, designed to ensure that both the local school district and state department of education kept true copies in print and online. Now that CDE is out of that business, the Education Policy Center has updated the information in a one-stop central repository for taxpayers, teachers, researchers and […]

Education Week last week ran with a story touting renewed local interest in the weighted student funding concept. Quoted in the story, the Center on Reinventing Public Education’s Dr. Marguerite Roza noted that while current budget pressures have sparked interest, the policy offers some real benefits: Weighted student funding can also help promote nonstandard staffing models that are growing in popularity, Ms. Roza said, offering as an example the Rocketship Education model. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based charter management organization combines online learning with small-group instruction. Standard funding formulas that provide a teacher for a certain number of students don’t allow for that kind of flexibility, she said. Also quoted in the Education Week story, another nationally-renowned academic expert on school finance is less high on weighted student funding:

A quick Friday freebie to wrap your mind around, compliments of Education Week‘s Sean Cavanagh: An estimated 610,000 students are on waiting lists to attend charter schools—a jump of about 200,000 from just two years ago, a national organization says. The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) — with its brand new executive director Nina Rees — notes that there are as many students nationwide on charter school waiting lists as attend charters in the two most heavily enrolled states, or enough to “fill seven and a half Olympic Stadiums during this summer’s Olympics in London.”

Who appreciates a little creativity from education policy wonks more than I do? Exactly, which is why a big smile covered my face to see today’s posting from Jonathan Butcher at the Goldwater Institute, titled “An Abbott and Costello routine: Who’s on… 49th?” It’s hard to imagine the really old-time comic duo taking on misleading claims about K-12 funding, but Butcher does a great job setting up the parody. Then he brings home the powerful punchline: Since 2007, local media in five states have named their state “49th” in education funding. In 2005, eight states were crowned 49th. While we all argue over who is second-to-last in funding, we ignore the larger problem: Despite decades of increasing education funding, student achievement is no higher today than it was 40 years ago. In Arizona, real per-student funding more than doubled between 1969-70 and 2008-09, but test scores are flat.

Being a Monday and all, I thought you might appreciate a little good news on the school choice front. So let’s head quickly to our nation’s Heartland, first to see my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow‘s new offering for School Reform News on the state of Hoosier State’s Choice Scholarship Program: Scarcely more than a year old, Indiana’s voucher program has grown in popularity, sent an extra $4 million to public schools, and yielded clear evidence of taxpayer savings. With Governor Mitch Daniels and Superintendent Tony Bennett at the helm, Indiana has really taken the reins of education reform and run forward with it. Just one year old, the private school choice program already is the nation’s largest, and two years from now there will be no cap on enrollment for choice scholarships. Most interesting, though, from the article is what’s beginning to bubble up: