Category Archives: Innovation and Reform

When I hear “yearbook,” my thoughts turn to a page full of photos (including the goofy ones, you know who you are) of kids in the same class at school. But the Reason Foundation’s Weighted Student Formula Yearbook is somewhat different. This yearbook is a one-of-a-kind look at 14 different school districts that use “portable student funding” (I like the term “backpack funding”) to make sure dollars are distributed fairly and transparently to serve real students’ needs. It also gives building principals more autonomy and responsibility to make budgetary decisions. Reason’s research gets updated every year, kind of like a school yearbook, but instead helps us to see which school systems are setting the pace in this area.

Today is PISA Day, and I’m not referring to pepperoni pies or unusual Italian landmarks. The 2012 results from the Program for International Student Assessment are in, and it doesn’t look pretty for the good old USA. At least not on the surface. First, let’s take a quick trip back to September, when I brought your attention to the unsettling book Endangering Prosperity and pointed out that America needs to take a different path to improve unimpressive math test scores. That was when our nation’s 15-year-olds scored a sub-par 487 on the PISA:

Sometimes it’s the small ideas that deserve big attention. No single one of these ideas can solve all the problems and shortcomings in education, but reformers and transformers might find pleasing results from one such strategic change. That’s what we find in a newly released Fordham Institute study by Michael Hansen, “Right-sizing the Classroom: Making the Most of Great Teachers.” What’s the result when a school shifts a few students from the weakest teacher’s classroom to the most effective teacher’s classroom? Hansen digs into years of 5th grade and 8th grade data from North Carolina to figure out how well the approach works:

Guess I should be thankful that the big education issue being talked up for next year’s legislative session is teacher licensure. (It was supposed to be last year, but kind of got lost in the shuffle with that whole Senate Bill 213 debate.) As it usually goes with such things, there’s been a group meeting called the LEAD Compact Working Group. Their job is to come up with recommendations for legislators on how Colorado can make the licensure system work better, especially now that we are launching a system that evaluates teachers based on effectiveness. But as Ed News Colorado reports, there’s the rub: Nearing the end of its work, the group that is studying possible changes to Colorado’s teacher licensing requirements remains undecided on a key issue – whether or how to connect license renewal to teacher evaluation.

Yes, these are crazy days. But a short blog post is better than none at all. And I felt compelled to reply when I read this new Denver Post column by Alicia Caldwell. Not because she is entirely wrong, but because she errs by coming so close to, but missing, a critical breakthrough: But the truth is — listen up, my free-market friends — enticing top-notch teachers means competing and paying for them. The average teacher salary in Colorado in 2012 was just under $50,000. That’s not much. Paying teachers more isn’t a popular idea. But getting rid of the mediocre — a non-negotiatiable [sic] first step — and hiring smart people who are star teachers should be. As usual, read the whole thing. She writes earlier in the piece that, due to challenging student demographics, we should celebrate Colorado’s small gains on national tests because of being so “poorly” funded. (Close to $10,000 per student.)

The elections are over. I’m out from underneath the rock. It’s nice to see the sunshine again, to see that Amendment 66 was rejected (let’s think Kids Are First instead), and the reform message carried many major school board races. Time to shift gears, though, with the release of 2013 results from NAEP, the nation’s gold-standard test. The overall picture, as reported by Education Week‘s Catherine Gewertz, is not too encouraging:

Several weeks ago I warned you about the onset of the campaign “silly season.” But then sometimes, like the last 24 hours or so, we get to see how seriously a local school board race can be taken. So seriously, it would seem, that a supporter of the union-backed Douglas County school board candidates was describing voter fraud intent to her anti-reform compatriots on Facebook. The public leak, detected and captured by a concerned citizen, quickly caught the attention of places like Denver morning talk radio.

You may not know what blended learning is. You probably can’t recite all the different categories of blended learning — though you would stand a better chance if you had read Krista Kafer’s paper on The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning in Colorado. One particular passage in Kafer’s paper highlights the rise of a particular form of blended learning that certainly seems to owe its origins to Colorado:

What would it be like to be the youngest person (by far) in a class? Would the situation be better if the class were a virtual one? Well, count me in, or at least count some of my Education Policy Center friends in for this free opportunity from the Clayton Christensen Institute: There’s plenty of buzz around blended learning [link added] and its transformational potential. But what does it really mean? You can now get the inside track on this growing movement by participating in our upcoming Blended Learning MOOC—a massive open online course—taught by our own Michael B. Horn, Brian Greenberg of Silicon Schools Fund, and Robert Schwartz of the New Teacher Center. The course begins October 15, so be sure to register as soon as possible. The class will explore the different types of blended-learning models as well as key issues that impact students, teachers, and schools. Specifically, the instructors will examine these issues through the lens of three high-performing schools that each implements a different model of blended learning. A few of the key topics will include:

I have some ideas of what to blog about. In fact, you can probably count on more fresh and insightful commentary tomorrow. But with the initial shock of the partial government shutdown, this young and sometimes naive edublogger is trying to keep composure and not panic. But I think the situation might even be worse for policy wonks like my friends in the Education Policy Center. Try heading over to the federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics to download the latest spending and enrollment data, or to run research queries on state NAEP scores, and this is what you encounter: