Category Archives: Innovation and Reform

Edublogger extraordinaire Joanne Jacobs brought my attention to Opportunity Culture, a new website project of the group Public Impact. The idea? How to extend the reach of excellent teachers with innovative uses of time, space, technology and professional roles. Opportunity Culture has a smart group of people advising the project, and of course Public Impact itself is co-directed by the Hassel team, who recently wrote a relatively concise Education Next piece on how the reach of excellent teachers can be enhanced.

Choice and accountability are two words you’ll hear my Education Policy Center friends say quite a bit if you’re around them enough. Empowering families with a broader range of educational options, and providing transparent information about — and real consequences for — a school ‘s learning results, are two general principles they and I regularly espouse. But what kind of accountability is appropriate for private schools that accept voucher students? One state with a large and growing private school choice program yesterday broke ground by adopting rules of a different kind from its predecessors. Fordham Institute blogger Adam Emerson, who supports the move, boils the decision down to its essence: Louisiana has shown us that it’s possible to offer private-school choice and control for quality in a way that doesn’t cramp what makes a private school unique. And in doing so, Louisiana has broken ground in school-voucher policy. While other states have made voucher and tax-credit-scholarship programs more transparent, only Louisiana would regulate enrollment at schools that consistently show poor performance. [emphasis added]

The Education Policy Center’s recent look at 10-year financial trends showed most Colorado K-12 schools have continued to increase real per-pupil revenues and spending — just not as quickly as most other states. But the decades-long trend of seemingly endless growth appears to be crashing headlong into fiscal realities, reaching a plateau or peak that more and more elected officials and school leaders need to be prepared to deal with. Writing for Education Next, Nevada state superintendent James Guthrie and George W. Bush Institute research associate Elizabeth Ettema paint a broad picture that should attract some attention: Not all relevant financial figures are available yet, but reasoned extrapolations from private- and public-sector employment data suggest that U.S. schooling may be on a historic glide path toward lower per-pupil resources and significant labor-force reductions. If not thoughtfully considered, budget-balancing decisions could damage learning opportunities for schoolchildren. Education managers are typically inexperienced in and often reluctant to initiate cost-savings actions. Budget cuts may be poorly targeted, and students, particularly economically disadvantaged students, are swept up in the process as collateral damage.

Ed News reports that the State of Colorado has laid out its detailed argument in the appeal of the Lobato school funding case. Former governors of both political stripes joined the University of Colorado Board of Regents and a coalition of business leaders in submitting their formal backing with the State and against the lawsuit: The state’s brief, along with most of the amicus briefs, attempts to make the point that the high court needs to consider all state budgetary needs, not just whether K-12 funding is constitutional, in making its eventual decision.

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 […]

Even though it’s the middle of the summer, your (no, really, it will be fun) homework assignment is to read the new Wall Street Journal guest opinion column by the Cato Institute’s Andrew Coulson: Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers’ aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs.

While I was gone fishing, the National Education Association had its annual representative assembly. Apparently, nothing took place there like in 2009, when the outgoing NEA general counsel proclaimed the union’s true priorities. Actually, it’s more along the spirit of last year, though, when NEA delegates took both sides in the debate over using value-added measures for evaluations. Reading NEA Assembly reports from the Education Intelligence Agency’s Mike Antonucci, like this one, have become a belly-tickling annual tradition:

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: