Category Archives: Research

Anyone who has followed my opinions here for awhile knows that I’m a big fan of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides real choices to a small number of needy students in our nation’s capital. Well, I had to smile because the Washington Post reports this week that leaders from both parties in Congress have struck a deal with President Obama to continue and expand the program: House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), the authors of legislation that reauthorized and expanded the Opportunity Scholarship Program, said they had reached an agreement with the White House to ensure that there would be no cap on enrollment in the program and that parents can apply to have their children stay in or join the program and get a response as soon as possible.

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:

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.

Once in awhile you read something that makes you really step back and think. In that spirit I commend to you the new Friedman Foundation report The Greenfield School Revolution and School Choice by Greg Forster and James Woodworth. Want to know what I mean? Start off with a statement like this potent summary: Existing choice programs transfer students from marginally less effective public schools to marginally more effective private schools, but they do not seem to drive more ambitious school reforms. Forster and Woodworth dive into the data, unpacking the private-sector share of students and schools in places where school choice has had the biggest reach, such as Milwaukee, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. Generally speaking, while doors are opening to break down some segregation, the private sector is shrinking and still catering to provide niche educational opportunities. Far and away, the greatest amount of true innovation is coming from charter schools, which includes blended learning superstars like Carpe Diem and Rocketship.

Yesterday I shared some thoughts about the current and coming changes to public education labor relations and the teaching profession. And since Gov. Scott Walker did indeed pull out a convincing win last night in Wisconsin, interest in the topic remains strong. State Budget Solutions has put together a great brief highlighting why current government collective bargaining models need to be reformed, something that mirrors what my Education Policy Center friends produced last year as a guide for local changes in Colorado. All this raises the need for a few more important points to be addressed:

What if I told you the Colorado school district with the second-highest average teacher salaries just dramatically increased compensation for new hires and is still figuring out how to pay for it? A few days ago the Boulder Daily Camera reported that the Boulder Valley School District agreed to boost starting teacher salaries to one of the state’s highest, increased by 17 percent from $34,192 to $40,000 (H/T Complete Colorado). As the article explains, that figure is for teachers who hold a bachelors degree. Such an across-the-board pay increase certainly represents a nice gesture from the district. For teachers with extra credentials, it gets even higher: For Boulder Valley, the major changes are the $40,000 starting salary and incentives to earn advanced degrees. A master’s degree, for example, would bump a starting teacher’s salary up to about $51,000. That’s an even bigger jump from the current starting MA salary of $36,927. The question for BVSD officials is what will they get for their money?

Marcus Winters — whom I will long remember as the author of Teachers Matter and featured presenter at the Independence Institute’s first-ever Brown Bag Lunch — has written a great new piece for City Journal. Appropriately titled “Better Schools, Fewer Dollars,” Winters’ column addresses the issue of tight budgets and educational productivity. A few weeks ago I highlighted a new 2-minute Education Policy Center video on rethinking Colorado school finance that sounded similar themes. Winters brings forward data, some more familiar than others, to show how spending per K-12 student skyrocketed in the past generation with very little or no improvements to show for it. The Manhattan Institute senior fellow further undermines the logic of adequacy studies used to inform court decisions like Colorado’s Lobato case. And this is what a Denver judge hangs her cut-and-paste ruling for the state to spend billions more in scarce resources? Anyway, Winters also reviews the research on cost-saving charters and voucher programs, which show some benefits for students and at the very worst could be interpreted as not doing any harm. Nothing new or surprising there for faithful readers or others who have paid attention to the education reform debate. But his concluding […]

What a hubbub. Having finally read last week’s desperate New York Times attack against K-12 tuition tax credit programs, I was left scratching my head. Really? The Old Gray Lady seems awfully cranky about school choice and short on facts or serious arguments when it comes to this one. In a way, it felt like writer Stephanie Saul was pushing different random hot buttons to get people fired up about… something or other. As usual, overlooked in the article was the fact that nearly all gold standard academic research shows positive academic or competitive benefits from private school choice programs — and not one shows a negative impact. But that probably didn’t sound as compelling as the overblown assertion that “scholarship programs have been twisted to benefit private schools at the expense of the neediest children.” Writing for Education Next, Jason Bedrick does the most thorough job of dismantling the implicit argument in Saul’s story.

A team of local education reform groups has partnered to release the new report True North: Goals for Denver Public Schools. It’s a quick, worthwhile read for anyone interested in improving the outcomes of American urban education. Denver Public Schools is often cited as a reform model for districts in other cities across the land, but this new report says even DPS isn’t aiming high enough. True North places a healthy focus on academic achievement as measured by “exit-level proficiency,” or how much students know when they complete elementary, middle and ultimately high school. As Ed News Colorado commentator Alexander Ooms notes, this focus corrects a misplaced obsession on academic growth scores as an end unto themselves. While DPS is above the 50th percentile in growth, not enough students are catching up to where they need be. In some cases, they’re actually falling further behind. DPS justly has been lauded for the development of its School Performance Framework (SPF) that incorporates a range of meaningful factors to determine how well schools are doing. But the new report makes a great argument that the current bar is set too low. Expecting more DPS schools to earn 50 percent of the available […]

Do I write enough here about blended learning? Probably not. The fascinating and significant topic has many different manifestations, and developments change so fast that it’s hard to get a really solid grasp of what it is. The respected gurus at the Innosight Institute define blended learning as: a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online delivery of content and instruction with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace and at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home. That definition comes from the new report Classifying K-12 blended learning by Heather Staker and Michael Horn. Why come up with a new report? To improve the system of classifying different blended learning models. After consulting with many other education experts, they reduced the number of identifiable models from six to four (skipping right over my favorite number — five!):