Category Archives: Research

Phew! There are only a few days left in Colorado’s legislative session, but there are still education bills left that deserve our attention. My new grown-up friends at Parent Led Reform today have their sights set on stopping Senate Bill 172, one of the shortest pieces of legislation you may ever lay eyes on: The bill directs the state to join as a governing board member a consortium of states that is developing a common set of assessments. For assessments in reading, writing, and mathematics, the state board will rely upon assessments developed by the consortium. What’s the big deal, you say? I thought you’d never ask. There’s a reason why the State Board of Education voted 4-3 to oppose the legislation. The majority is committed to Colorado developing its own tests and maintaining control within the state rather than from outside agencies.

I write here about a lot of different issues related to education and education policy. But this one may be a first for me: How early should school start? When it comes to the bigger kids, middle school and high school students, new research by Finley Edwards featured at Education Next suggests it may actually be better to let them sleep in a little longer, especially the underperforming students. After looking at schools and student results in Wake County, North Carolina, he concludes:

There’s a lot of talk these days in education about dealing with the perennial problem of school bullies. Not long ago an acclaimed movie was released, and President Obama spoke out against it, while new research suggests that it leads victims to hurt themselves more and special-needs students to suffer from anxiety and depression. Hey, I can’t imagine if some big, mean kid wanted to come beat me up and take my lunch money because — who knows? — maybe I’m a cute and clever blogging prodigy. But it could conceivably happen. Maybe they’d just want to call me mean and nasty names like “Blog Geek.” I don’t know. But a new Washington Examiner column by Joy Pullmann quite clearly brings home that there’s a whole other kind of school bullying going on: Earlier this month, the presidents of America’s two largest teachers unions co-hosted a screening of the new documentary “Bully.” The movie, of course, aims to combat bullying of schoolchildren. But even as they publicly eschew bullying, these unions and their locals across the nation bully teachers and competing organizations to maintain membership and power….

Digital learning is much more than a buzzword. It’s a real trend in K-12 education that’s growing faster than any single person or entity can keep up with. The effective use of technology in instruction to enhance student learning experiences takes on a variety of forms — including full-time online education programs and numerous blended learning models. Like many other reforms, it can be done well or done badly. While digital learning is no magical silver bullet to save every student in every school, neither is it something to be feared. Rather, the opportunity needs to be embraced as a tool to strengthen and enhance the reach of quality instruction, to improve and diversify curricula, to focus staff time and energy, and provide for more productive use of education dollars. I can’t begin to try to point you to all the important nooks and crannies of this issue, but the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has brought together some of the best current thinking in their new book Education Reform for the Digital Era. (If you’d rather pop up some popcorn, Fordham also has just released a 90-minute video panel discussion on this very theme.) Well worth the read is the […]

I’m busy tweeting about the landmark first day of open union negotiations in Colorado’s third largest school district — Douglas County — so you’ll have to forgive a shorter post for today. In my normal brilliantly childlike fashion, I jump at the opportunity to put together two topics I’ve written about recently. What are those two things? A survey of teacher opinion and the Harrison School District Two’s cutting-edge performance pay system. Put them together and what do you get? An in-depth article yesterday from the Gazette‘s Carol McGraw gives the answer:

Calling all Colorado education policy makers and policy wonks: I hope you’ll check out this new Fordham Institute report Defining Strong State Accountability Systems: How Can Better Standards Gain Greater Traction? My Education Policy Center friends and I can’t endorse everything in the publication. But it’s worth looking at because Colorado is one of seven state accountability systems profiled. The 2009 CAP4K changes to the state’s accountability law, as well as 2010’s educator effectiveness legislation, were both cited as key reasons for including the Centennial State in the analysis. The authors make some excellent points to chew on. First, improvements can be made to the way district and school performance data are presented:

The Center for Education Reform (CER) today released its annual analysis of the state’s charter school laws, giving the nation a mediocre 2.1 Grade Point Average. CER’s gold standard measure looks at the practical effects of statutes and policies that govern the creation of high-quality, autonomous and accountable public charter schools to meet the demands of students and parents. For example, does a charter school applicant have access to multiple authorizers? Is the state free from caps (both hard and soft) on the number of charter schools that can operate? Are charter schools funded equitably compared to other public schools? In the 2012 report, Colorado maintained its solid B grade, but slipped from 6th to 9th in CER’s national rankings: “After a flurry of education reform activity around ‘Race to the Top’, it seems that Colorado has gone quiet,” said CER President Jeanne Allen. “Even a good charter school law can become stronger.”

If you live in the Denver area, please mark your calendars for April 12. My Education Policy Center friends are hosting a brown bag lunch event with a special guest speaker. Dr. Marcus Winters, a University of Colorado at Colorado Springs assistant professor and Manhattan Institute senior fellow, will be sharing the findings and recommendations from his new book Teachers Matter: Rethinking How Public Schools Identify, Reward, and Retain Great Educators: The question is, how do we sort out the good teachers from the bad? Winters shows the shortcomings of the current system, which relies on credentials and longevity, and spells out a series of reforms based on results achieved in the classroom. For the first time, standardized test results offer an objective, reliable measure of student proficiency that can be tied to an individual teacher. Sure to be controversial, Winters’s plan will be of interest to the education community, policy makers, and parents concerned about the future of education in America. I’m so glad that Dr. Winters lives in Colorado and can drive up to visit the Independence Institute. The invitation to the event reminds us that the issue is one of profound and timely relevance in our own […]

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about the performance pay plan in Colorado Springs’ Harrison School District, so you may not be up to speed on this cutting-edge innovation. At that time, six months ago, Harrison superintendent Mike Miles was sharing the district’s story around Ohio. From those events has come at last an excellent Fordham Institute publication with Superintendent Miles himself as the lead author — “to serve as a tool and model for Ohio’s school districts” (and for others as well). I don’t think he’s far off to describe Harrison’s compensation reform as “arguably the boldest pay-for-performance plan in the country.” It’s certainly the boldest in Colorado, and there are only a handful of other districts that even could be considered in the running. The Fordham report is worth reading in full, as it gives a critical, in-depth look beyond even what my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow wrote in his 2011 issue paper Pioneering Teacher Compensation Reform. Miles lays out in detail the thoughtful and balanced approach to making transformational change, while also answering many of the common objections to teacher performance pay. Here are a baker’s dozen highlights that give the flavor of how different […]

If I weren’t so little, I might have stayed up to hear the first result for Colorado’s most talked about education bill of the session. But it went past my bedtime before the House Education Committee agreed to adopt HB 1238, as Ed News Colorado reported: The House Education Committee Monday gave a full hearing – more than seven hours – to House Bill 12-1238, the proposal that would require improved literacy programs in the early elementary grades, create a preference for retention of third graders with weak reading skills and add early literacy results to the factors in the state’s accountability system for rating schools.