Category Archives: Research

Back in April I brought your attention to Arizona’s cutting-edge, outstanding-results “blended learning” charter known as Carpe Diem. While you might have found my post and Ben DeGrow’s School Reform News feature story interesting, this 9-minute marketing video really brings it home: Carpe Diem Marketing Video – Final Cut from Nicholas Tucker on Vimeo. Let’s be honest: Carpe Diem’s success didn’t happen overnight. It has taken plenty of careful design, hard work, skill and dedication. But it’s all definitely worthwhile when you ponder the results. With comparable student demographics, the stats that jump out of the video are the 92 percent academic proficiency the school has attained (vs. 57% local and 65% state averages, respectively) while spending thousands of dollars less per student than in the nation or Arizona. Carpe Diem founder and executive director Rick Ogston wraps up the video with this compelling conclusion:

I so often enjoy reading the online work of Mike Antonucci at the Education Intelligence Agency, if for no other reason than he asks the questions and does the homework that so very few others are willing to do. On his Intercepts blog today, he adds some badly needed context and perspective on the supposed effects of the “Teacherpocalypse” crisis: The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics has updated its Common Core of Data to include last year’s workforce numbers, and they show – for the first time in ages – a decline in the number of K-12 full-time equivalent classroom teachers. But it’s difficult to connect these modest figures with the stories of overcrowded classrooms, devastated schools, and other tales of woe that accompanied the edujobs debate last summer. I’ll post the full details in Monday’s communiqué….

An interesting tidbit to open the month of June from the Education Intelligence Agency’s Mike Antonucci in his latest Communique. A reminder that severe economic recessions typically don’t affect K-12 public education anywhere near the same as they impact families and businesses in the private sector: From 2004 to 2009, student enrollment increased a cumulative 0.7 percent, while the K-12 teacher workforce increased 6.5 percent. Per-pupil spending increased 26.7 percent (about 12.5% after correcting for inflation). Spending on education employee salaries and benefits increased 27.5 percent. It’s an odd enterprise that reacts to fewer clients by hiring more employees. The day of reckoning was postponed, but finally arrived this year. Unfortunately, there was no rapture to accompany it.

If you think American K-12 education policy is a complex and tangled web of laws, bureaucracies, incentives, politics and emotions — and you would be quite normal to do so — then treading into the narrower world of special education services might make your head completely spin. It’s the day after a long and fun Memorial Day weekend, in which most of my time was spent with playgrounds or Legos. So rather than make any grand interpretations or pronouncements, I want to bring your attention to the new Fordham Institute report by Janie Scull and Amber Winkler, titled Shifting Trends in Special Education. Nationwide, the number and share of special education students peaked in 2004-05 and has been on the decline ever since. The report explains:

Talk about one of your below-the-fold news stories. Yesterday a Denver Business Journal headline declared: “Colo. near bottom for education spending.” The story references newly-released data from the U.S. Census Bureau, which shows Colorado fell from 36th in per-pupil spending in 2007-08 ($9,079) to 40th in 2008-09 ($8,718). There is good news, though. The best I can tell, unlike a certain recent tax increase press conference, no children were harmed — or even used as props — in the making of this article. For that we can truly be thankful. How do they measure these spending rankings, though? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I missed any local headlines when the National Education Association released its data showing Colorado’s per-pupil spending increased from $9,335 to $9,574 — albeit slipped down one spot in the rankings from 29th to 30th — during the exact same span. And the U.S. Department of Education’s data likely would be different from both NEA and the Census Bureau, as soon as they release their 2008-09 numbers for us to see.

The first time I heard of the Colorado Growth Model, I thought maybe it would be a scientific system to help determine how tall I would grow up to be in our high-altitude environment. No, we’re talking about our state’s system for measuring student progress toward proficiency in math, reading and writing, sorted by district and school. So I was more than just a bit off. You could sue me, but it wouldn’t get you very far. Anyway, the reason I bring up the topic is a brand-new Education Sector report titled Growth Models and Accountability: A Recipe for Remaking ESEA. The report’s hook and chief case study is Denver’s Bruce Randolph School, and a significant chunk of the report is focused entirely on (you guessed it) the Colorado Growth Model. That’s why my Education Policy Center friends gave it such close attention. Co-author Kevin Carey was kind enough to spend a few minutes on the phone with Ben DeGrow to explain a few things and answer some questions. It’s safe to say the authors of the Education Sector reports are high on the Colorado Growth Model as exemplary for other states to follow. As the report notes, a consortium […]

An email blast sent out Thursday by the Education Action Group (EAG) Foundation highlighted a list of “top 10 education reforms passed by the 2011 Indiana General Assembly.” If you follow this blog at all, you know right off the top what some of the biggies are — including limiting the topics open for teachers union collective bargaining and “the nation’s largest voucher program”. Also known as #1 and #3 on EAG’s list: 1. Limited collective bargaining to wages and benefits only. 2. Ended the union-contrived “last in, first out” practice of laying off teachers with the least seniority first, regardless of teaching ability.   3. Established the broadest voucher program in the nation by allowing all families in the state earning up to 150 percent of the threshold for free or discounted school lunches to receive a voucher to attend private schools. The vouchers – worth up to $4,500 for elementary students and 90 percent of state tuition support for high schoolers – will be available to 7,500 students the first year and 15,000 in the second. The enrollment cap is lifted in year three. 4. Expanded the state’s charter school law by allowing more charter school authorizers, creating a […]

What can I say but, “Wow?” (I know, bad rhetorical question, because here goes….) All you education transformers out there should be aware of a new Innosight Institute report by Heather Staker titled The rise of K-12 blended learning: Profiles of emerging models. Doesn’t sound that spectacularly exciting, I know, unless you have joined little education policy geeks like me in catching on to the hugely important trend known as blended learning. And this snippet from Staker’s introduction gives you just a taste of what I mean: Online learning appears to be a classic disruptive innovation with the potential not just to improve the current model of education delivery, but to transform it. Online learning started by serving students for whom there was no alternative for learning. It got its start in distance-learning environments, outside of a traditional school building, and it started small. In 2000, roughly 45,000 K-12 students took an online course. But by 2010, over 4 million students were participating in some kind of formal online-learning program. The preK-12 online population is now growing by a five-year compound annual growth rate of 43 percent—and that rate is accelerating…. This paper profiles 40 organizations that are blending online […]

Denver’s Professional Compensation System for Teachers has received a great deal of attention through the years from those interested in education policy and reform. (Just Google “ProComp” if you want to see what I mean.) So it’s certainly no surprise to see the Denver Public Schools celebrate ProComp’s fifth birthday. Somehow, ProComp has caught up to become the same age as me: This may mean a challenge to my self-proclaimed position as Colorado’s #1 Education Reform Five-Year-Old! Anyway, not long after the system went into full effect in Denver, my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow wrote an issue paper titled Denver’s ProComp and Teacher Compensation Reform in Colorado. He took the opportunity to credit the district for the extent of improvements made, given the binding power of a union bargaining contract, while pointing out areas where improvements could be made. As Charlie Brennan noted in today’s Ed News Colorado story, DPS’ leading partner in developing and implementing ProComp has more doubts now to express about how the pay reform has turned out — but not for the same reasons: [DCTA president Henry] Roman, who attended Monday afternoon’s event, offered a tempered endorsement of the program – in which he […]

There’s more to creating good policy than just passing a good law. This is especially true when it comes to big changes, like Colorado Senate Bill 191’s push to update how teachers are evaluated and retained. It wasn’t that long ago I expressed my concerns about the implementation. A couple weeks ago the co-chairs of the State Council on Educator Effectiveness presented their recommendations to the Colorado State Board of Education. One of the presenters expressed a hopeful confidence that the 50 percent of teacher and principal evaluations based on observed performance would match up with the 50 percent based on student growth. The good news, as reported by Education Next, is that new research by Thomas Kane and colleagues shows creating such an effective evaluation system can be done — because in a sense, the Cincinnati Public Schools’ Teacher Evaluation System (TES) already has done it: