Category Archives: School Accountability

Do you ever get lost, driving around a big city and missing your destination? Maybe you pass the same landmark two, three, or even four times, getting more frustrated along the way. Maybe your GPS is malfunctioning, or maybe you just wish you had a GPS! For me, the feeling comes as I search for the pirates’ buried stash of gold doubloons (okay, it’s really some of those chocolate candies wrapped in gold foil, but please play along). What makes it so much easier to find the treasure? That’s right, a map. A treasure map. X marks the spot. Now it isn’t exactly the same, but today my Education Policy Center friends officially released “The Future of Colorado Digital Learning: Crafting a Policy Roadmap for Reform.” A quick read with some pretty graphics (thanks, Tracy!), it lays out the main policy changes that many of the state’s online education leaders see as important — including some of the important changes Center director Pam Benigno highlighted in an op-ed last fall. From the media release sent out this morning:

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.

Hard to believe it was five months ago I asked the question: Is major education reform about ready to give Iowa a try? At the heart of the story is a local connection. Jason Glass, appointed the state’s education chief a little more than a year ago by incoming Governor Terry Branstad, has some notable Colorado roots. Branstad and Glass forwarded a fairly bold plan for the Hawkeye State. Ideas included significant changes to teacher preparation, pay and retention; focusing on literacy through cutting back on social promotion; school accountability enhancements; and more flexibility and student opportunity through charters, online programs and other public education options. Of course, the state’s top executive certainly can’t — nor should he be able to — update laws by fiat. Still, Gov. Branstad’s plan has faced a particularly difficult time since being launched in the Iowa legislature in February. My Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow provides some of the detail in a new story for School Reform News:

Since today is February 29, I’ll take a timely leap from some of my usual fare to point you to two new podcasts produced by my Education Policy Center friends. In the first, Gina Schlieman explains how school-level autonomy has empowered some positive changes in Britain. In the second, foundation president Tom Kaesemeyer highlighted a program rewarding high-poverty Denver-area schools that are getting good results, and observed that exceptional principal leadership was at the top of the list of common school factors. Next, a recently published op-ed by Ben DeGrow, who hosted both of the aforementioned podcasts, explains one of the key merits of Colorado’s 2010 educator effectiveness legislation: Principals as instructional leaders will share accountability with classroom teachers for promoting student growth, which must make up at least half of educator evaluations. In an unusual step, legislators and Governor Hickenlooper recently ratified some of the details for the state’s coming new educator evaluation system. It’s by design, not by accident, that the policy holds principals to similar standards as teachers. Such a system gives school instructional leaders more reason to retain or remove teachers based on their professional effectiveness at helping students learn. Will it be perfect? No. Are […]

I usually don’t like talking about bad news, but sometimes it has to be done. When it comes to Colorado high school graduates needing extra help in reading, writing and math at Colorado colleges and universities, the news is just that: bad. Despite the positive higher education angle headlined by the Denver Post, there’s no doubt that from a K-12 perspective things are moving in the wrong direction. Two days ago the Colorado Commission on Higher Education (CCHE) released its annual report detailing the in-state academic remediation rates for post-secondary students. The bottom line? Overall, the percentage of first-time recent high school graduates placed into remediation in at least one subject increased by 11 percent from the previous year (31.8 percentage points in 2010-11 from 28.6 percentage points in 2009-10).

I’m still catching my breath from an amazingly successful National School Choice Week, including the Kids Aren’t Cars movie night put on by some of my friends right here in Denver. And now today it’s the first-ever Digital Learning Day, centered at a site where you can participate in a live chat and watch a series of webcasts, including an online national townhall meeting at 1 PM Eastern (11 AM Mountain). Colorado is well represented, as the townhall features National Online Teacher of the Year Kristen Kipp from Jeffco Virtual Academy. Also, at 1:30 PM ET / 11:30 AM MT, our local Englewood High School will be one of numerous school sites around the country interacting online via Skype. I tell you what. There is so much more going on in the digital learning arena here in Colorado, and my Education Policy Center friends are right in the middle of it. If you haven’t seen their helpful guide for parents that came out within the past couple months, you really need to check out Choosing a Colorado Online School for Your Child.

Today’s lead story at Ed News Colorado highlights the disparity in private parent and community giving within Denver Public Schools. Reporter Charlie Brennan notes that no school raked in more than the nearly $230,000 at Bromwell Elementary, a school with a low 8 percent study poverty rate. The general findings are no surprise, yet nonetheless disappointing: At the other end of the poverty – and fund-raising – spectrum is Johnson Elementary in southwest Denver, which reported fewer than $3,000 in private gifts in 2010-11. If a donation of five or six figures came through the door of the school, where 96 percent of students are low-income, said Principal Robert Beam, “You’d be writing a story about a principal who is dancing in the streets all day long.” The timing of the story is remarkable. Why? Yesterday substantial checks went out to 14 metro area public schools and 2 public charter management organizations (CMOs) serving high-poverty student populations, with awards totaling $500,000. And they didn’t just go out to schools based on need, but to schools with a proven record of serving their students well:

Update, 1/5/12: Chris Tessone at the Flypaper blog also makes note of the Denver Post story, correctly observing: “It’s difficult to make an argument that taxpayers should be directly subsidizing union leaders. Organized labor already extracts indirect subsidies by skimming dues from teachers’ paychecks, sometimes against the desires of teachers.” Guess what! Just over a week ago I banged on a drum that may have started to hurt some of your ears by now. The drum is the madness of taxpayer-funded release time for Colorado teachers unions. And then (out of the blue?) yesterday the front page of the Denver Post shouts about “Colorado teachers unions under fire for taxpayer subsidies from school districts.” Thanks so much to reporter Karen Crummy not only for taking note of this issue my Education Policy Center friends have highlighted for years but also for doing lots of her own digging to tell a pretty disturbing story. The Post‘s findings about the number of districts paying tax dollars for union officers and other teachers to leave the classroom, and the lack of accountability for the practice, track very closely with the findings in Independence Institute papers from 2004 and 2010. That’s probably why Crummy […]

Having more educational choices by itself is a good thing. Yet without enough accompanying information for families to make wise and effective choices, a lot of potential is lost. That’s one of the reasons why my Education Policy Center friends continue to offer the fantastic School Choice for Kids (SCFK) website, with all its helpful information for parents. Today brings the launch of another helpful site that complements the work of SCFK. As the name ColoradoSchoolGrades.com suggests, the new site does something that SCFK does not. Namely, it rates schools and gives them a grade based on measures of academic performance (static numbers) and academic growth (progress over time). In a sense, it’s like the next generation of the school report cards the Independence Institute pioneered once upon a time before the state adopted — and later discarded — School Accountability Reports.

Sometimes you have to look outside the world of education to capture attention for issues affecting Colorado schools and the students and taxpayers invested in their success. Two headlines in particular popped up this week. The first comes from the Goldwater Institute in Arizona, which is litigating Cheatham v. Gordon, a troubling case of wasted tax dollars in Phoenix and other cities: The contract provides an estimated $900,000 in annual release time for police union work, including lobbying. Six officers are released from city work on a full-time basis (each receiving 160 hours of overtime at 1.5x their regular salary). PLEA also uses 35 representatives. These representatives are not given a set amount of release time. Instead, they are authorized to use an unspecified amount of release time to accompany fellow officers to grievance meetings, use of force hearings, etc…. Release time harms police officers…. Then yesterday, the national website Real Clear Markets featured commentary from the Manhattan Institute’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth that the federal government is dishing out huge sums of taxpayer dollars for bureaucrats not to work: