Category Archives: School Board

Update, 5/28: I took off for the long holiday weekend, and came back to learn that Our Colorado News had updated the article on the Trailblazer teacher evaluation controversy, addressing some of the shortcomings I identified. I’d like to thank them for making an effort to improve the story. If you can’t stifle dramatic local innovation at the legislature, there’s always the route of misleading newspaper articles. When it comes to the bold transformational changes going on in Douglas County, and the overheated political opposition that goes along for the ride, you almost have to expect it. The local journalists at Our Colorado News have picked up the slack, publishing a story rife with relevant omissions to try to convey a conveniently crafted political message: Trailblazer Elementary School Principal Linda Schneider says 70 percent of her teachers are “highly effective” under the Douglas County School District’s new evaluation system. The district questions that finding, and is summoning all the school’s teachers for a second, independent review…. District-wide, about 15 percent of teachers are rated “highly effective,” according to information provided by DCSD. Under the evaluations, each teacher is assigned a rating ranging from “highly effective” to “ineffective” that is tied […]

After a lot of recent attention, it seems to have grown awfully quiet this month in the Adams 12 school district. Two of four scheduled negotiation sessions with teachers union officials already have taken place, but beyond that it’s left to the open-ended curiosity of a perpetually precocious 5-year-old to try to guess what’s taking place. If the Colorado Education Association (CEA) mother ship had let the District Twelve Educators Association (DTEA) accept the board’s offer of open negotiations, we might have more than a clue. Still, we could take a stab at what the respective sides might be fighting hard for behind closed doors. An April 19 DTEA memo set forth the topics proposed for discussion. Kept out of the (properly hygienic, smoke-free) back rooms, I can only wonder what sort of progress might have been made in the direction of cutting back or ending tax-funded union release time, or the board’s general push toward greater fiscal responsibility. On the other hand, union leaders want to undo the 1.5% shift in teacher pay to cover their guaranteed retirement benefits (aka PERA), even if they can’t explain how that will be accomplished without asking more of parents and/or having to […]

A great classic novel my big friends tell me I need to read someday starts with a famous line. I’m talking about Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way. I’m told Dickens was contrasting conditions in the major cities London and Paris during the tumultuous French Revolution more than 200 years ago. On a more modest scale, one could do a lot to distinguish Colorado’s two biggest education stories this year based on a pair of new public opinion surveys. Read on to find the information and draw your own conclusions.

I told you yesterday that former Secretary of Education William Bennett is “very impressed” with the major innovative overhaul going on in Douglas County School District. The district has passed 9 months now without a governing union contract, and also continues to defend a groundbreaking private choice program in the courts. A prominent outside expert may be impressed, but what about the district’s teachers? The latest edition of the Colorado TELL survey is out, in which teachers answer a long series of questions about their schools as a workplace environment. Sponsored by the state’s department of education and several large education interest groups, the third TELL survey was open for teachers across Colorado to answer from February 6 to March 6. In many (but not all) cases, detailed data for each question is broken down at the individual district or school level. Yesterday Douglas County touted some very favorable news from the fresh results, starting with the fact 71.7 percent of teachers participated in the survey — 17 points higher than the 2013 state average and 22 points higher than the district’s 2011 numbers. Dougco teacher satisfaction significantly outpaced the state average on 75 of 97 data points (lower on […]

Colorado’s non-union teacher group PACE today posted some more of the results from their recent member survey. Roughly 3 out of every 4 expressed support for “a pathway for career advancement outside of the traditional, seniority-based salary schedule,” often known as a career ladder. One of their members hit the nail on the head: A high school math teacher in Harrison School District commented, “I think a seniority-based salary schedule is a horrible way to pay teachers and should be eliminated, not tweaked. A very interesting (and not terribly surprising) observation coming from a school district that has pioneered true pay-for-performance and as of a year ago showed tremendous signs of front-line support. But even more noteworthy, there is a Colorado district that is pushing change even further. Interestingly, given yesterday’s topic here, it came from the lips of former U.S. Secretary of Education Dr. William J. Bennett, who spoke Friday at a Fordham Institute event on “A Nation at Risk: 30 Years Later”:

Interesting news this week out of Phoenix, Arizona, where a judge ruled it unconstitutional for taxpayers to fund police union “release time” activities, and put an injunction on the practice. We’re talking about two different states, and two different sectors of government, but one has to wonder whether a similar case could be made about underwriting Colorado teachers’ union business? It may not be happening through the courts, but it appears officials in Colorado’s fifth-largest school district are taking a second look at a policy that in 2009-10 cost taxpayers more than $187,000 to release three union officers. The District Twelve Educators Association (DTEA) recently announced to its members that the Adams 12 school board is proposing changes to the part of the union contract that grants the tax-paid release time.

A sad education story is emerging from Oakland, California. Poor kids soon could be deprived of the option of attending the city’s top-performing high school and producing some of the best results nationwide. Why? Because a state audit found financial mismanagement by Ben Chavis, charismatic leader of the successful American Indian Charter, and lack of proper controls by the school’s board. The Oakland Unified School Board narrowly voted 4-3 in favor of shutting down the school that has topped California’s charts with its test scores. You’d be right to say the situation must be pretty bad for a school that successful to be shuttered down. Nationally-renowned libertarian investigative journalist John Stossel says American Indian Charter’s amazing academic track record for students so poorly served throughout most of the traditional K-12 system should overshadow the fact that Chavis and his wife made so much money off the school:

Gold-standard research on the positive impacts of school choice keeps rolling in. The latest work by Matthew Chingos and Paul Peterson measures the results for New York City students who received modest privately-funded vouchers to attend private schools. The study directly compared how many voucher students successfully completed high school and enrolled in college compared to non-voucher peers.

Take your hats off to those teachers union officials, they sure know how to plan ahead sometimes. The Education Intelligence Agency’s Mike Antonucci brings our attention to a PBS Newshour clip in which NEA president Dennis Van Roekel tried to respond to a question about why private educational choice works at the college level but should be rejected for K-12 students: I think post-secondary education, college and university, I think you have to put that into a different category than K-12 education, because then you’re choosing between a career or college and specialized training. That definitely makes sense. But for young children, they shouldn’t have to be bussed somewhere. It should be in their neighborhood. Huh? Giving a voucher or tax credit is bad because a kid might have to ride a bus? Antonucci presumes Van Roekel meant to say something else. Perhaps his analysis is correct. I’m not sure the Friedman Foundation will need to add this argument to its list of anti-school choice myths that need to be rebutted.

In case you haven’t been following me on Twitter (which raises the question: Why not?), you may not have noticed that the big education bill of the 2013 Colorado legislative session has made its way through the State Senate. As a new Ed News Colorado story by Todd Engdahl highlights, Senate Bill 213 has advanced as a purely partisan piece of legislation: The Senate approved Senate Bill 13-213 on a 20-15 preliminary vote, which is expected to be the same party-line total when a final vote is taken later. That final vote occurred earlier today by the same 20-15 margin. And thus the 174-page legislation motors on over to the House now. Still not really much choice or backpack funding at all. Changing from a single count date to average daily membership is great, but not worth a billion smackeroos. As the Education Reform Bulletin proclaims about SB 213, raising taxes trumps reform.