Category Archives: School Board

About six weeks ago I shared with readers that the Falcon School District 49 innovation plan was nearing a crossroads. That crucial time may now be upon us. As reported in the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Colorado State Board of Education yesterday unanimously approved requests to give six District 49 schools official innovation status: “Innovation is here to stay,” said Bob Felice, Innovation Zone leader/assistant superintendent, adding that the plans grant a lot of autonomy to teachers and parents. Yesterday’s Board votes bring the list of innovation schools to 33, including 24 from Denver Public Schools and now the following six from Falcon 49:

So I hear there’s this little election going on in Wisconsin today. As is so often the case, the political happenings are closely connected to the issues of our public school system. One of the nation’s leading education reform voices, RiShawn Biddle, has written a two-part series (here and here) highlighting the dilemma centrist Democrats face regarding aggressive collective bargaining reforms like those advanced in Wisconsin by Governor Scott Walker. Biddle shines a big spotlight on the national implications of today’s likely Walker victory for the future politics of education reform. You really need to read both pieces in their entirety. But in this passage he really drives the point home:

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 […]

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:

School district “Innovation” through site-level autonomy can be a promising path to pursue, but doesn’t necessarily move forward smoothly or quickly. Local politics, leadership challenges, and the limits of imagination all can slow progress. Yet the spark unleashed remains to be ignited into action, where there is a will to yield productive, student-centered change. Such is the case in Falcon School District 49 outside Colorado Springs, where more than 15 months ago the Board of Education boldly seized the mantel. Within weeks, leaders in the district’s zones of innovation separately began to convene with parents and staff to flesh out plans that would free them from specific district policies and state laws to achieve something greater. District leaders made some tough decisions to streamline functions and administrative personnel. One local election and various delays later, numerous school innovation proposals yesterday reached the Falcon Board of Education for an important vote. (Pictures from the meeting are on the district’s Facebook page.) Despite objections, the Board was able to squeeze out three votes to approve innovation proposals affecting nine schools.

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 […]

Last week I brought your attention to the Douglas County school board’s bold proposals heading into historic open negotiations. (Thank you, Parent Led Reform!) While I’m little and sometimes notice things that most big people do not, that’s certainly not the case with the Dougco budget proposal. In fact, Denver Post columnist Vincent Carroll yesterday delved into a few areas I barely touched on, particularly in relation to how district teachers are paid: In contract negotiations with the district’s teacher union, the board has signaled it wants to move toward a system in which pay scales are related to the relative scarcity (or abundance) of various categories of teachers. That way, the district hopes to attract the best possible applicants. In other words, if the district gets hundreds of applications every time it has an opening for a physical education instructor but only a few applications to teach AP calculus, why should it pay the same for both of those career paths?

I write a lot about Douglas County here, and with good reason. The school board there has charted a bold course. Hey, it wasn’t much more than a year ago that they voted to establish the first locally-created private school choice program in the nation. More recently, they demonstrated their commitment to transparency by voting to open union negotiations to public view. Tomorrow morning’s Dougco open negotiations Twitter Rally, which yours truly will be a part of, should be noteworthy not only for the breakthrough moment but for the content of the conversation. Because, you guessed right, it sure looks like the Board of Education of Colorado’s third-largest school district has taken the bold approach. While leaders in the 42,000-student Adams 12 school district “are proposing a 3 percent reduction in employee pay through furlough days and an increased pension contribution,” Dougco is offering up a more appealing plan to :

I’m a little down in the dumps today, and the cool, gloomy weather only has a little bit to do with. Ed News Colorado has reported that bold Harrison reform superintendent Mike Miles is all but officially moving on to be chief of the Dallas Independent School District, the 14th largest in the nation. Apparently, I’m not alone in feeling the selfish reaction about what Colorado is losing, an exception in the leadership of traditional public education: Van Schoales, senior consultant to the national Education Reform Now, described Miles’ pending departure as “depressing.” Why, it was barely 10 days ago I carefully brought your attention to a terrific new report Miles wrote for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute on the Colorado Springs school district’s bold and cutting-edge teacher performance pay plan.