Category Archives: School Board

I’ve got to hand it to Mike Antonucci for coming up with such a great name for an education event as Collaborpalooza (try saying it five times fast). Sounds like some sort of rock & roll festival. But according to the U.S. Department of Education that’s putting it on, the actual name of the event is the Conference on Labor-Management Collaboration. Of 245 school districts that applied, the Department announced this week the names of the 150 that will participate, in addition to 13 districts separately selected to act as presenters. Color me highly skeptical about the whole confab. Of course, all results and other things being equal, collaboration on a project is preferable to having it imposed from the top-down. But how often in the multi-billion, quasi-monopoly K-12 education enterprise are all other things really equal — especially when the Department insists on involving unions? Did Colorado’s 100-plus non-union school districts need not apply?

So what does my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow’s brand new op-ed in the Colorado Springs Gazette have to do with President Obama’s State of the Union address last night? Piqued your curiosity at all? Maybe just a tad? A couple weeks ago I told you about what’s going on in Falcon School District 49 near Colorado Springs, and the beginnings of their creative attempt to restructure the school district. Well, the Falcon board voted to move forward with the innovation plan — a decision Ben lauds and highlights in his Gazette op-ed. You can find out more about Falcon’s innovation plan by listening to an iVoices podcast with school board member Chris Wright, or by visiting a new page created on the district’s website. A main tenet of the plan is moving greater autonomy from the central administrative office to the schools in the different innovation zones. To get there, the district plans to request Innovation status from the State Board of Education — a step empowered by the creation of Colorado’s 2008 Innovation Schools Act. But what was the genesis of the groundbreaking piece of legislation? A high-need school with a bold principal (Kristin Waters, now helping […]

I’ve heard my mom say on more than one occasion that people come in all shapes and sizes. The same is true for school districts, too. Rebecca Jones at Education News Colorado provides some interesting insights with a story focused on Colorado’s smallest, and steadily shrinking, school district: Agate. When you see the numbers and the trends that tell the story, you can see why the “State’s smallest district ponders future”: A decade ago, enrollment in Agate peaked at 132. Since then, the decline has been steady. And like many small school districts across Colorado struggling with declining enrollment, the prospects for remaining a viable independent district grow slimmer with each departing child. To serve its 26 students – 12 in high school, five in middle school and nine in elementary school – Agate has a nearly $1.2 million budget for the 2010-11 school year. More than 70 percent of that comes from the state, which sets aside a relatively generous per-pupil allotment for rural school districts, and lets a district with declining enrollment average out its head count over four years, so a sudden drop in enrollment won’t cause quite so catastrophic a loss of revenue. That means Agate […]

Update: Thanks to quick help from staff at the Colorado Dept. of Education, I can tell you that Colorado public school agencies spent $7.9 million in 2008-09, and at least $6.9 million in 2009-10, on “tuition paid to private schools or non-approved agencies.” Now to figure out if that changes the nuance of CEA’s opposition to a private school tax credit program. Hey, there, don’t look now, but I think there’s something behind you… like the bogeyman!! Not really, it’s just the impression I got from reading yesterday’s Colorado Independent story titled “Colorado private school vouchers are back, disguised as tax credits.” (H/T Complete Colorado) You’ve got to watch out for those pesky vouchers in disguise. You never know what they might sneak around to do: haunt your house (Vouchergeist!), drink your blood (Vouchers or Vampires?), or worst of all, maybe steal some of your Legos! About that story in the Independent, guess what? Did you know that teachers unions and public school establishment groups are opposed to private school choice? I had no idea before reading it that groups like the Colorado Education Association or Colorado Association of School Boards might not like Rep. Spencer Swalm and Sen. Kevin […]

Today is one of those terrific days when I’ve discovered a great new education blog. I’m talking about Education Debate at Online Schools, authored by the mysterious Matthew. He got my attention by linking to a post I wrote and calling me “the sharpest 5 year old in the entire education debate.” Let me tell you. No matter what you’ve heard, in some cases flattery indeed will get you somewhere. Anyway, last week Matthew wrote a great post bringing attention to a financial transparency development in Kansas’ Wichita School District. Local officials posted the district’s checkbook online, a mildly positive step that Matthew rightly addressed with a critical eye: On the financial disclosure: B for effort, D for execution. On the PR supporting it: A+ for selling a mediocre, indecipherable product to those who never bothered to pop the hood. Ouch. I wouldn’t want that to be my report card.

Today, January 13, 2011 … a significant day for innovation and productivity in Colorado K-12 education? It’s too early to say for sure. But a couple of Board decisions may mean as much. First, the Colorado State Board of Education — which yesterday broke in its new members by making their first decision on a charter school appeal — has an exciting resolution on its agenda for this afternoon. Here’s the main punch of the resolution: BE IT RESOLVED: That the Colorado State Board of Education encourages Colorado’s local Boards of Education to implement cost efficiencies and adhere to the Secretary’s recommendation to improve the productivity of the education system through smart, innovative and courageous actions including, but not limited to, the following areas: (1) Streamlined administrative operations; and (2) Competitive contracting; and (3) Digital learning; and (4) Enhanced educational options; and (5) Performance-based compensation systems. “The Secretary’s recommendation” refers to something I highlighted a couple months ago: a speech by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in which he called for school districts to be more productive and do more with less.

I’m still catching up on stories and commentaries I may have missed while on break at the end of the year. A few months ago I brought your attention to a growing dispute in Weld County’s Valley Re-1 School District, from the local teachers association that claimed its collective bargaining privileges were being stripped away illicitly. In December by my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow on his personal blog took a closer look and found more reasons to be skeptical of the Valley Education Association’s claims that the existing policy represented collective bargaining. He also pointed out how the dispute was set up by Colorado’s unique legal formulation and noted the potentially significant ramifications from VEA’s lawsuit against the school district for officially changing the policy. A precedent from the case very well could affect other Colorado districts with similar policies. Well, on December 23, the Michigan-based Education Action Group (EAG) featured the story in its national e-newsletter and on its NEAExposed blog under the headline “Colorado school board battling to keep aggressive teachers union in check.” EAG’s interview with the Valley Re-1 superintendent:

In the end-of-the-year holiday dash, it sure looks like the Colorado League of Charter Schools has been busy. Busy standing up against the anti-charter actions of a couple local school boards. Two cases in point. The first is an op-ed League president Jim Griffin penned for the Greeley Tribune. It came out a couple days ago as the Greeley school board contemplated denying an expansion of the successful Union Colony charter school on the basis of student demographics. (The board since has officially rejected it.) But Griffin provided the skeptical Board and the Tribune itself with some clarifying insights:

The Mackinac Institute for Public Policy’s Michael Van Beek — who is essentially the Michigan equivalent of my friends in the Education Policy Center — brought some interesting news to my attention with a recent posting: The Traverse City Area Public School district is raising transparency to a new level by posting on its website the contracts it proposes to unionized employees. At present, only the proposed transportation employee union contract is available, but eventually, all of them will be. So what, you say, that’s more than 1,000 miles away. Why should little Eddie in Colorado care? Glad you asked for me. Several months ago my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow wrote an issue backgrounder called “Colorado Education and Open Negotiations: Increasing Public Access to School District Bargaining.” He noted that only one of 42 bargaining districts in our state have policies that ensure public access to the union negotiating process.

This is not the week for your average, run-of-the-mill, humdrum school board meeting. Not in Colorado, not in the Denver metro area. I already highlighted the heavy attendance at Douglas County’s Tuesday public testimony on their School Choice Task Force proposals and all the attention generated from it. Then there was last night in the Denver Public Schools, as a divided Board of Education was set to weigh a controversial turnaround reform proposal affecting the Far Northeast (FNE) part of the city. According to Jeremy Meyer in the Denver Post, the Board stayed up well past my bedtime to approve the proposal on a 4-3 vote. The newly-approved proposal includes a lot of features — which are well broken down in Nancy Mitchell’s Ed News Colorado story. One piece is an expansion of the successful Denver School of Science and Technology program using shared space in the Cole Arts and Science Academy innovation school. My Education Policy Center friends alerted you to this possible development back in March on an iVoices podcast with Cole principal Julie Murgel. In its story, Ed News Colorado also published a 4-minute highlight video from the Denver school board meeting, a more balanced presentation than […]