Category Archives: School Choice

I’m not that old, so the thought of having a big red “Easy” button is rather appealing. According to my grown-up education policy friends, developing a high-quality education model and scaling it up to reach a huge number of kids is a far more challenging and time-consuming task. How do we take pockets of success and super-size them to make a real dent in overcoming mediocrity and closing the achievement gap? Last night the Denver Public Schools board approved 14 new schools (including 12 charters) to open for the 2015-16 school year. Some of the names are new, but many are expansions of true success stories and promising innovations. Headlining the group is the eight-year-old STRIVE Prep (formerly West Denver Prep) charter network, with three of the 14 new schools. Besides adding another middle school — the original model and “core competency” — to the network, STRIVE also now is slated to open a second high school and its FIRST elementary school, both in far northeast Denver.

Another Jeffco school board meeting, another set of fun or crazy things to talk about. These meetings have become a regular kind of twisted entertainment for my family, I think. As best as I can tell, three big items went down last night. The Denver Post and some other major media focused on the finalized contract for Dan McMinimee — which meets my expressed hopes of sending “the right message to tie a significant portion of the new superintendent’s pay to measures of performance.” Chalkbeat reporter Nic Garcia covered a second important development, namely that the school board rejected the teachers union contract proposal

Time flies when you’re young and enjoying early summertime fun. Why, it was only last week I told you all about the bad smell left by a new book attacking private schools with weak and questionable data. Thanks, Patrick Wolf and Education Next. However, in writing that post, I may have made a mistake. It’s not easy for a stubborn little edublogger to admit he should change his mind, but a new development this week might just do it. I wrote the following sentence: “It’s extraordinarily challenging to make broad, facile comparisons between the two sectors of education.” It may not be terribly challenging at all to make simplistic comparisons. What’s more, it appears eminently possible to make meaningful comparisons between public and private schools on a number of academic data points. Yesterday, the local nonprofit group ACE Scholarships released a pilot analysis showing how scholarship students in 6 of their 150 partner schools fare compared with charter and other public school options available.

I have my reasons for doing so. But today’s entry will be easy on both of us (unless perhaps you’re a legislator or other policymaker). The Friedman Foundation has done it again, releasing last week a thorough and thoughtful study of state regulatory impacts on private schools — before and after choice is enacted. So easy because author Andrew Catt’s research led to the development of this: Breaking Down "Public Rules on Private Schools: Measuring the Regulatory Impact of State Statutes on School Choice Programs" from The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice

It’s Friday, and it’s my blog. So if I want to cover two topics in a single post, well… I hope you like it. This story from Wednesday’s Washington Post was too significant to pass up. Lyndsey Layton reports that the last five traditional public schools in New Orleans close down this week, making the Recovery District the first all-charter district in the United States: By most indicators, school quality and academic progress have improved in Katrina’s aftermath, although it’s difficult to make direct comparisons because the student population changed drastically after the hurricane, with thousands of students not returning. Before the storm, the city’s high school graduation rate was 54.4 percent. In 2013, the rate for the Recovery School District was 77.6 percent. On average, 57 percent of students performed at grade level in math and reading in 2013, up from 23 percent in 2007, according to the state.

In the world of education policy, there’s limited research with shaky conclusions. There’s highly questionable research with sketchier conclusions. Then there’s the findings in the new book The Public School Advantage by Christopher and Sarah Lubienski. The authors not only seek to make the case that traditional public schools outperform private schools, but attempt to invalidate private school choice programs in the process. First and foremost, let me say such apples-to-oranges comparisons give me pause. It’s extraordinarily challenging to make broad, facile comparisons between the two sectors of education. Some have tried to make the opposite case as the Lubienskis, with varying degrees of success. The point is that parents choose the best kind of school that works for their child and that we ought to be working to improve access, opportunity, and excellence through competition. Education policy wonks and school choice supporters should take a few minutes to read Patrick Wolf’s review in the new edition of Education Next. It gets somewhat technical, but some of the main points are worth your attention:

A couple months ago I was going wild and crazy (in a good way) with the news that the Arizona Supreme Court upheld the fabulous and liberating Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs). We remember a very important reason why a cutting-edge program like this one is so great when we hear directly from the families who benefit. Thanks to the Foundation for Excellence in Education, I came across a terrific letter by Arizona mom Amanda Howard. Her autistic son Nathan struggled in a regular kindergarten classroom, and still wasn’t talking at age 6, when they received an ESA:

A somewhat overlooked education policy outcome from this year’s Colorado legislative session was the passage of House Bill 1382. Outside the realm of full-time online schools, where the legislation has real but not overwhelming impact, HB 1382 generally follows the recommendations of a short-lived K-12 Online Education Commission, which I told you about earlier. As sent to the governor, the bill authorizes the creation of a task force that would work on two major areas: Craft high-quality standards for authorizers of K-12 online programs; and Oversee the development of pilot programs to test innovative education policies in the online sector.

The good news from yesterday is summed up in two words: Sine Die. Near as I can tell, that’s Latin for “The legislature gets out of town, productive everyday citizens breathe a sigh of relief.” (But maybe I need to enroll in one of Colorado’s fine classical schools to find out for sure.) The not-so-good news comes from a pair of test results that leave me sadly shaking my head. First, Colorado’s critical 3rd grade reading TCAP scores took a slight dip this year. We’re talking about 71.5 percent passing the proficiency bar in reading, as opposed to 73 percent last year. The Denver Post story mentions one metro district that has bucked the trend, with Colorado Public Radio’s Jenny Brundin shining the spotlight on Westminster:

Many years ago, someone famously said: “I have seen the future, and it works.” Ironically, Lincoln Steffens said that about the Soviet Union, and he ended up being grossly incorrect. What I see included in the future of Colorado K-12 education is considerably more modest and considerably less likely to backfire. When it comes to positive and promising development in Colorado K-12 education, I don’t need to be quite so brash — nor expect to be just plain wrong — as Mr. Steffens was. I’m talking about student-based budgeting, which directs money to schools based on the needs of individual students attending there rather than on (often secretly) negotiated staffing formulas. As students exercise their choices within our K-12 public education system, the dollars as much as possible should be portable along with them. This move in turn puts more autonomy at the local school level, where decisions can better be made to benefit students.