Category Archives: School Choice

After an earlier hiccup left the innovative program’s status in doubt, I’m excited to see creative Louisiana leaders get the go-ahead for a new plan to launch Course Choice in 2013-14. The state’s Board of Education yesterday approved $2 million in funding for a pilot program that enables secondary students in schools graded C or below to take an approved course from one of 40 different public or private providers. (Other students are only eligible to select a course if their school doesn’t offer the subject.) Three of the leading national advocates in the digital education arena — the Clayton Christensen Institute, Digital Learning Now, and iNACOL — teamed up to celebrate the news, explaining what the program really offers:

At the risk of putting everyone on a neck-jarring roller coaster of education policy emotions, I have to follow up yesterday’s good school choice news from Arizona with a brief account of a New Hampshire disappointment. Whereas the uplift came from an elected state legislature, the downer emerged from the courts. New Hampshire Judge John Lewis declared the state’s scholarship tax credit program partly unconstitutional. As far as I know, this is the first-ever setback for a school choice tax credit program in the judicial system, at least as a less-than-100 percent positive decision. Both the Institute for Justice — which represents New Hampshire families who benefit from the program in the case — and the Cato Institute’s Jason Bedrick highlight the dangerous dual fallacy in the judicial logic:

There’s no time like summertime to focus on some good news, even if it comes from some place even hotter than home: Arizona. Thanks to Matt Ladner guest-posting on Jay Greene’s blog, I learned that the Grand Canyon State is a small step away from creating more opportunities for students and families after the legislature voted to expand two of its leading school choice programs. The nation’s leading school choice advocacy organization offers up some key details:

Governing magazine reports today that Wisconsin wants to join the cadre of states that offer private school tax deductions: Last week, the Wisconsin legislature’s Joint Finance Committee approved new tax deductions for families that put their kids in private school as part of its 2013-2015 budget. The plan allows for families to deduct up to $4,000 for every student in kindergarten through eighth grade and up to $10,000 for every high school student.

Just a short one today. Because it all has to do with things that happened in the way-back long ago dark ages of 1993 (before my time), I defer to my Education Policy Center friends. What better place to start than today’s Denver Post column by Vincent Carroll, who writes about when the good guys in education reform prevailed. Twenty years ago on Monday, then-Gov. Roy Romer signed into law Colorado’s Charter Schools Act, the third of its kind in the country. Carroll captures the essence of it well and, importantly, also points readers to a great new Independence Institute non-fiction story:

You may have heard old adages like “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” and “Familiarity breeds contempt.” Well, here comes the young whippersnapper again, questioning longstanding wisdom. When it comes to tax credits for private school choice, I have to say the old adages just don’t work. So the Cato Institute’s Jason Bedrick points out on a new posting. Bedrick looks at states with scholarship tax credit (STC) programs before 2010 that later expanded those programs. He compares eight legislative votes in four different states, before and after, and finds that the vote margin grew significantly and dramatically in all but one case. The Cato analyst concludes:

According to my stressed-out-looking Education Policy Center friends, we are fast approaching the 20th anniversary of Colorado officially approving charter schools as a means of public school choice. At the time, we were the third state to do so (after Minnesota and California). Today, 42 states have some form of a charter school law. As being one of the pioneers, it’s great to see Colorado’s charter law today ranks among the strongest nationwide. Not far behind us was Arizona, where charters became law of the land in 1994. Yesterday the Goldwater Institute’s Jonathan Butcher took the opportunity to explain why lawmakers in his state should continue to preserve charter freedoms while also pointing out improvements the state could make to ensure equity. Butcher’s accompanying new report also provides a detailed picture of the growth made in Arizona’s charter sector and the results their students have achieved.

You may not be surprised to hear that this little tyke enjoys games as much as the next kid. Want to challenge me to a contest of Checkers — or better yet, use those same Checkers in a game of Connect Four? Maybe you just want to get me outside during the summer so I can play Hide-and-Seek or Kick the Can. Perhaps you can appreciate my parents trying to keep me occupied at a busy restaurant with something old-fashioned like Tic Tac Toe, or better yet, a chance at Angry Birds on my dad’s phone. Games are great and can be lots of fun. But gaming the system to hurt students? That’s just wrong. A quick stop today over at Jay Greene’s always-enlightening blog (I have to say that ever since he told everyone I have “one of the best education blogs, period”) led me to two separate stories with an intertwining theme: How students with disabilities are counted can limit access to educational options OR can malign programs and schools that provide those opportunities. Very telling stuff.

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 […]