Category Archives: School Choice

I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about teachers and policies related to them. But what about those who teach teachers — at least those teachers who receive traditional certification from postsecondary schools of education? Last week the Fordham Institute released the results of a survey of more than 700 education professors “to determine how they view their own roles and what they think of myriad K-12 policy developments that have taken place over the last decade.” The report Cracks in the Ivory Tower? sheds some light on education policy debates. As Checker Finn points out, there are some modest signs of more education professors being open to reforms of teacher tenure, incentive pay and alternative certification. But overall, they still “see themselves as philosophers and evangelists, not as master craftsmen sharing tradecraft with apprentices and journeymen.” Our own State Board of Education chairman Bob Schaffer, participating as one of the “Education Experts” on the National Journal blog, is not terribly impressed. Schaffer latches onto the finding that only 36 percent of education professors see teaching math facts as “absolutely essential” compared to a much higher percentage who believe in the critical importance of teaching 21st Century […]

We’re getting closer to that Waiting for Superman Colorado premiere… less than two weeks! While we know that a school isn’t necessarily better because it’s a charter school, the coming of the movie reminds us there are some innovative charter operators attaining remarkable results. One of the charter networks deserving positive attention is Rocketship Education, the “hybrid” school network that launched a few years ago in San Jose, California. (To get up to speed, go back and listen to the iVoices podcast with Rocketship Education CEO John Danner.) The most recent results (PDF) show that Rocketship’s two elementary schools — both of which serve high-poverty stuent populations– are continuing on a high trajectory of academic performance:

Today I don’t have a lot to say, but am hoping my school choice and market-reform supporting friends take a dive into Rick Hess’s new National Affairs piece titled “Does School Choice Work?” While Dr. Jay Greene is correct that we should be optimistic over the progress made thus far in building support for school choice, Hess offers some serious food for thought about what we’ve learned and where we can go from here. With little comment, I want to share a few provocative remarks from Rick Hess to spur your interest in reading his long but important article: Competition matters only when it pinches, and the reality is that competition in K-12 education has not yet been given a robust test. And:

Are you a parent of school-aged kids and live in Colorado? Perhaps you already have been to our enormously helpful School Choice for Kids website to learn about all the education options available near you and great tips to navigate the school district open enrollment process. (If you haven’t, why not check it out now?) But maybe you are looking for other handy resources on school-related issues. Then there’s another site to add to your list, EdNews Parent. The three areas of emphasis are Healthy Schools, Teaching and Learning, and Safe Schools — with an opportunity for parents to ask questions of 14 different experts. (Here’s hoping my mom and dad don’t log on to ask about how to deal with their 5-year-old son’s blogging addiction or Lego obsession….) Of course, I have to give the standard disclaimer about the site. I don’t necessarily endorse any or all of the advice offered there, nor should you necessarily rely wholly on that advice alone. But I did want to make known the availability of another important resource for Colorado parents, one that has some promise and potential and one you might find to be of value.

The past week has brought all kinds of big buzz in the education world. The news that 26-year-old billionaire and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to donate $100 million to schools in Newark, New Jersey, is as big as any. We’ve yet to see the details, so it’s hard to say for sure whether this is a good idea or not. Of course, as recently as yesterday President Obama made national headlines acknowledging the obvious, stubborn fact of education reform that simply pouring more money on the problem does no good. The USA spends more than $500 billion on K-12 education a year, about a billion dollars annually in Newark. So that should give some perspective to Zuckerberg’s generous challenge grant donation. (That, and the fact I broke open my piggy bank to start counting pennies and got nowhere close to $100 million.) As the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke observes: …the only hope of success for Zuckerberg’s $100 million venture into large-scale philanthropy is if the money is used to fundamentally reform the existing broken system in Newark.

This morning President Obama spent a 30-minute live interview on NBC’s Today Show talking about education. The headline from the President’s remarks, including in the Denver Post‘s featured AP story, was that money alone can’t solve education problems. True enough, and hats off to the President for acknowledging what has become abundantly clear to those studying the long-term trends in American K-12 public schooling. As my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow has noted on the Ed News Colorado blog, the challenge today is how we are going to stretch the school dollar. In his interview, President Obama also touted a longer school year, his Race to the Top grant program to states and a newly-proposed initiative to recruit 10,000 new teachers from the math, science and engineering fields. That’s all well and good up to a point. But sometimes it’s hard politically to get beyond the soft-sell. What most caught my attention was this section from the AP story:

I am so excited, I can hardly wait. Another great education movie is coming out, and this one may be the best of them all! Get a taste of Waiting for Superman by watching the trailer: After a lot of well-deserved attention, the movie’s national premiere comes tomorrow: Friday, September 24. To mark the opening of the movie, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute today issued a media advisory with quotes from some leading lights of education reform, including our own Ben DeGrow:

The new week brings an interesting Ed News Colorado story from new writer Katie Kerwin McCrimmon called “Keeping Up with the Dunruds.” The story highlights a Denver family with a boy about my own age who sounds like he shares some of my penchant for prodigy: Braeden Dunrud was riding in the family car when he saw a sign for the Spicy Pickle restaurant and asked his mom if it said “Spacey Pickle.” Pretty darn close for a 3-year-old. A short time later, Braeden revealed his reading abilities again. As he carried a can of root beer to the recycling bin, he called out, “Does it say Mug’s?” His parents looked at each other, stunned. Yes, as a matter of fact, it did say Mug’s, a brand name the parents never used. Clearly, Braeden was teaching himself to read. Now 5, Braeden is among 38 children in advanced kindergarten at the Center for Early Education in Denver, a stand-alone site that houses preschool programs for four southeast Denver feeder schools, along with both traditional and advanced kindergarten classrooms. The center opened in 2009 and expanded to provide preschool for 3-year-olds, along with kindergarten, this year.

The big local education news of the day is the release of the latest results from Denver’s School Performance Framework. SPF — which in this case has nothing to do with how much protection you get from the sun — takes into account a host of measures of how DPS schools are performing, with an emphasis on student academic growth. Based on their score, each school receives one of five ratings (from best to worst): Distinguished (Blue) Meets Expectations (Green) Accredited on Watch (Yellow) Accredited on Priority Watch (Orange) Accredited on Probation (Red) The rating determines whether individual schools receive greater autonomy and rewards or greater support and corrective action. Two major headlines come from Denver’s latest round of SPF results:

As a young edublogger, I hear from a lot of people and groups with their new education book. Some look more interesting than others, including this one that crossed my desktop today from the Capital Research Center (CRC): The Neighbor’s Kid tells the story of what twenty-four year-old Philip Brand discovered regarding American education when he drove his car cross-country during the 2008-09 school year visiting two schools in each of forty-nine states. The schools were public and private, religious and secular, urban and rural, typical and unusual. Brand wanted to learn first-hand what students, parents, teachers, and principals think about their elementary and secondary schools and what they expect from education. His principal discovery: When it comes to picking a school parents care most about the kids with whom their own children associate. Not the curriculum, not the teachers, but the other kids. That concern has important consequences for how school districts, states and the federal government set education policy. A second conclusion: Government policymakers cannot set standards of educational “achievement” because true education is intimately tied to the cultural and civic experiences of families and communities.