Category Archives: School Choice

Thanks to the Complete Colorado site, I saw this revealing article from yesterday’s Boulder Daily Camera: Boulder Valley began taking open-enrollment requests for the 2010-2011 school year this week, but the school district’s new online application system crashed within an hour of its debut — possibly because of an overwhelming number of applicants, officials said. According to the school district website, they hope to have the system back up and running in a little while — by noon local time. I’m not so interested in the technical difficulties (though some of my Education Policy Center friends have examined the quality of school districts’ online choice information), but in the reminder that open enrollment time for many Colorado school districts is here or soon will be. And whether you’re in Boulder Valley or Jeffco, on the Western Slope or Eastern Plains, or anywhere in our great Centennial State, you need to bookmark the School Choice for Kids website for all kinds of valuable information on different schools and the process of selecting the best one for your child. And may you not encounter any crashing computer systems along the way.

Last night marked a key moment of transition for the Denver Public Schools, as the old, reform-friendly Board made its last votes and the new, not-so-reform-friendly Board was sworn in to take its place. More remarkable and bizarre, however, was how dramatically events unfolded, as reported by Ed News Colorado: As board member Michelle Moss walked up to take her seat for what was to be her last meeting in eight years representing southwest Denver, her newly elected replacement Andrea Merida told her that she would be sitting on the dais instead. Merida, rather than waiting to take the oath of office with two other new members after the meeting, had instead been sworn in hours earlier so she could cast a vote on the controversial reforms.

(H/T Jay Greene) A new study of North Carolina by Harvard researcher David Deming finds that school choice for the poorest students — especially African-American males — leads to less criminal activity: Importantly, the effects of winning the [school choice] lottery persist beyond the treatment years into the peak ages of criminal offending and beyond. After enrollment in the first choice school is complete, youth attend similar schools and live in similar neighborhoods. Yet the impacts persist for seven years after random assignment. The findings suggest that schools may be a particularly important setting for the prevention of future crime.

Should Colorado enact a K-12 scholarship tax credit program that empowers families to choose private schools? It may sound crazy politically, yet the idea would make sense not only to expand choice for families but also to help the state save money during an especially tough budget year. What, you say, you don’t believe that it could save Colorado money? Then you simply have to take a look at this: As the Center for Arizona Policy reports, an analysis by Baylor University economist Dr. Charles North shows that Arizona’s education tax credit program saves their state somewhere between $100 million and $240 million! Arizona’s experience shows that there is a demand out there among families for something better, and that providing the right kind of tax credit incentive can help provide a quality education to more students more efficiently than the existing system. It’s time for Colorado to take a closer look.

Last week I asked what Denver Public Schools was up to with a plan to change the enrollment policies for some of its charter schools, making them into “boundary schools.” What’s up with that? When you’re 5 years old like I am, you can tend to be insecure about questioning authority so often. Thus I was pleased to see some of the quotes Denver Post education writer Jeremy Meyer posted on his Colorado Classroom blog this week:

If there’s such a thing as being the opposite of “progressive” when it comes to education personnel practices, this example from the Boston Herald is it: Grinchlike union bosses are blocking at least 200 of Boston’s best teachers from pocketing bonuses for their classroom heroics in a puzzling move that gets a failing grade from education experts. The Boston Teachers Union staunchly opposes a performance bonus plan for top teachers – launched at the John D. O’Bryant School in 2008 and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Exxon Mobil foundations – insisting the dough be divvied up among all of a school’s teachers, good and bad. “It’s insanity,” said Jim Stergios, executive director of the nonpartisan Pioneer Institute. “They’re less concerned about promoting the interest of individual members than maintaining control over their members.” Insanity from the perspective of someone whose first priority is education excellence and student achievement. Business as usual for the Boston Teachers Union. Teachers union power is good for self-preservation: security, membership and the bottom line of the union. Everything else — including rewards for high-quality teaching — takes a back seat. Without significant outside competition, there is little or no incentive for this […]

Katie Redding at the Colorado Independent reported yesterday on the official recommendations for Colorado’s application to receive Race to the Top federal reform dollars. One of my Education Policy Center friends got a chance to chime in: Ben DeGrow, education policy analyst for the free-market Independence Institute, found much to like about the application, particularly the suggestions to provide financial incentives to teachers and to attach higher funding to high-risk students (which he noted would give parents more choice about which schools could best serve their students.) There’s only so much reasonable space in an article like that one, so Ben asked me to revise and extend his remarks a bit. The “higher funding to high-risk students” is really a call for a widespread move to a transparent Weighted Student Funding formula that empowers parents and school-level leaders at the expense of central administration bureaucrats. Ben further cited Cole Arts and Science Academy as Colorado’s premier example of “Turning Around Low-Performing Schools.”

Colorado is a great place to be for families seeking a free online public education. There are 18 different multi-district cyberschools in the state, in addition to single-district and other supplemental online programs. Over the past several months I’ve introduced you to insights on the transformative power of online education through a podcast interview with Dr. Terry Moe, and helped give you a better glimpse of this fast-growing type of education with local cyberschool leaders and with Colorado’s Online Elementary Teacher of the Year. Now you can hear the perspective of those who matter the most: some of the students. Sean, Shannon and Ashlyn Cooney have been enrolled in the Colorado Virtual Academy (COVA) (the state’s largest online charter school) for several years now. Click the play button below to listen to them talk about what cyberschool life is like on an iVoices podcast with my Education Policy Center friend Pam Benigno:

Update: I’m still hanging out over at Twitter. Social studies standards were slated for 10:40 (not 10:20, my bad) — but not surprisingly the State Board is already behind on its agenda. Stay tuned…. A couple months ago I told you about the new social studies standards Colorado is seeking to adopt. Well, thanks to your feedback and others, the latest draft of standards (PDF). But has it improved enough? Today at 10:20 AM, the State Board of Education will be taking public testimony on the social studies standards. And yours truly has been set free to report live on what’s happening: so please check out my Twitter page! What students like me need to learn about history, geography, civics and economics is an important decision — so stay tuned….

Look, I’m not going to mess around with you: I know I’m an exceptionally smart kid. I pay attention to the education reform and policy debates more closely than most big people I know. So when I see the Denver Public Schools talking about draining the choice out of charter schools, as in the Denver Post, it feels really weird to be left scratching my head: District officials want three charter middle schools to become “boundary schools,” which means they must accept every child in the neighborhood the schools serve. The move could silence a long-running criticism about charters schools serving select groups of students.