Category Archives: School Finance

Update: In today’s post on Lobato, the Colorado Education Association blogging team writes: “In 2008-09, before the current recession began, Colorado spent $1,809 less per pupil than the national average of all states.” However, the National Education Association’s latest data (see page 55, table H-11) show Colorado spent $9,574 per student in 2008-09, only $616 below the national average. Someone in Denver needs to contact the D.C. mother ship. August is here, can you believe it? For a few students, it means school is starting. But the big news is the first of two major education-related court case hearings gets underway today. Reporter Carol McGraw lays the groundwork of the six-year-old Lobato v State school funding lawsuit with a substantial article in the Sunday edition of the Colorado Springs Gazette: “Where would the $3 billion come from?” asks Ben DeGrow, senior education policy analyst for Boulder-based [sic] Independence Institute. He said the court has no business ordering the legislature what to do. “What makes a judge in a courtroom more qualified? This is throwing the state Constitution out the window.“ Under the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, state and local governments cannot raise tax rates without voter approval and cannot spend […]

Good thing my parents don’t have any kids enrolled in Brighton Public Schools. Nothing per se against the school district northeast of Denver. But I can only imagine my mom and dad’s reaction if they got one of those tax hike-supporting political flyers in this year’s school information packet. Probably something like what one mom told Channel 7 reporter Russell Haythorn (though maybe a bit more colorful): “Education specific funding being used to push a political agenda — that’s not appropriate,” said concerned parent Stacy Petty. Agreed. And credit goes to the hard-working folks at Complete Colorado for breaking this story first. They have posted a copy of the flyer sent home to Brighton parents.

It was just last week I introduced you to a new video produced by my friends in the Education Policy Center that highlighted one family’s story to show why the Douglas County vouchers are needed to help save students. (Wouldn’t you like to see more of these brief video profiles that tell the real stories behind Colorado’s groundbreaking local school choice program?) Then today — what do you know? — the Goldwater Institute releases an article right along the same vein. You see, just like Douglas County became the first local school district to enact a private school choice program, Arizona this year was the first state in the nation to create “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts.” Designed to serve students with special needs, these ESAs are almost like super-vouchers. From the Goldwater report:

Over at the Ed News Colorado blog, progressive teacher-activist Sabrina Stevens Shupe lays out a critique against reformer types for “the intellectually lazy use of ‘status quo.’” She says that reformers like me use the term as a blunt object “meant to suggest low achievement,” but that in reality the No Child Left Behind test-based accountability regime is the true “status quo.” Guess it all depends on your perspective. I question how truly pervasive this lazy reformer use of “status quo” is. Without a ton of time on my hands, I took to my own archives here at Ed Is Watching. The last two instances in which I used the phrase “status quo” were to talk specifically about the current states of union bargaining transparency and teacher evaluations. Going back to last October 1, though, this type of remark I made might rile up Shupe: Funny how we forget so quickly about $100 billion of borrowed taxpayer funds shipped around the country to prop up the K-12 status quo.

Back in April I brought your attention to Arizona’s cutting-edge, outstanding-results “blended learning” charter known as Carpe Diem. While you might have found my post and Ben DeGrow’s School Reform News feature story interesting, this 9-minute marketing video really brings it home: Carpe Diem Marketing Video – Final Cut from Nicholas Tucker on Vimeo. Let’s be honest: Carpe Diem’s success didn’t happen overnight. It has taken plenty of careful design, hard work, skill and dedication. But it’s all definitely worthwhile when you ponder the results. With comparable student demographics, the stats that jump out of the video are the 92 percent academic proficiency the school has attained (vs. 57% local and 65% state averages, respectively) while spending thousands of dollars less per student than in the nation or Arizona. Carpe Diem founder and executive director Rick Ogston wraps up the video with this compelling conclusion:

The state’s most under-reported K-12 education story of the year — at least under-reported outside Colorado Springs — remains the deep and fast-paced innovation efforts in Falcon School District 49. Thankfully, reporters at the Gazette continue to keep tabs on developments. I wanted to share the latest two with you. In one key cost-saving move, the District 49 board further streamlined bureaucracy by consolidating positions and converting two key administrative posts from employees into contract jobs. Then yesterday the Gazette reported that leaders were floating the idea of opening a military academy, among the many innovations being considered and implemented.

I so often enjoy reading the online work of Mike Antonucci at the Education Intelligence Agency, if for no other reason than he asks the questions and does the homework that so very few others are willing to do. On his Intercepts blog today, he adds some badly needed context and perspective on the supposed effects of the “Teacherpocalypse” crisis: The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics has updated its Common Core of Data to include last year’s workforce numbers, and they show – for the first time in ages – a decline in the number of K-12 full-time equivalent classroom teachers. But it’s difficult to connect these modest figures with the stories of overcrowded classrooms, devastated schools, and other tales of woe that accompanied the edujobs debate last summer. I’ll post the full details in Monday’s communiqué….

About eight weeks ago I brought your attention to the fact that Colorado and Michigan taxpayers both are still underwriting teachers union release time. But not so much anymore in one of our neighboring states. This is one to chalk up in the “How did I miss that?” category. Anyway, way back in March, Utah enacted House Bill 183. According to the description from Parents for Choice in Education, a Utah grassroots group backing education reform, the legislation: Prohibits granting paid association leave and requires reimbursement to a school district of the costs for certain employees, including benefits, for the time that the employee is on unpaid association leave.

An interesting tidbit to open the month of June from the Education Intelligence Agency’s Mike Antonucci in his latest Communique. A reminder that severe economic recessions typically don’t affect K-12 public education anywhere near the same as they impact families and businesses in the private sector: From 2004 to 2009, student enrollment increased a cumulative 0.7 percent, while the K-12 teacher workforce increased 6.5 percent. Per-pupil spending increased 26.7 percent (about 12.5% after correcting for inflation). Spending on education employee salaries and benefits increased 27.5 percent. It’s an odd enterprise that reacts to fewer clients by hiring more employees. The day of reckoning was postponed, but finally arrived this year. Unfortunately, there was no rapture to accompany it.

If you think American K-12 education policy is a complex and tangled web of laws, bureaucracies, incentives, politics and emotions — and you would be quite normal to do so — then treading into the narrower world of special education services might make your head completely spin. It’s the day after a long and fun Memorial Day weekend, in which most of my time was spent with playgrounds or Legos. So rather than make any grand interpretations or pronouncements, I want to bring your attention to the new Fordham Institute report by Janie Scull and Amber Winkler, titled Shifting Trends in Special Education. Nationwide, the number and share of special education students peaked in 2004-05 and has been on the decline ever since. The report explains: