Category Archives: School Finance

I began the week by telling you about the series of “Innovation Conventions” going on in Falcon 49 — a school district serving about 15,000 students east of Colorado Springs. (Background: Check out District 49’s innovations page and the links it contains, especially the open letter from the Board, the iVoices podcast interview and the op-ed by Ben DeGrow.) An article from yesterday’s Colorado Springs Gazette by Kristina Iodice highlights the latest “Convention,” this one hosted at Falcon High School for 100 staff and parents from the Falcon Zone. A couple of my Education Policy Center friends were there to listen in and observe the process unfold.

Adults can be strange sometimes. Create a government program. Make it about helping little kids like me. Give it a catchy name like “Head Start.” Spend billions of dollars. And then when the evidence repeatedly shows it doesn’t work? Just ignore it. Wait, huh? Okay, not all adults have that mindset. But it’s funny to see the reaction some have when the idea of cutting 15 percent of Head Start’s budget is introduced. Writing at National Review, Mona Charen takes on the Washington Post‘s E.J. Dionne. She criticizes him for being “impervious to evidence,” and then opines the following:

Just when I start to think I can keep up with what’s going on in the world of education, something sneaks up on me almost in my own backyard. I’m talking about a vote by the school board in Colorado Springs District 11 — the state’s eighth-largest school district (nearly 30,000 students) — to do teachers union collective bargaining in the light of day. One of my Education Policy Center friends was quoted in the story: Benjamin DeGrow, education labor policy analyst with the Golden-based Independence Institute, wrote a policy paper on the subject two years ago that concluded that negotiations should be public. “We are talking about taxpayer money and the future of children, it shouldn’t be done behind closed doors,” he said in an interview.

In a high-tech media world, it’s still lots of fun to get an actual print copy of the Sunday newspaper. That’s what my parents do. Sunday afternoon as I was digging through the newest edition of the Denver Post to find the color comics, I ran across something called the “Perspective” section. What did I find, but two (not just one) very interesting pieces on K-12 education in our state — things I have told you about before right here on the blog. How exciting is that!

It was exactly two years ago today that President Obama flew to town to shake lots of bills off the magical money tree for Colorado public schools. Now the federal dollars (borrowed from my future) have dried up. Our new governor John Hickenlooper bore the news to the Joint Budget Committee (JBC) on Tuesday: $332 million in direct cuts from this year’s School Finance Act for 2011-12. The two main culprits? One is a projected decline of 7 percent in property tax assessments, which will cut well over $100 million from school budgets statewide. The other, as I hinted at the beginning, is the end of more than $200 million in one-time federal funds. Rather than cushion the blow, the ARRA and Edujobs money just delayed the pain.

It’s been more than a week since my last update about the cost-saving, cutting-edge innovation going on in Colorado’s Falcon School District 49. Last Thursday, after the Ed News Colorado feature was republished on the Education Week site, one of the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper bloggers reacted favorably by noting Falcon’s innovation could serve as a model for Ohio schools. The secret (figuratively speaking) about the Colorado Springs school district’s innovation proposal is out. So it’s hardly surprising my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow would follow up his op-ed in the Colorado Springs Gazette with a Saturday morning appearance on the hometown Jeff Crank Show. AM 740 KVOR has re-posted the full audio from the two-hour program. The 10-minute interview about Falcon 49 starts about a third of the way into the show, right after the host plays some clips about global warming. At first, Ben thought his on-air performance was what made me so excited to listen to his interview. I hated to bust Ben’s bubble, but the real reason for my excitement was the fact that host Jeff Crank sounded like the Cookie Monster (you’ve got to listen to know what I mean). On this mushy and yucky […]

A few weeks ago I told you about the “voucher bogeyman” fearmongering around Colorado House Bill 1048 (PDF) — which would provide non-refundable tax credits to parents or donors supporting a student’s private school tuition or home education. (And therefore, not a “subsidy” as was headlined and reported with a strong anti-choice slant on the Denver Post‘s blog. To expound further by quoting from said post might get me in legal trouble, and I’m too young to be able to afford a lawyer.) Well, the bill finally got a hearing yesterday afternoon before the House Finance Committee. A fairly long one. And ultimately an indecisive one. Education News Colorado has the best account I’ve seen: After dark had fallen and the witness list was exhausted, [committee chair Rep. Brian] DelGrosso said, “I think we have raised several questions” and that “trying to piecemeal some amendments might not be the wisest decision.” “I’m going to lay it over a couple of weeks,” he told [bill sponsor Rep. Spencer] Swalm. “Maybe you can give the committee a couple of different options.” So now it’s time to hurry up and wait again. I’m learning that’s just sometimes how it goes in the big […]

A few weeks ago I pointed out to you the weak effort of Kansas’ largest school district (Wichita) to implement online financial transparency — an effort I learned about through the great work and analysis of Matthew Tabor of Education Debate at Online Schools. Afterward, I received a phone call telling me about KansasOpenGov.org, a project of the Kansas Policy Institute (KPI). Well, sometime in the past few weeks KPI has posted a searchable version of the Wichita school district’s checkbook on its site with some obvious improvements in accessibility and user-friendliness. Matthew previously gave the school district’s own efforts at financial transparency a D grade for execution. I wonder what grade he would give KansasOpenGov.org?

Colorado Springs Gazette editor Wayne Laugesen posted a great piece last night urging citizens to give District 49 leadership a chance with its bold plan that favors students over bureaucrats: The school board has decided the large district will go forward without a superintendent — an experiment educators are sure to watch throughout the United States. If Colorado Department of Education officials approve the district’s anticipated application to become an “innovation” district, a chief executive officer will oversee the education program with less authority than a superintendent. Other day-to-day responsibilities, traditionally managed by a superintendent, will shift to principals, teachers and others directly in contact with students. It’s a decentralization plan, designed to focus resources more directly on students and those who work with them. It’s the Marine Corps approach, in which all personnel work the trenches. You can read his piece and then vote on the question: “Do you support D-49 in eliminating top administrative positions, including the Superintendent?” I hope you join me in choosing the first option: “Yes, it’s a good idea.”

During last week’s National School Choice Week emerged a sad, dramatic story that made the case for school choice better than many policy papers could. I’m finally getting around to commenting on the case of Ohio’s Kelley Williams-Bolar, who was charged with a felony for falsifying papers to enroll her daughter in a different school district where she would be safer. For someone like me living in Colorado, with a strong (but not perfect) open enrollment law, the first reaction was: You have to lie to get your kid into another school district? It’s very sad that some K-12 systems can be so backward and unresponsive, but it’s symptomatic of a larger problem. Using a real-life example, Adam Emerson notes on the RedefinED blog that a tuition tax credit program like the one in Florida also easily would enable a mom to find a safer schooling option without breaking the law.