Category Archives: Teachers

Let’s go over it again: Standardized tests are far from the be-all and end-all of education. But if we’re not going to put money in student backpacks and make schools directly accountable to parents, how can such assessments NOT be used as a key component of measuring student progress, teacher effectiveness, and school quality? If the test is broken, fix it or find a new one. Nevertheless, the predictable overreactions return as more news this week filters out of Atlanta that shows the city’s terrible cheating scandal was bigger and more systemic than previously reported. I had thought of the comparison to students cheating on tests before, but a national expert picks an even better analogy: Abandoning testing would “be equivalent to saying ‘O.K., because there are some players that cheated in Major League Baseball, we should stop keeping score, because that only encourages people to take steroids,’ ” said Thomas J. Kane, director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, who has received funding from the Gates Foundation. Now my faithful readers know I’m not a naysaying, “we ain’t never done it that way before” curmudgeon. If we find a better way to assess student learning, […]

Take your hats off to those teachers union officials, they sure know how to plan ahead sometimes. The Education Intelligence Agency’s Mike Antonucci brings our attention to a PBS Newshour clip in which NEA president Dennis Van Roekel tried to respond to a question about why private educational choice works at the college level but should be rejected for K-12 students: I think post-secondary education, college and university, I think you have to put that into a different category than K-12 education, because then you’re choosing between a career or college and specialized training. That definitely makes sense. But for young children, they shouldn’t have to be bussed somewhere. It should be in their neighborhood. Huh? Giving a voucher or tax credit is bad because a kid might have to ride a bus? Antonucci presumes Van Roekel meant to say something else. Perhaps his analysis is correct. I’m not sure the Friedman Foundation will need to add this argument to its list of anti-school choice myths that need to be rebutted.

It’s been several days since I’ve had a chance to write here. The end of my spring break provided a lot of time for reflection on some issues that really have been bothering me. Now that I’ve had time to re-evaluate my well-known positions on some key education issues, I feel it is my obligation to share with you the following: When it comes to education, I’ve come to agree with Diane Ravitch that parents don’t really know what is best for kids. They should leave it all up to the experts in the classroom and the school district administration building. (I would also like to apply this logic to the question of eating vegetables, an area in which I’m now considered an expert.) As a result, I now believe this whole idea of school choice is really overblown, and actually undermines the great work professional educators do on our behalf every day. Instead of celebrating the recent Indiana Supreme Court decision, we all should be sobbing our hearts out right along with the Hoosiers fans, whose team went down hard in the Sweet 16. I’ve also made a resolution to stop spending nearly so much time praising the innovative, […]

It’s time to send Colorado home with another report card (figuratively, I mean — not sure how you would do that literally). Back in January I pointed out the release of 3 national education policy report cards. Colorado got a C from Student First for some key teacher and choice policies, a B from the Center for Education Reform for the quality of our charter school law, and a D from the National Council on Teacher Quality for our educator preparation system. Not to be outdone, yesterday Digital Learning Now released the 2012 Digital Learning Report Card. As usual, with this sort of thing, there are two kinds of news to share. Since we’re heading into the weekend, let’s end with the good news and go with the bad news first: Colorado earned a D-plus. Some of our state’s key shortcomings?

When it comes to the world of K-12 education in Colorado — you know, what keeps my little eyes busy watching — today (this week!) is all consumed in the political debates over Senate Bill 213, the big school finance overhaul tied to a billion dollar tax increase. So I invite you to follow the clever, quippy (is “quippy” a word) Eddie on Twitter today starting at 2 PM Colorado time. Or just tune into the hash tag #CoSchoolFund. At this point, I hardly know what to expect. After nearly two years of a School Finance Partnership predicated on the idea of a “Grand Bargain”, it comes down to the introduced legislation‘s first big committee hearing this afternoon. With 174 pages of legislation and billions of dollars to be allocated, you can be sure of lots of witnesses, questions, and discussion. Here are a not-so-dirty dozen questions I hope to see answered (in no particular order):

Update, 3/25: Happy endings don’t usually come so quickly. But just one week later, Dougco has made and received confirmation on a number of online transparency improvements to now receive an A-minus grade. If you’ve followed little old Eddie for any length of time, you know I’m a fan of the following two things: open government and the education reform pioneers on the Douglas County school board. So needless to say, when I learned that the group Sunshine Review gave DougCo a ‘D’ letter grade for transparency, I did a double-take. Huh? After all, this was the first school district in Colorado to open and advertise all its union negotiations so the public could look on. They showed that honest discussions about important but sometimes controversial policies can be held in the light of day without causing any harm or great expense. Sunshine Review didn’t seem to take that much into account. Going back even further, before the law required them to do so, DougCo and Jefferson County were the two premiere leaders in creating a searchable online database of all expenditures. And if anything, it’s even better and more user-friendly today. Not to mention all the other financial information […]

When Colorado and other states pass education reform laws, it’s important to pay attention to what problems are solved and what problems are not. As an example, Colorado’s SB 191, which passed three whole years ago, made some important changes. Effective teacher evaluations soon will be required before earning extra “due process” job protections. How well that works in practice remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the problems related to tenure live on. Last spring I brought your attention to a disturbing case in suburban metro Denver where the Adams 12 school board fired a couple of teachers for taking thousands of dollars from a fund intended for student field trips. Today the Colorado Observer reports that the state’s Court of Appeals has upheld the findings against Johnny Trujillo, removed along with his wife from their longtime positions at Northglenn Middle School for “insubordination and immorality.” Writer Sunana Batra also notes that the school district so far has paid more than $25,000 in legal fees to keep Mr. Trujillo from the classroom. Compared to some tenure cases, that’s not a lot of money. But since we also learn that he plans to challenge his case in the Colorado Supreme Court — […]

Intriguing. The Colorado Springs Gazette today reports that some of the region’s leading education innovators have proposed a new idea to provide specialized oversight and support to online learning programs: The Falcon School District 49 school board is expected to vote Thursday on a proposal that would create a collaborative education organization that could charter and provide services to online schools statewide. The concept was pitched to the board last week. D-49 would not have oversight of the proposed Colorado Digital Board of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES), but appeared poised to jump start the organization’s creation. District officials said D-49 would not benefit financially from the entity. The digital BOCES would focus on blended and online learning programs across the state, said Kim McClelland, D-49’s iConnect Zone Leader. It would charter online schools, instead of districts being responsible, she said.

Every once in awhile you see a piece of K-12 education legislation appear, and you just scratch your head. (Okay, really, it’s more often than every once in awhile.) Colorado’s latest example is the short and sour House Bill 1257, which I think should be called the Stifling Innovation Act of 2013. HB 1257 as introduced says that any school district working to craft an employee evaluation system must work in collaboration with a local teachers union if:

You can’t judge a book by its cover. There are many expressions like this one out there that convey a basic piece of wisdom. A beautiful building you may have driven by many times could be a filthy mess inside. How do you know? If it’s somebody’s house or private property, they would have to invite you inside for you to properly find out for yourself. But if that building is a place where tax dollars are paying officials to negotiate how tax dollars are spent and policies are made for our public schools, then there’s no reason for the doors to be locked. Citizens should be able to peer inside and know what’s going on. The Professional Association of Colorado Educators (PACE) — one of Colorado teachers’ professional membership options — today highlighted some interesting results from their latest member survey, showing that most of their members like the idea: The Professional Association of Colorado Educators recently asked member educators their views on a variety of relevant policies related to education in Colorado. One of these issues related to whether or not negotiations between school boards and union officials should be open to the public. An overwhelming 81% of […]