Category Archives: Uncategorized

Colorado is a truly interesting place when it comes to education reform. If you follow this blog at all, you know what I mean. But seriously, how many states have a State Board of Education chair who is such a bold spokesman for empowering students and parents rather than propping up politics and the current system? Bob Schaffer isn’t your everyday education official. Don’t believe me? Check out what the former Congressman and Senate candidate (and current charter high school principal) wrote in his latest entry of the National Journal “experts” blog when asked about the turnaround process and the U.S. Department of Education’s school improvement grant program. Here’s an excerpt for the flavor: Only from behind the haughty parapets of Washington, D.C., would anyone consider it “good news” that taxpayers of a bankrupt government are dropping heaps more of yet-to-be-printed money on 730 failing public schools. It’s a bizarre stratagem, unashamedly rewarding failure with billions more of other peoples’ hard-earned cash. How otherwise sane people can actually expect the long-term outcome of this audacity to be anything but more failure is beyond the rest of us out here in the commonsense parts of the country.

It’s always fun to discover a great new education blog on a Friday. I’m talking about the blog “redefinED: the new definition of public education” by Florida reformers John Kirtley and Doug Tuthill (H/T Eduwonk). A series of their recent entries report and provide analysis from Jeb Bush’s very recent Excellence in Action conference in Washington, D.C. — including the hot topic of digital learning. More to come on that front later. Overall, the blog offers some interesting insights from a couple of experienced and thoughtful leaders in the movement to expand school choice and make our schools better. I agree that a large part of the battle of ideas surrounding education reform falls in the lap of how public education is understood to be defined, and look forward to reading Kirtley and Tuthill’s blog regularly.

I’m super busy working on a new Lego project today, so forgive me for keeping this one short. But I wanted to bring your attention to an investigative piece by Greg Campbell at the online Colorado news service Face The State. The story? “Stimulus funds lavished on special ed – even where the need is in decline.” Apparently, the $150 million in special education dollars kicked down from D.C. to Colorado in the 2009 stimulus (aka the magical money tree) isn’t necessarily paying attention to where the special education students are: In the Sheridan School District in Arapahoe County, for example, enrollment in special-ed programs fell 22 percent from 2005 to 2009. And yet the amount of federal money the district can spend on such programs ballooned by more than 105 percent between 2009 and 2010, thanks to an infusion of cash from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Likewise, Colorado Springs School District 11 saw its enrollment in special ed decline by 12 percent from 2005 to 2009, but the amount of federal money available to run such programs increased by 114 percent from 2009 to 2010. The same is true of several other districts, large and small, including […]

Last year I told you that all I wanted for Christmas was to be nominated for an Edublog Award. Ok, so it wasn’t really ALL I wanted for Christmas, but that’s beside the point. Well, the 2010 Edublog Awards competition is up and running, and I am proud to say that someone DID nominate me! Thank you so much to Lori at Lori’s LOLz for putting my name in the virtual hat as a contender for “Best Individual Blog”: Ben DeGrow, along with 5-year old Eddie keep their eyes on the goings on in education in Colorado. Every day I look forward to reading their thoughts on the latest news and information that they share along with their ‘Edifying’ podcasts. All I can say right now is that both Ben and I are blushing. Seriously, though, I’m very grateful to Lori and very honored for the consideration. Here are my nominations (know that there are more categories than these): Best individual blog: Colorado Charters Best group blog: Jay P. Greene Best new blog: Rick Hess Straight Up If I had time to explain why each of the nominations was made, I’d do so. But I invite you to check them […]

Yesterday’s Denver Post featured an interesting story on a successful program at Denver’s Abraham Lincoln High School and its feeder schools to engage parents: The collaboration is focused on aligning academics and empowering parents — providing them with training, taking them to visit colleges, encouraging them to volunteer and getting them to attend parent-teacher conferences. Not long ago, it was typical for only 100 parents to attend parent-teacher conferences at the high school. This year, an estimated 1,500 parents showed up. Wow, that’s a huge improvement! No doubt parental involvement is an important contributing factor to student success. That includes the research-based findings that show students fare better when their parents actively choose the school their children attend. And even better if they make a well-informed choice. That’s one of the main reasons my Education Policy Center friends have created and maintain the very valuable School Choice for Kids website. So yeah, my first instinct would be to hesitate at my mom and dad showing up at every parent-teacher conference. (Kind of like my hesitation at having to eat broccoli and other green vegetables for dinner.) But on the other hand, odds are that kind of interaction is only going […]

Thanksgiving is football season, so I thought it would be a perfect time to highlight the intersection of education reform and… baseball. Yes, that’s right. Writing on the Education Next blog, Harvard professor Paul Peterson brought my attention to a great new consensus report from the Brookings Institution on the role of value-added in teacher evaluations. Value-added? You know what I’m talking about. Measuring how much students gain and improve academically in a teacher’s classroom. Specifically, the Brookings report takes on four major areas: Value-added can be valuable without supporting every possible use of the information — including releasing it to the public Since the interests of students and teachers don’t align, their consequences from value-added should be different, too Value-added measurements turn out to be as reliable as high-stakes performance measures used in non-education fields Teacher evaluation systems that use value-added prove to be more reliable than systems that do not use it

We’re getting really close to Thanksgiving. Many of you are probably daydreaming about turkey dinners, football and family gatherings. But let’s look ahead. Exactly two months from today begins National School Choice Week: Our message is simple: we need a K-12 education system that provides a wide array of options. We need an effective education system that has the flexibility to personalize and motivate students and allow parents to choose the school that is best for their child. National School Choice Week was created to provide a concentrated focus on this mission – a time for the media and the public to hear our resounding message and a time to bring new voices into the chorus. There is no one organization behind this effort; those working on setting it up come from a variety of school reform organizations. We may each have a specialty: charter school growth and success, universal vouchers and tuition tax credits, corralling out-of-control spending, or union accountability, but each is equally important and all should plan to be a part of this special week. National School Choice Week needs your participation to succeed as a bullhorn for the school choice movement. Sign up for updates about […]

Thanks to Mike Antonucci’s Intercepts blog, I learned that today is “National Blogging for Real Education Reform Day.” The American Association of School Administrators and ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) are hosting this “grassroots effort to bring together Pk-12 and higher education educators.” I like to help educate people and am definitely grassroots, but I probably don’t fit the bill of whom they’re looking for to blog on the topic. Nevertheless, here’s a post for real education reform on November 22, 2010, and it has to do with educators. Specifically the way they are paid. I’m talking about all the money we pay teachers and other educators just because they have a master’s degree. As noted in a Saturday Associated Press story (H/T This Week in Education), we spend about $8.6 billion nationally each year on these “master’s bumps” — which have no connection to improved student learning. In Colorado, thanks to the research of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, we know the amount is nearly $140 million annually (that figure is from year-old data). My Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow pointed this out in July 2009 testimony he gave before the state’s Fiscal […]

This is not the week for your average, run-of-the-mill, humdrum school board meeting. Not in Colorado, not in the Denver metro area. I already highlighted the heavy attendance at Douglas County’s Tuesday public testimony on their School Choice Task Force proposals and all the attention generated from it. Then there was last night in the Denver Public Schools, as a divided Board of Education was set to weigh a controversial turnaround reform proposal affecting the Far Northeast (FNE) part of the city. According to Jeremy Meyer in the Denver Post, the Board stayed up well past my bedtime to approve the proposal on a 4-3 vote. The newly-approved proposal includes a lot of features — which are well broken down in Nancy Mitchell’s Ed News Colorado story. One piece is an expansion of the successful Denver School of Science and Technology program using shared space in the Cole Arts and Science Academy innovation school. My Education Policy Center friends alerted you to this possible development back in March on an iVoices podcast with Cole principal Julie Murgel. In its story, Ed News Colorado also published a 4-minute highlight video from the Denver school board meeting, a more balanced presentation than […]

I only have time for a short posting this morning, but thought you should be aware of the newly-released results of the 12th-grade NAEP (National Achievement of Educational Progress) test scores. Instead of weighing in, I’ll point you to the analysis of a few others. First, Fordham’s Checker Finn writes: The big news, alas, isn’t news at all, which is that proficiency levels remain dreadfully low in both reading and math (worse in math), that gains have been tiny, that college readiness is nowhere near what it ought to be, that the achievement gap hasn’t narrowed by a micron….