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So last night the Douglas County Board of Education hosted an hour of public comment on proposals made by the community’s School Choice Task Force. Of course, the testimony overwhelmingly was about the “Option Certificates,” or voucher, proposal. The Denver Post‘s Jeremy Meyer reports that public comments “were evenly split for and against the plan.” Ed News Colorado’s Nancy Mitchell says the comments were about 60/40 against the private school choice proposal, though their embedded five-minute video dedicates 80 percent of airtime to opponents. In addition to the Ed News video, you should watch the local 9News report, including a great comment from Douglas County resident and task force member Charcie Russell: “It’s not about private versus public, it’s really about more choice, and I see that great for kids, great for parents, and great for the district,” Russell said. It’s not surprising to see passion on both sides. The opposition, though, should consider the merits of their arguments. Drawing from resources at the Foundation for Educational Choice and the Institute for Justice, my Education Policy Center friends have compiled the following document to address concerns about effects on public school performance, fiscal impact and constitutionality:

With a little snow finally starting to fall around here, it’s time to go outside and play. So instead of any sort of grand analysis today, I just want to extend my congratulations to Michelle Pearson — who last week was named Colorado’s 2011 Teacher of the Year: Pearson comes from a teaching family; both the maternal and paternal sides of her family had teachers in them, working in schools in the U.S. and Canada. She says her greatest accomplishments in education have not been what she’s done alone, but what students, families, colleagues and the community do together. Pearson believes standards are the key to teaching. She says in a true standards-based environment students should understand what they are learning, why they are learning it and be able to connect their work to their world. Her belief in the importance of standards is exemplified by her recent service on the Colorado Department of Education’s social studies standards committee (along with my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow).

It’s Friday. Time to lighten up with a 90-second summary of the new education reform movie Waiting for Superman produced by Taiwanese animators, a video you simply have to see to believe (H/T Jay Greene): Michelle Rhee as a martial arts heroine with a “Reform” bandanna and a broom? My little heart is going pitter-patter….

Not everyone can be super-smart at math, but a brand new Harvard study (PDF) by Paul Peterson, Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann shows how virtually every state in the USA is not educating enough top-flight math performers. If you look at the 56 nations who take the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), 30 do better than America in the share of students who rank advanced in math. Even our best state doesn’t crack the top 10 or 15. Can’t we be more competitive? The neat part of the Harvard study is seeing how individual states stack up against the other PISA-tested nations. (The authors found a valid way to compare results on our NAEP test with PISA.) Top-ranking Massachusetts, where 11.6 percent of 8th-graders (and 12.4 percent of white 8th-graders) rate as advanced in math, comes in behind 16 entire nations. That includes not only Taiwan, Korea and Finland, but also our neighbors to the north: Canada! Even if you include only the advanced math rate among students with a college-educated parent, seven other nations still outperform Massachusetts. What about Colorado, though?

Most of us know about public charter schools: publicly funded and publicly accountable schools with independent boards and waivers from certain state laws and regulations concerning personnel and program. Here in Colorado they’ve been around quite awhile and have become an important part of the education landscape. Right now, as the Colorado League of Charter Schools reports, there are about 170 charter schools serving 70,000 students in our state (or 176 schools serving 66,000-plus students, if you accept the Center for Education Reform’s new numbers). There’s been a long debate about charters that doesn’t need to be rehashed here. Some are truly top-flight, head and shoulders above most public schools, others operate at about the same level but offer something different or unique, while some are underperforming (one of the great things about charter schools is the poor ones can be shut down much more easily than other public schools). The myths about charters have been debunked over and over and over again.

In all the excitement over what’s going on in Douglas County, I nearly overlooked something else in the Denver Post that deserves our attention. An article last week about the state’s new education accountability system included this little gem: State officials have called the new School Performance Framework a national model. “It is intended to build a communal understanding of the performance of schools and to build a planning process on how to improve schools,” said Colorado Associate Commissioner Richard Wenning. The School Performance Framework’s big reveal isn’t supposed to be for another month, when state officials are planning an event that will include the governor, unveil a new online tool for parents and provide every school a detailed scorecard. A new information tool for parents? If it makes SchoolView.org more helpful and parent-friendly, then three cheers and a big hurrah! Perhaps it will turn out to be something else to complement the incredibly valuable information we provide on our School Choice for Kids website.

Update, 11/9: Douglas County’s choice proposals have been noticed east of the border (the Colorado border, that is). A blogger at Kansas Education notes: …why are so many private schools religious ones? The answer. As a parent, you’re probably already paying taxes to support a school district to which you can send your child. What’s going to motivate you to pay tuition on top of that? Religious faith is one compelling reason. Let parents take some of the money spent on behalf of their child to a private school, and you’ve expanded the range of choices for those parents. Isn’t that a good thing? Most Americans like having more choices rather than fewer. Update, PM: A great resource I overlooked is this Douglas County Choice Task Force FAQ sheet (PDF). Find out why the task force exists, what it’s been up to and what’s coming next. I’d like to think it was my Friday blog post about Douglas County’s private school choice proposal that fired up everyone. While I may be just a little tyke, I’m not that naive! Anyway, let the discussion (and the good times) roll…. On Saturday the Denver Post‘s Jeremy Meyer followed up with a second […]

Update, 11/9: Blogger Ben Boychuk at Somewhat Reasonable gives a plug to Douglas County and to little ol’ Eddie. He echoes our remarks and raises a great point: “Indeed, what if the public schools in Douglas County, Colorado served the interests of taxpayers and parents, and not those of the unions and ranking members of the establishment with a vested interest in preserving the status quo?” I love it when the Denver Post brings big attention to issues I’ve covered here weeks before. It tells me little Eddie is ahead of the curve. It was true of this summer’s Common Core standards debate, and today it’s true of the Douglas County school board looking to expand the boundaries of parental choice. I wrote on October 18 about the DCSD School Choice Task Force: The Task Force has looked at a range of changes for possible recommendation and adoption — everything from improving open enrollment policies to enhancing services available to home schoolers to ensuring equitable treatment of charter schools to considering a local private school choice program. I wrote that after the Board itself publicly reasserted in a public memo: We believe that informed parents, not Board members, are best […]

It’s the day after a late night election. There are some yawns and droopy eyes around here. But I did want to share you with some initial reactions. Let’s start in Colorado. First, we learned that Republicans won the state house and closed the gap on the Democrats’ state senate majority. Democrats hold on to the governor’s office, with John Hickenlooper taking the place of Bill Ritter. Alan Gottlieb opines in this morning’s Ed News Colorado commentary that a Hickenlooper administration will be “more in tune with the Obama administration and Democrats for Education Reform than with traditional Democract [sic] influencers, including teachers’ unions.” I sure hope he’s right.

Everybody’s got the election on the brain today, but there is something maybe even bigger going on out there that is of concern to us education transformers. Tomorrow the United States Supreme Court is set to hear the case Garriott v Winn, which will decide the constitutionality of Arizona’s K-12 tuition tax credit program. Apparently, somebody didn’t like the program because a lot of people have given to scholarship organizations that make it easier for students to attend religious schools. But it seems groups like the ACLU never bothered to ask whether the program helps families like the Dennards, featured below in an Institute for Justice video: As a new study by Dr. Vicki Murray shows, Arizona’s tax credit program “overwhelmingly” benefits low- and middle-income families. But that didn’t stop the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals from stepping out on a limb to say that the program empowering more parents to make educational choices is somehow against the law. Thank goodness there is one higher judicial stop to determine what should happen. For some more background and basic facts on the case, check out this page from “On the Docket.”