Category Archives: Uncategorized

This week the Detroit News reported on one of the measured reactions Michiganders have to proposals to address that state’s budget crisis: Local public school districts have too little funding to provide a quality education, according to 60 percent of voters surveyed in an exclusive Detroit News/WXYZ (Channel 7) poll released Tuesday. Only 23 percent of respondents said the taxes and fees paid for public education are “too high”; 60 percent said they are about right, and 12 percent said “too low.” What’s missing from the story?

Thanks to the Complete Colorado site, I saw this revealing article from yesterday’s Boulder Daily Camera: Boulder Valley began taking open-enrollment requests for the 2010-2011 school year this week, but the school district’s new online application system crashed within an hour of its debut — possibly because of an overwhelming number of applicants, officials said. According to the school district website, they hope to have the system back up and running in a little while — by noon local time. I’m not so interested in the technical difficulties (though some of my Education Policy Center friends have examined the quality of school districts’ online choice information), but in the reminder that open enrollment time for many Colorado school districts is here or soon will be. And whether you’re in Boulder Valley or Jeffco, on the Western Slope or Eastern Plains, or anywhere in our great Centennial State, you need to bookmark the School Choice for Kids website for all kinds of valuable information on different schools and the process of selecting the best one for your child. And may you not encounter any crashing computer systems along the way.

Last night marked a key moment of transition for the Denver Public Schools, as the old, reform-friendly Board made its last votes and the new, not-so-reform-friendly Board was sworn in to take its place. More remarkable and bizarre, however, was how dramatically events unfolded, as reported by Ed News Colorado: As board member Michelle Moss walked up to take her seat for what was to be her last meeting in eight years representing southwest Denver, her newly elected replacement Andrea Merida told her that she would be sitting on the dais instead. Merida, rather than waiting to take the oath of office with two other new members after the meeting, had instead been sworn in hours earlier so she could cast a vote on the controversial reforms.

(H/T Jay Greene) A new study of North Carolina by Harvard researcher David Deming finds that school choice for the poorest students — especially African-American males — leads to less criminal activity: Importantly, the effects of winning the [school choice] lottery persist beyond the treatment years into the peak ages of criminal offending and beyond. After enrollment in the first choice school is complete, youth attend similar schools and live in similar neighborhoods. Yet the impacts persist for seven years after random assignment. The findings suggest that schools may be a particularly important setting for the prevention of future crime.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which means I’ll take a little break from blogging. One of the things I’m thankful for are teachers — especially good teachers who work hard, know their stuff, and care about the success and well-being of kids like me. This time of year I also am thankful that teachers in Colorado are free to choose which membership organization best represents them, and that if they join a union they at least have the opportunity to ask for their money back — if they do so by December 15. What am I talking about? Take 2 minutes and watch this teacher explain it:

In many Colorado school districts, taxpayers are subsidizing union presidents and/or other officers to take release time from the classroom for union business. Back in 2003-04 the practice cost Colorado taxpayers at least $775,000 (PDF). Since nothing is known to have changed to crack down on the process, the figure must be considerably more these days. What exactly are union officials doing with their taxpayer-subsidized time, and how can we find out? Bargaining negotiations? Grievance procedures? District committees? Political activities?

Should Colorado enact a K-12 scholarship tax credit program that empowers families to choose private schools? It may sound crazy politically, yet the idea would make sense not only to expand choice for families but also to help the state save money during an especially tough budget year. What, you say, you don’t believe that it could save Colorado money? Then you simply have to take a look at this: As the Center for Arizona Policy reports, an analysis by Baylor University economist Dr. Charles North shows that Arizona’s education tax credit program saves their state somewhere between $100 million and $240 million! Arizona’s experience shows that there is a demand out there among families for something better, and that providing the right kind of tax credit incentive can help provide a quality education to more students more efficiently than the existing system. It’s time for Colorado to take a closer look.

Last week I asked what Denver Public Schools was up to with a plan to change the enrollment policies for some of its charter schools, making them into “boundary schools.” What’s up with that? When you’re 5 years old like I am, you can tend to be insecure about questioning authority so often. Thus I was pleased to see some of the quotes Denver Post education writer Jeremy Meyer posted on his Colorado Classroom blog this week:

If there’s such a thing as being the opposite of “progressive” when it comes to education personnel practices, this example from the Boston Herald is it: Grinchlike union bosses are blocking at least 200 of Boston’s best teachers from pocketing bonuses for their classroom heroics in a puzzling move that gets a failing grade from education experts. The Boston Teachers Union staunchly opposes a performance bonus plan for top teachers – launched at the John D. O’Bryant School in 2008 and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Exxon Mobil foundations – insisting the dough be divvied up among all of a school’s teachers, good and bad. “It’s insanity,” said Jim Stergios, executive director of the nonpartisan Pioneer Institute. “They’re less concerned about promoting the interest of individual members than maintaining control over their members.” Insanity from the perspective of someone whose first priority is education excellence and student achievement. Business as usual for the Boston Teachers Union. Teachers union power is good for self-preservation: security, membership and the bottom line of the union. Everything else — including rewards for high-quality teaching — takes a back seat. Without significant outside competition, there is little or no incentive for this […]

I’ve told you before about groups like ABCTE that are reaching out to top-notch professionals and making it easier for them to make an effective transition into classroom teaching. But where’s the proof this is a good idea for the bottom line of education? In the new edition of Education Next, Daniel Nadler and Paul Peterson show that states with genuine alternative teacher certification programs (like Colorado) have experienced greater gains in math and reading scores, and especially among African-American students. Is it a coincidence, or cause-and-effect? Ultimately, it’s hard to say. But as the authors conclude, the arguments against alternative certification have been eroded: But the burden of proof would now seem to shift to the plaintiffs in the Renee v. Spellings case, who argue that traditional state certification is necessary to ensure teacher quality. Genuine alternative certification opens the door to more minority teachers, and student learning is more rapid in states where the reform has been introduced. Meanwhile, scientific evidence that alternative certification harms students remains somewhere between scant and nonexistent. The Race to the Top push in Colorado has brought forth some good ideas, but a truly bold and visionary effort also would have included a […]