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Yesterday I celebrated the fantastic news that Alabama has become the 43rd charter school state. In that post I noted that Alabama is behind the curve (and way behind Colorado) on public school choice, but beat us to the punch on scholarship tax credits. Still, as good as it is, welcoming new states into the charter fold wasn’t at the forefront of my mind when I contemplated that 2015 could become the official Year of School Choice sequel. I made that observation based on the number of states pursuing new or expanded Education Savings Account (ESA) programs. For example, I’m not the only waiting with bated breath to see if and when Alabama’s next door neighbor, Mississippi, will become the third ESA state. (My elders keep advising me to be patient, but that’s just really hard!)

Not too long ago, I wrote about why I love it when school choice is talked about as a “movement.” Now, though, I realize I may have been wrong there. Instead, I think school choice should be talked about as a series of simultaneous movements that are linked by similar goals and values. The Colorado public school choice movement is doing nicely, with a strong charter law and wide-open (if you ignore the waiting lists) public choice already thriving. Even so, we have yet to open the door to our world of fantastic private schools. Other states are in different places. Alabama is a good example of a state working from a different starting position. To my envy, the state already has a scholarship tax credit program. But until very recently, it was one of only eight states that don’t have a charter law on the books despite years of unsuccessful efforts by charter advocates. In a totally random twist that underscores the differences between choice situations in Colorado and Alabama, both Colorado’s pseudo-scholarship tax credit bill and Alabama’s charter bill are designated SB 45. You can’t make this stuff up. Anyway, charter proponents’ efforts finally paid off last week. […]

Fridays are always better when they involve policy field trips, don’t you think? This morning, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a floor debate on SB 45, which some of you will remember I wrote about a while back. SB 45 may well pass in the Senate, but it doesn’t have much chance of passing in the House. That doesn’t mean it’s insignificant, though. It is, after all, the first school choice bill to make it to the Senate floor for debate in quite some time. That means yours truly got to sit in on some pretty interesting arguments. We will discuss these arguments in more detail in the near future. But I don’t want to talk about SB 45 today. In fact, I don’t want to talk about policy at all. Instead, I want to use today’s post to highlight the other young policy explorers at the Capitol. Every time I take a field trip to the Capitol, the building is absolutely stuffed with little guys and girls who, like me, are excited to see democracy in action. These explorers lean toward the rail in the Senate gallery to get a better look at our state’s leaders, […]

The bad news? Today is one of those days when little Eddie is going to be a broken record. The good news? This will be brief and to the point. Go back in your mind all the way to last March, a whole year ago. The National Education Association — the nation’s largest teachers union — released its annual statistical dump known as Rankings & Estimates. The big news? Colorado ranked 21st in per-pupil spending during the 2012-13 school year. In recent months, this information has provided a great antidote to attempted spooks and various forms of number-fudging. With this year’s new release of Rankings & Estimates, guess where Colorado stands?

Late last year, I wrote about the sticky testing issue knot. After a series of weird events on the State Board of Education and the early prospect of a strange alliance between Republicans and teachers unions during the ill-fated effort to reauthorize ESEA, we may be looking at more of a sticky testing issue black hole. Now, though, things are beginning to reach maximum weirdness, with the same strange alliances seen in Congress being observed in Colorado. So yeah, stuff’s complicated. It’s getting tough to make sense of it all. That’s why I was glad to see my Independence Institute friend Ross Izard’s new article, “Strange Bedfellows: Teachers Unions, Conservatives, and Tenure Reform.” I’m pretty sure I’m too young to know what a “bedfellow” is, but I think I see what Ross is trying to convey. The article takes a long, hard look at the differing motivations behind the oddly aligned conservative and union pushes against testing and for opt-outs. We’ll just do a brief overview of the highlights here in order to avoid unnecessary brain damage, but the article is stuffed with links and references for those whose nerdy proclivities drive them to dig a little deeper into the […]

It’s not a completely unfair characterization to suggest that a specialty for 5-year-old boys is busting things. Or at least enjoying watching others bust things. This post won’t help disabuse anyone of that impression. Last week I cheered to see Marcus Winters flex his charter school myth-busting muscles. Today I bring your attention to a different kind of bustin’ going on. Two years ago American Enterprise Institute (AEI) education scholar Rick Hess made waves calling for a greater can-do attitude among school and district administrators with his book Cage-Busting Leadership. Now he highlights the same sort of opportunities for teachers.

I love when people talk about school choice as a “movement.” The word just does such a good job of conveying a sense of momentum and highlighting the fact that an increasing number of families are looking for more options for their kids. A Chalkbeat story illustrated that kind of momentum this morning, reporting that participation in Denver Public Schools’ SchoolChoice system jumped nearly 10 percent this year. More than a quarter of the district’s students are now using the system. In case you’re unfamiliar with the SchoolChoice system, it essentially creates an all-in-one application for families looking to get their kids into schools other than their neighborhood school. Families list their top five choices on the application, something magically administrative happens, and kids are (hopefully) matched with one of those choices.  This year, about 95 percent of kids got one of their top-five choices. Around 75 percent of students got their first choice.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for longer than I’ve been alive, then most likely you’ve heard of the show MythBusters. As the name would imply, the show’s hosts are out to disprove some commonly held misperceptions. What’s really cool is sometimes these guys get to crash things and blow up stuff to help prove their point! Did you know that the world of education policy has its own cast of myth-busters? Or at least it should. I propose putting Marcus Winters forward as one of the leading nominees. Last summer I told you how a study by Winters dealt a serious blow to a prominent anti-charter myth in Jeffco. His report for the Center on Reinventing Public Education told a much different story than the myth that Denver charter schools build their success on counseling out special-needs students.

If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that debates between national education experts are good things. They are almost always interesting, often helpful, and unfailingly entertaining for little policy geeks like myself. Maybe that’s why I was so excited to see two of my favorites, Andy Smarick from Bellweather Education Partners and Jason Bedrick from the Cato Institute, spar a little over the need for “technocrats” in school choice. Because I am five years old, I feel compelled to point out before we begin that I chuckled at the word “technocrat.” I chuckled not because it’s a funny concept, and not because I don’t like technocrats (well, generally speaking), but because it sounds very similar to “technoCATS.” And because it gave me an opportunity to finally put this in a blog post: I certainly hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Now, back to edu-business.

Not long ago, my mom came along with me to the toy store to buy a new set of Legos. When it came time to pay, mom pulled out a piece of plastic from her wallet and handed it to the cashier. It was like magic! The store treated the card like real money, and I got to take home the Legos. I later had a talk with my parents, and realized it wasn’t quite as magical as I first thought. That debit card my mom used was just keeping track of the money that’s already there. What if Colorado gave students and parents a debit card they could use just for education-related expenses? Well, enter my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow: