Category Archives: Uncategorized

When I hear “yearbook,” my thoughts turn to a page full of photos (including the goofy ones, you know who you are) of kids in the same class at school. But the Reason Foundation’s Weighted Student Formula Yearbook is somewhat different. This yearbook is a one-of-a-kind look at 14 different school districts that use “portable student funding” (I like the term “backpack funding”) to make sure dollars are distributed fairly and transparently to serve real students’ needs. It also gives building principals more autonomy and responsibility to make budgetary decisions. Reason’s research gets updated every year, kind of like a school yearbook, but instead helps us to see which school systems are setting the pace in this area.

The bone-chilling cold has arrived, so I really needed something to fill me with warm thoughts. Even though it’s more than 7 weeks away, what about the official announcement that there’s soon going to be another National School Choice Week Whistle-Stop Tour? Planned by National School Choice Week, the tour will span 3,800 miles and feature special events in 14 cities. Modeled after pioneering whistle-stop tours in American history, the events will call attention to the benefits of – and need for – greater educational opportunity for children and families. The tour will launch from Newark, New Jersey on Wednesday, January 22, 2014 and end in San Francisco on Saturday, February 1, 2014.

Today is PISA Day, and I’m not referring to pepperoni pies or unusual Italian landmarks. The 2012 results from the Program for International Student Assessment are in, and it doesn’t look pretty for the good old USA. At least not on the surface. First, let’s take a quick trip back to September, when I brought your attention to the unsettling book Endangering Prosperity and pointed out that America needs to take a different path to improve unimpressive math test scores. That was when our nation’s 15-year-olds scored a sub-par 487 on the PISA:

For Colorado public educators, it’s that time of year again. Current members of many CEA local affiliates who want or need to drop their membership and stop their dues payments have to wait until next school year. For those who want to keep their membership but would rather decide how to spend their (as much as $63 in) Every Member Option automatic political deduction on their own, the clock is ticking to request one or both refunds. Every year my Education Policy Center friends reach out to thousands of Colorado educators with the information. General awareness of the EMO political refund has grown, but every year they still encounter union members who hadn’t known about the scheme.

‘Tis the season for expressions of gratitude. So I’m glad to say this week that the U.S. Department of Justice has dropped its hollow and shameful attack against a Louisiana school choice program and the parents who benefit from it. So if you see little Eddie smiling and muttering a few extra Thank-You’s than normal, now you know why. Back in August Eric Holder’s Justice Department launched a legal assault against the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP), claiming that it was undermining desegregation orders. Last week Commentary magazine writer Seth Mandel explained how the Feds’ phony case had completely broken down under the weight of new evidence.

A few weeks ago I pointed you to a growing body of research that cast serious doubts on the glowing claims about what universal preschool can accomplish. That was before Amendment 66 went down in flames, including a proposal to boost funding for at-risk early childhood education. While shell-shocked tax increase supporters continue to mourn the devastating rejection of 66, it’s still difficult to contemplate what might come next. Yet into the fray comes the most powerful batch of troubling results yet — troubling for backers of expanded early childhood education. A summary of gold-standard research findings on 1,100 intensively studied youngsters in a Tennessee preschool program was reported yesterday by the Brookings Institution’s Russ Whitehurst:

Sometimes it’s the small ideas that deserve big attention. No single one of these ideas can solve all the problems and shortcomings in education, but reformers and transformers might find pleasing results from one such strategic change. That’s what we find in a newly released Fordham Institute study by Michael Hansen, “Right-sizing the Classroom: Making the Most of Great Teachers.” What’s the result when a school shifts a few students from the weakest teacher’s classroom to the most effective teacher’s classroom? Hansen digs into years of 5th grade and 8th grade data from North Carolina to figure out how well the approach works:

Before heading off into the weekend playground sunset, I ran across this recent piece from former California Democratic state legislator and passionate education reformer Gloria Romero. She touts the 2010 Open Enrollment Act she guided through the state legislature to empower parents, explaining how it can be used as a tool to highlight failing schools and help set students free:

Guess I should be thankful that the big education issue being talked up for next year’s legislative session is teacher licensure. (It was supposed to be last year, but kind of got lost in the shuffle with that whole Senate Bill 213 debate.) As it usually goes with such things, there’s been a group meeting called the LEAD Compact Working Group. Their job is to come up with recommendations for legislators on how Colorado can make the licensure system work better, especially now that we are launching a system that evaluates teachers based on effectiveness. But as Ed News Colorado reports, there’s the rub: Nearing the end of its work, the group that is studying possible changes to Colorado’s teacher licensing requirements remains undecided on a key issue – whether or how to connect license renewal to teacher evaluation.

My eyes gleamed when I saw this new Friedman Foundation report, More Than Scores: An Analysis of Why and How Parents Choose Private Schools. Why? Not only because it used a survey of 754 parents in the Georgia GOAL Scholarship Program, but also because it asked really helpful questions to understand why parents make the choices they do. GOAL is a scholarship tax credit program, adopted by Georgia in 2008. Its features aren’t too much different than the ones my Education Policy Center friends recommend in A Scholarship Tax Credit Program for Colorado. You know, the type of program that could help thousands of Colorado Kids Win. Such a program would encourage more donations to nonprofit scholarship organizations that provide K-12 private tuition assistance to students from low- and middle-income families. One idea you see in some choice programs is that private schools should be required to share certain information with parents. But the Friedman report by Benjamin Scafidi and Jim Kelly brings out an important survey finding: