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Blah, blah, blah, the whiny voice said to me. All you ever talk about is Amendment 66! Well, come on. Look. It’s been two days since the last time I wrote about it, but there are even new developments since then. Since it’s Friday afternoon, count yourself fortunate that I’m just going to dish it out in bullet-point fashion:

‘Tis the season for the DVR in our house. Political ads are back in Colorado, including ones making wildly exaggerated promises about Amendment 66. You know, the billion-dollar statewide tax increase allegedly “for the kids.” Thankfully, some local TV journalists have been willing to look under the hood of the Rube Goldberg proposal and call out the misleading rhetoric. Well, I’m too young for my own TV spot, but little old Eddie wants to give it a try with this pro-66 flier being handed out in Greeley. Let me respond to some of the points in turn: 1. For Greeley-Evans taxpayers — $3 return on $1. They’re referring to how much new revenue local schools will get for each new tax dollar area residents will pay. It’s certainly a better deal than a .62 return in Gunnison, a .59 return in Boulder County, a .56 return in Jefferson County, a .50 return in Douglas County, or a .20 return in Steamboat Springs. But it also means, taxpayers all across the rest of Weld County will be turning over more of their hard-earned funds to low-performing District 6. 2.Good schools are fundamental for our economic future Who can disagree with that? […]

You may not know what blended learning is. You probably can’t recite all the different categories of blended learning — though you would stand a better chance if you had read Krista Kafer’s paper on The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning in Colorado. One particular passage in Kafer’s paper highlights the rise of a particular form of blended learning that certainly seems to owe its origins to Colorado:

Following the Independence Institute’s own analysis of the economic harms the Amendment 66 billion-dollar tax hike would inflict, the Common Sense Policy Roundtable has released a long-term forecast that shows “without substantial improvement in student performance, Amendment 66 is drag on the Colorado economy.” The second in the pair of studies sought to estimate how much better student performance would have to be in order to make the tax increase proposal a neutral proposition. University of Colorado business school researcher Brian Lewandowski framed the question to the Denver Post in somewhat dramatic terms: “Even when you’re the best in the nation, graduation rate alone doesn’t get to break even,” he said. “We need a lot of improvement in educational performance for it to have profound positive impact on Colorado’s economy. But it’s not unachievable.”

What would it be like to be the youngest person (by far) in a class? Would the situation be better if the class were a virtual one? Well, count me in, or at least count some of my Education Policy Center friends in for this free opportunity from the Clayton Christensen Institute: There’s plenty of buzz around blended learning [link added] and its transformational potential. But what does it really mean? You can now get the inside track on this growing movement by participating in our upcoming Blended Learning MOOC—a massive open online course—taught by our own Michael B. Horn, Brian Greenberg of Silicon Schools Fund, and Robert Schwartz of the New Teacher Center. The course begins October 15, so be sure to register as soon as possible. The class will explore the different types of blended-learning models as well as key issues that impact students, teachers, and schools. Specifically, the instructors will examine these issues through the lens of three high-performing schools that each implements a different model of blended learning. A few of the key topics will include:

We are now well into the silly season of school board campaigning, but the union leaders displaced from Douglas County sure are taking matters seriously. More than a year ago, the American Federation of Teachers lost its monopoly bargaining power when the collective bargaining agreement expired. But as the Colorado Observer reports, their union rivals at the Colorado Education Association sure have their eyes on the prize. An email from the CEA’s vice president tried to drum up support at a recent rally protesting against the pro-reform school board.

Tomorrow my Education Policy Center friends are hosting a Brown Bag lunch with special guest speaker Clint Bolick. He’s a big time pro-school choice attorney who right now is helping low-income families in Louisiana whose educational civil rights are under attack by the U.S. Department of Justice. Why the attack? The Feds say the program that empowers them to choose a more suitable school somehow violates federal desegregation orders. Huh? That’s all ancient history to a little kid like me, but the idea they say is that these students’ choices are keeping kids of different races apart. The problem with that claim? New research published in Education Next shows the Louisiana Scholarship Program actually has the opposite effect:

These are the days when little Eddie is too busy soaking in the last rays of warm weather before the fall chill. So you have to forgive me if a post like today’s is a quick hit. I just wanted to make sure you saw two recent pieces of good news from two states that Colorado ought to idolize when it comes to school choice. First, it looks like the Hoosier State has the fastest-growing voucher program in the country, as student and parental demand for better educational options soars: The number of Indiana students applying to receive vouchers allowing them to use state money to pay for private schools has more than doubled for a second consecutive year. The Indiana Department of Education reports it received 20,047 applications for vouchers for the 2013-14 school year….

I have some ideas of what to blog about. In fact, you can probably count on more fresh and insightful commentary tomorrow. But with the initial shock of the partial government shutdown, this young and sometimes naive edublogger is trying to keep composure and not panic. But I think the situation might even be worse for policy wonks like my friends in the Education Policy Center. Try heading over to the federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics to download the latest spending and enrollment data, or to run research queries on state NAEP scores, and this is what you encounter:

All my education reform friends out there, you and I very likely have been getting too comfortable. Or perhaps just too naive, or maybe too lacking in ambition. Leave it to the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess to splash a bucket of water in our faces. But trust me, we needed the dirt knocked out of our eyes and ears. Last week, Hess penned for National Affairs his latest thoughtful piece chocked full of insights that many education policy advocates and insiders know, but few are willing to say. Given numerous observations like the following, I recommend reading “The Missing Half of School Reform”: