Category Archives: Uncategorized

Since I got so long-winded yesterday (and because I know you’re tired of me hammering on the school funding issue once again), today’s post is going to be a short one. I’ve recently pointed out that the statewide K-12 financial trends are not quite as dire as some have proclaimed. But what about at the local level? The Education Intelligence Agency’s Mike Antonucci has been doing his homework. Using the latest Census Bureau data, he has assembled a district-by-district comparison of Colorado K-12 spending between 2004-05 and 2009-10. It’s worth a look to get a localized sense of funding effects. On a per-student basis, all but 10 of the state’s 178 school districts spent more in 2010 than in 2005.

I’ve recently been asked whether I actually take the time to read every piece of hate mail, er, fan mail that I receive with not only compliments but also with thoughts and suggestions to improve this blog. Let me tell you, I’ve never let a piece go unopened. And yes, all your suggestions have been heard loud and clear. But this time, it really is important for me to talk about school finance. You see, Ed News Colorado reports today that the School Finance Partnership has released a new and expanded version of a report released five months ago, highlighting some guiding principles to develop a new school funding system for Colorado. The Partnership includes several groups from CASE, CASB and CEA to a few more reform-minded organizations, and is co-chaired by former state treasurer Cary Kennedy. To approve any and all recommendations required the full consensus of all these groups on the steering committee. Unsurprisingly, then, the result is not exactly tilted in a fiscally conservative direction. That’s seldom how these things work. But it’s worth a closer look:

Summer vacation is almost over (for some students, it already is). Any reason why I can’t write about Douglas County again? That’s what I thought. So here goes… Education Week‘s Stephen Sawchuk reported last week from the annual the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention that members sounded off on a local Colorado issue: The union passed, unanimously, a special resolution pledging solidarity for AFT affiliates that it asserts have been attacked, beseiged, or had their contracts superceded, as in Detroit, Chicago, and Douglas County, Colo. Today a friend found and brought my attention to a copy of the resolution. Truth be told, it contains more Whereas‘s than you can shake a stick at, including the paragraph that honed in on Colorado’s third-largest school district:

Here’s a good question I haven’t thought a lot about before: What kind of payments should school board directors be eligible to receive? I’m not talking about campaign contributions, which most districts unfortunately allow from groups that get dues collection services from government payroll systems. Special interests stopped Colorado from cleaning up that unethical cycle four years ago. No, I’m talking about publicly-funded compensation for official service. Last week a school board member from Loveland proposed that her Thompson School District might help cover expenses: Board member Denise Montagu sparked the conversation during a special meeting this week in which the application deadline for the vacant District A board seat was extended. Specifically, she asked if the board members could be reimbursed for mileage or receive a stipend towards their personal cellphone bills.

I need a sidekick. No, I really, really do. Someone maybe a little naive and idealistic (even more than yours truly) who can feed me lines like these: Sidekick: What are we going to do today, Eddie? Me: Why, same thing we do every day: Blog about education, of course! Sidekick: Oh, yeah. Of course. But what exactly are we going to blog about? Me: Same thing we blog about every day: How schools need to spend money more effectively in tight budget times…. Ok, so I exaggerate a bit. Just a little bit! I mean, in the past couple weeks alone, we’ve covered the issue of reforms focused on productive spending here, here, here and here. It’s a common theme for a very practical reason. As Checker Finn and Amber Winkler explain in the preface of the new Fordham Institute report How Americans Would Slim Down Public Education:

One of the themes my Education Policy Center friends and I like to harp on is how poorly most of our K-12 system does in distinguishing high-quality educators from their low-performing counterparts. And the problem is especially pronounced in low-income urban communities, where tremendous need exists for great instruction to compensate for the challenges more students bring to school. Do we provide the top-tier teachers real opportunities for more pay, career advancement, specialization, and expanded student reach? How about this one: Do schools work to keep the highest-performing instructors at a significantly greater rate than their peers who provide 5 to 6 months less of learning per year? Education Week guest bloggers Sydney Morris and Evan Stone (co-founders of Educators for Excellence) say teachers are not surprised to hear the answer. Whether or not you are shocked, the findings of the latest report from The New Teacher Project (TNTP) should be disturbing:

More than 10 years after Washington, D.C., gave us the No Child Left Behind era, the issue of educational accountability is returning to the forefront. How do we measure and attribute school success (or failure)? Who should be held accountable, and how should that accountability be shared? What should be the consequences, both positive and negative, and how will they be implemented and enforced? What role, if any, should the federal government play? The New York Times is hosting a forum with some of the brightest minds in education policy chiming in on the question: “Can School Performance Be Measured Fairly?” Now look, I’m not really fond of the way the question is framed. The obvious answer is Yes, just as obvious as the answer to the question “Can School Performance Be Measured Perfectly?” is No. That being said, some of the points respondents have made are significant, and deserve serious attention in policy debates:

Edublogger extraordinaire Joanne Jacobs brought my attention to Opportunity Culture, a new website project of the group Public Impact. The idea? How to extend the reach of excellent teachers with innovative uses of time, space, technology and professional roles. Opportunity Culture has a smart group of people advising the project, and of course Public Impact itself is co-directed by the Hassel team, who recently wrote a relatively concise Education Next piece on how the reach of excellent teachers can be enhanced.

The latest edition of the Olympic Games is almost here (who else do you know who gets to live through two different Summer Olympics at age 5?), so what better time to hand out some figurative medals to states for K-12 student learning success? A new Harvard study by Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann sheds some helpful light on trends in Achievement Growth among nations and states. The authors examine gold-standard test results of 4th and 8th graders to see where the United States’ progress from 1995 to 2009 ranks among 49 nations and how 41 individual U.S. states with enough data stack up against each other from 1992 to 2011. The good news? American students cumulatively picked up nearly a year’s worth of additional skills learned in math, science and reading, with stronger gains at the earlier grade level. The not-so-good news is we’re stuck in the middle of the pack: Students in three countries–Latvia, Chile, and Brazil–improved at an annual rate of 4 percent of a std. dev., and students in another eight countries–Portugal, Hong Kong, Germany, Poland, Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Colombia, and Lithuania–were making gains at twice the rate of students in the United States. By […]

Choice and accountability are two words you’ll hear my Education Policy Center friends say quite a bit if you’re around them enough. Empowering families with a broader range of educational options, and providing transparent information about — and real consequences for — a school ‘s learning results, are two general principles they and I regularly espouse. But what kind of accountability is appropriate for private schools that accept voucher students? One state with a large and growing private school choice program yesterday broke ground by adopting rules of a different kind from its predecessors. Fordham Institute blogger Adam Emerson, who supports the move, boils the decision down to its essence: Louisiana has shown us that it’s possible to offer private-school choice and control for quality in a way that doesn’t cramp what makes a private school unique. And in doing so, Louisiana has broken ground in school-voucher policy. While other states have made voucher and tax-credit-scholarship programs more transparent, only Louisiana would regulate enrollment at schools that consistently show poor performance. [emphasis added]