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Do you ever get lost, driving around a big city and missing your destination? Maybe you pass the same landmark two, three, or even four times, getting more frustrated along the way. Maybe your GPS is malfunctioning, or maybe you just wish you had a GPS! For me, the feeling comes as I search for the pirates’ buried stash of gold doubloons (okay, it’s really some of those chocolate candies wrapped in gold foil, but please play along). What makes it so much easier to find the treasure? That’s right, a map. A treasure map. X marks the spot. Now it isn’t exactly the same, but today my Education Policy Center friends officially released “The Future of Colorado Digital Learning: Crafting a Policy Roadmap for Reform.” A quick read with some pretty graphics (thanks, Tracy!), it lays out the main policy changes that many of the state’s online education leaders see as important — including some of the important changes Center director Pam Benigno highlighted in an op-ed last fall. From the media release sent out this morning:

Quite awhile ago I highlighted the work of my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow discussing the issue of union revocation periods. What is that, you say? Well, teachers in 30 Colorado school districts (and other school employees in 11 districts) have just a short window of time to cancel their membership dues deduction. You read that right. They can decide at any point during the year to start paying dues to a union. But if they wish to stop, they have to wait until the busy first two weeks of September or pay dues the rest of the year. If 148 school districts can accommodate requests throughout the year, why are employees in the rest accorded less equal treatment? As introduced in an August 2010 article Ben wrote for Liberty Ink Journal, a one-time Denver teacher named Deb found out it’s not just the two-week window that imposes a burden:

Can you believe it was one year ago today that the Douglas County Board of Education voted to adopt the groundbreaking Pilot Choice Scholarship Program? (Can you also believe that I was 5 years old then and am still 5 years old now? I need to talk to my Education Policy Center friends about this.) Time certainly flies. So rather than diving into the news of the day, it seemed fitting to feature a brief retrospective. A lot has happened since then. To refresh your memory, here are some of the highlights:

A couple weeks ago I excitedly tweeted about a great blog piece in which four of Colorado’s leading Democrats — Lt. Governor Joe Garcia, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, and State Senator Michael Johnston — explained why they support school choice. Then today Todd Shepherd of Complete Colorado forwarded me an interesting little tidbit of information that ties right in. It’s a tidbit that (to the best of my knowledge) no one has reported on, and hey, even 5-year-old blogging prodigies like to share scoops once in awhile. Apparently, on January 9 of this year, Mayor Hancock took a 30-minute call from former tennis champion Andre Agassi on the subject of “Education Reform.” Some of you may be scratching your head, but there is a good reason not to be surprised. After holding the number 1 world ranking, winning eight Grand Slam singles titles and claiming an Olympic gold medal, Mr. Agassi opened a highly-successful Las Vegas charter school, the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy. The school has graduated close to 100 percent of its mostly low-income students ready to do college work.

If I weren’t so little, I might have stayed up to hear the first result for Colorado’s most talked about education bill of the session. But it went past my bedtime before the House Education Committee agreed to adopt HB 1238, as Ed News Colorado reported: The House Education Committee Monday gave a full hearing – more than seven hours – to House Bill 12-1238, the proposal that would require improved literacy programs in the early elementary grades, create a preference for retention of third graders with weak reading skills and add early literacy results to the factors in the state’s accountability system for rating schools.

Today the group Sunshine Review (“a national nonprofit organization dedicated to government transparency”) unveiled its 2012 Sunny Awards to the 214 government agencies that have the most transparent websites. Colorado is represented by six agencies, including three school districts: Jefferson County Public Schools Denver Public Schools Mesa County School District 51 (Grand Junction)

When I wrote a month ago about how the old momentum for open Colorado school district-union negotiations had returned, what came out at last night’s Douglas County school board meeting was something I didn’t expect to happen — at least not so soon. Ed News Colorado’s Nancy Mitchell offers up the somewhat surprising scoop: In an unusual move, the president of the Douglas County teachers’ union on Tuesday asked school board members to open contract talks to the public. “By letting the sunlight shine on our negotiations, parents, taxpayers and employees will benefit by seeing the open dialogue around our district’s priorities,” said Brenda Smith, president of the Douglas County Federation of teachers. “I hope you consider this.” At the previous board meeting, a group of citizens with Parent Led Reform — following the release of their petition to open union negotiations — made the same plea initially. So pressure has been building for awhile, pressure for collective bargaining transparency in Colorado’s third-largest school district. But last night’s development leaves this curious kid with two nagging questions. First, why would the DCF come out in favor of open negotiations and why now? Mike Antonucci, a guru on many issues related […]

Hard to believe it was five months ago I asked the question: Is major education reform about ready to give Iowa a try? At the heart of the story is a local connection. Jason Glass, appointed the state’s education chief a little more than a year ago by incoming Governor Terry Branstad, has some notable Colorado roots. Branstad and Glass forwarded a fairly bold plan for the Hawkeye State. Ideas included significant changes to teacher preparation, pay and retention; focusing on literacy through cutting back on social promotion; school accountability enhancements; and more flexibility and student opportunity through charters, online programs and other public education options. Of course, the state’s top executive certainly can’t — nor should he be able to — update laws by fiat. Still, Gov. Branstad’s plan has faced a particularly difficult time since being launched in the Iowa legislature in February. My Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow provides some of the detail in a new story for School Reform News:

Today is the birthday of the late, great Dr. Seuss (aka Ted Geisel). Millions of school children across Colorado and the rest of the United States will hear one or more of his stories as part of the Read Across America campaign. The nation’s largest teachers union is one of the event’s key sponsors. Hey, the NEA needs to show off its softer side, too — especially when mired in a losing PR battle. So in the spirit of the day, I decided to reach out to some NEA officials and invite them to become regular readers on my blog. Here is an unofficial transcript of the dialogue*:

The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice has released an interesting new study titled “The Fiscal Effects of School Choice Programs on Public School Districts.” Author Benjamin Scafidi took a state-by-state look at total per-pupil spending, breaking out the fixed costs from the variable costs. Here’s the basic idea. Take a state’s K-12 “expenditures on capital, interest, general administration, school administration, operations and maintenance, transportation, and ‘other’ support services” and set them to one side. Subtract these “fixed costs in the short run” — as Scafidi conservatively considers them — from the total spending. What’s left over are the expenditures tied more closely to actual enrollment, which districts have shown can be easily reduced when numbers of students leave. A voucher or tax credit given to student up to that amount safely can be considered not to have any fiscal harm on the district. On a national scale Scafidi finds: