Category Archives: Urban Schools

About a month ago, I pointed out to you the somewhat disturbing views about parents held by certain figures within the education establishment. Well, here’s going way out on a limb to guess the same crowd won’t be lining up in excitement to watch the new movie Won’t Back Down: The feature-length film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis and Holly Hunter is a story about parents who take charge of transforming their children’s failing inner-city school. In other words, it’s a real Hollywood movie with a powerful education reform message that should resonate with American families facing challenging educational circumstances. Maybe it can pick up where Waiting for Superman left off.

No time to opine today, but the attention of the K-12 education world is on the continuing Chicago teachers strike. A lot of pixels are being used to cover the topic, but I believe the following are the most informative and insightful:

From Todd Engdahl’s story yesterday in Ed News Colorado, at least 23 school districts in the state are going to local voters this year to ask for one or more tax increases–mill levy overrides for various operating costs, and/or bonds or BEST matching grant requests to pay for capital construction or renovation projects. (In the unusual case of Aspen, voters will decide on a sales-tax increase to fund schools.) The proposals follow one year after a historically-high 26 out of 38 local school tax proposals went down to defeat. Notably, this year five of the state’s nine largest school districts, cumulatively enrolling more than one-third of Colorado’s public K-12 students, are seeking voter approval of various tax increases. Some of them represent significant amounts (descriptions from Ed News in quotes): Jefferson County: “$99 million bond for a variety of building upgrades; $39 million override to maintain class size and protect some programs.” Denver: “$466 million bond for maintenance, technology, renovation and upgrades; $49 million override for enrichment, student support services and other programs. DPS also is an alternate for a $3.8 million BEST grant to renovate South High School, and some of the bond issue would provide a match.” Cherry […]

Today’s big education news comes from The Windy City, where thousands of Chicago Public Schools teachers have walked out on strike. Students pay the price as the American Federation of Teachers union affiliate turns down an offer to boost an average salary of $71,000 (or $76,000?) by 16 percent over the next four years. Even if CPS officials wanted to be so generous and approve across-the-board-raises for educators who already make about 50 percent more than the average Chicago worker with a college degree, the money isn’t there. I can’t help feeling a connection to the story. After all, friends of my Education Policy Center friends are on the case. The Illinois Policy Institute’s labor policy director Paul Kersey posted the facts and some scary pictures from a Labor Day union protest march. While many of the 400,000 CPS students may be cheering today to be out of school, the 50,000 attending non-union charter schools are not affected. Which interestingly prompted Chicago union president Karen Lewis to say: “Real school will not be open [Monday]….” That certainly sounds like she has a low opinion of many parents’ public school options. Too bad for her. But I wonder what the anti-reform […]

Not everything in the world of Colorado K-12 education is a serious statement about policy. Sometimes the more compelling story comes in the heat of a dramatic moment, when more is at stake than grades on a test. The Colorado Springs Gazette‘s Matt Steiner reports on a high school freshman who, when confronted with a potentially life-threatening situation, (literally) charged forward and took the wheel: [Jeremy] Rice, 14, remembered noticing the bus driver reach down for a garbage pail that had been knocked over by a student. While the bus was in motion, the driver attempted to right himself in his seat and make sure his safety belt was secure. Then, the driver tumbled to the right and down into the bus’s stairwell, Rice said. From eight rows back, Jeremy raced into action. With some instruction from the bus driver, he was able to steer the large vehicle, and the students on board, to safety.

Stop for a moment and picture a classroom of 20 little Eddies and Edwinas (girls, I know, yeck). The nice teacher one day gets up in front of the room and hands out permission slips for a field trip. “Field trip? Yay!!!” we shout. “Where are we going? The zoo? The science museum? The fire station?” After she finally gets our class settled down, the teacher says: “No, this is going to be a great new kind of experience. We’re going to go hang out with Occupy Denver! ….” Huh, what? This imaginary scenario must take place in Denver Public Schools (DPS), because of some very real new language being used to evaluate teachers. High-achieving DPS instructors may want to keep their “distinguished” rating by encouraging students “to question and challenge the dominant culture” and “to work for social justice”? The newly-revised evaluation framework makes these items a priority for DPS teachers in 2012-13. Perhaps now you can understand what would upset my Education Policy Center friends so much:

A quick hit this afternoon. The Cato Institute’s Adam Schaeffer today has released the summary of a new data analysis by RAND Corporation economist Richard Buddin, seeking to explain what he calls “The Charter School Paradox”: On average, charter schools may marginally improve the public education system, but in the process they are wreaking havoc on private education. Charter schools take a significant portion of their students from private schools, causing a drop in private enrollment, driving some schools entirely out of business, and thereby raising public costs while potentially diminishing competition and diversity in our education system overall. I’m still wrapping my little mind around the information presented and what he has to say, but let’s clear up one thing right away: being anti-charter is not the answer. But Cato has made a case to be considered, namely that learning will better thrive, and be more cost-effective, with both a healthy private education sector and adequate choices within the public system.

A little over 18 months ago, a story broke out of Ohio that a mom was charged with a felony for falsifying information about where she lived to get her daughter into a different public school. Neither Kelley Williams-Bolar nor any other parent should be forced to choose between finding a better education and obeying the law. Back then I wrote: For someone like me living in Colorado, with a strong (but not perfect) open enrollment law, the first reaction was: You have to lie to get your kid into another school district? It’s very sad that some K-12 systems can be so backward and unresponsive, but it’s symptomatic of a larger problem…. Well, color me naive. A new story from the Aspen Times (H/T Ed News Colorado) reports that the problem is real in the resort town’s high-end school district, and includes more than just one person:

As I told you a couple months ago, the nation’s largest voucher program — enacted by Indiana in 2011 — is growing quickly in both popularity and promise. In the Hoosier State, more than 8,000 students from low- and middle-income families are taking advantage of the private option provided by the new choice scholarships. And as Associated Press writer Tom Coyne points out, public education leaders not only are taking notice of the phenomenon, many also are taking action to try to woo families to stay:

Real educator compensation reform has grown well beyond being a conservative or liberal issue. We continue to learn more and more about the costs and effects of unproductive pay systems. A couple weeks ago I brought your attention to a possible breakthrough New Teacher Project report called The Irreplaceables — showing how high-performing teachers not only are not better rewarded but also not better retained than their low-performing counterparts. If we treat outstanding instruction so little different from, ahem, inadequate instruction, what do we expect is going to happen? Interestingly, considering the well-publicized findings of The Irreplaceables, the editorial board of the Washington Post yesterday had to acknowledge this important reality: