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I’m back after a brief hiatus, and we’ve got some catching up to do on the legislative front. Specifically, we can celebrate the fact that Sen. Michael Merrifield has learned once again that doing the same thing over and over again may not be the best approach. I wrote a rather snarky post a few weeks ago about Merrifield’s SB 067, which was functionally identical to last year’s SB 105. Both bills sought to gut tenure reform, performance pay, and merit-based personnel decisions by essentially blowing up strong educator evaluations. In particular, Merrifield was once again attempting to eliminate the requirement that evaluations include multiple measures of student growth. And once again, he failed to do so.

It’s been a while since we talked about PARCC. Truthfully, there hasn’t been much to talk about. The test remains enormously unpopular—a fact that breeds high opt-out rates; limits student, educator, and parent buy-in; and fosters instability in our ability to measure schools’ performance and provide good information to parents looking to choose schools for their children. Now, thanks to a new bill at the legislature, PARCC will very likely be leaving Colorado high schools for good. It’s hard to talk about PARCC-era testing without talking about opt outs. That subject can get complicated quickly. There’s a lot more going on with the formal “opt-out movement” than meets the eye, a lot of which is pretty concerning. But a good deal of the fuel for that particular fire comes from opposition to PARCC. Don’t believe me? Consider this (from a previous post on the issue): I still believe PARCC—not the idea of standardizing testing itself—is a big part of the problem here. Americans overwhelmingly still support the idea of regular standardized testing, and this level of anti-testing angst didn’t exist back in the TCAP era. Don’t believe me? Check out the CDE graph from the last ESSA Hub Committee meeting below. […]

President Trump has always been a wild card. It’s been very hard to say what he would or would not do—and in some ways it still is. But one of the central promises of his campaign was that he would nominate a great justice to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died tragically almost exactly year ago. To his credit, he has kept that promise by selecting Neil Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s empty seat. Education is still a bit of a question mark when it comes to the Trump administration. There have been all sorts of rumors and ideas floating around, but none has yet coalesced into a cohesive vision of how the federal government will interact with K-12 education. The crystal ball is further clouded by Betsy DeVos’s sharply contested nomination to head the U.S. Department of Education. It’s been sad to watch the conversation about DeVos, a lifelong philanthropist who has donated her time and money to increasing opportunities for those who need them, devolve into a shouting match that sidesteps reality and avoids real conversations about what DeVos should or shouldn’t do should she be confirmed. As Rich Lowry wrote for National Review, “We now know that working […]

Everybody’s heard this famous advice: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. I have certainly heard my dad say something like that many times before. State Senator Mike Merrifield (remember him?) and his legislative allies must have also heard the saying somewhere, because they recently introduced Senate Bill 17-067—a practically identical copy of last year’s spectacularly defeated Senate Bill 16-105. The complete unwillingness to listen to any of the feedback—or learn any of the political lessons—that came out of the SB 105 debacle last year is striking. That old saying about trying again is definitely a good reminder of the importance of persistence, but I’m not sure it should be interpreted as refusing ever to rethink one’s position on bad public policy. After all, the saying is not “If at first you don’t succeed, disregard all feedback and do exactly the same thing again.” I could write a big blog post about why SB 067 is bad policy that holds the potential to harm students; destroy important collective bargaining reform, teacher tenure reform, performance-based compensation systems, and a variety of other things (which is its intended purpose); and decrease fairness for teachers by refusing to acknowledge and reward […]

Almost a year ago, I highlighted a Denver Post analysis detailing the general failure of millions of dollars in federal grant money—given out in the form of School Improvement Grants—to produce the kinds of results we might expect in many underperforming Colorado schools. It now turns out that the overall results of this $7 billion federal turnaround endeavor are worse than we might have thought. Education policy maven Andy Smarick has been a staunch critic of the SIG program since its inception, and made a compelling case against the program as early as 2010. As he says in the Denver Post story above: If you funnel a whole lot of money to the same dysfunctional districts that have been running the dysfunctional schools, these are the results you should expect. What’s mystifying to me is that people thought the school improvement grant program was going to get dramatically different results than the dozens of other similar efforts at school turnaround in the past. It turns out Smarick was right, not only in Denver, but in the nation overall. His latest blog post for Education Next is a scathing indictment of $7 billion spent on the SIG program, which he now […]

It’s National School Choice Week again, my friends. This year’s celebration of educational opportunity is the biggest yet with more than 21,000 events attended by more than six million people across all 50 states. You can help us celebrate the occasion by stopping by the Colorado Capitol on Thursday, January 26, at 11:30 AM. If you live further south, there will also be a rally at the Colorado Springs City Hall at 9 AM on January 24. If neither of those options works for you, you can take a look at this interactive map to find another event in your area. No matter where you live, you should plan to get to a NCSW rally. There will be lots and lots of fuzzy yellow scarves as usual, and you’ll get to go home feeling pretty fuzzy yourself for having helped promote opportunity for all students. There’s plenty to celebrate during National School Choice Week 2017, like the fact that educational choice just keeps on expanding all across the United States. There are more than 2.5 million students enrolled in more than 6,500 public charter schools in more than 40 states. Additionally, there are 61 private school choice programs of various types spread […]

In case you weren’t paying attention, something really big happened in the education world two days ago. Betsy DeVos, President-elect Trump’s pick for secretary of education, had her confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. The hearing was actually supposed to happen earlier this month, but it was delayed “to accommodate the Senate schedule.” In other words, politics happened. But Republican leadership stuck to its word about not allowing Democratic complaints over ethics paperwork to prevent the confirmation process from moving forward, and so DeVos’s hearing went ahead. You can watch the full hearing here if you are so inclined. I’m still waiting for a credible transcript to be released. In the meantime, I’d like to talk a little about the slanted coverage of the hearing I’ve seen. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched a confirmation hearing before, but I have. They tend to amount to a whole lot of rhetorical jousting by senators looking to score points against their rivals’ picks, various attempts to force nominees to make (often absurd) commitments, and a cat-like ability to avoid answering trap questions on the part of the nominees themselves. They usually get partisan—and ugly—fast. […]

As you all know, I like to write. We’ve tackled all sorts of policy and politics here on Ed is Watching, usually in the form of blog posts written by yours truly. But even at five years old, I know something important: Sometimes it’s better to just shut up and listen. That’s what I plan to do today as you enjoy this Heritage Foundation video about the power of educational choice. But first (you didn’t really think I wouldn’t say anything at all, did you?), I do have to say one thing. I wrote not too long ago about what Betsy DeVos, President-elect Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, could do to advance the cause of educational opportunity in America. High on that list is the reauthorization—and maybe even the expansion—of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. The only federally funded private school choice program in the nation, the OSP has helped and is helping thousands of low-income kids and families desperate for better educational opportunities. Sadly, the program has been left in existential limbo as the Obama Administration and its allies worked against it in previous years. Mrs. DeVos has a real opportunity to breathe new life into the OSP […]

While Education Week’s annual Quality Counts report is just one of many K-12 state rankings out there, it tends to get a lot of attention because it’s more accessible and easier to interpret that data directly from, say, the U.S. Census Bureau or the National Center for Education Statistics. The latest edition of that report was just released, which means we’re about to see a bevy of questionably accurate news articles, accusations, and assertions crop up in the near future. In the meantime, we can talk a little about the latest results and what they may or may not tell us. Some of you may remember that the Education Policy Center spent some time talking about Education Week’s 2016 Quality Counts report in a recent paper on Colorado school finance. Here’s a refresher on last year’s report: Published annually by Education Week, this report ranks states on “chance for success,” academic achievement, and school finance, with ratings in each of these categories consisting of both an overall grade and a number of more granular rankings. The 2016 report, which relied upon 2013 data, ranked Colorado 37th overall in the area of school finance. As some interest groups have reported, the […]

It’s almost Christmas, friends! I can’t wait to see what I got—though it may be a lump of coal given my fire-breathing posts over the last several months. Regardless of what I get, I have a special policy present for you: new poll data on school choice! A couple of weeks ago, my Independence Institute friend Ross Izard highlighted some interesting new research in a Choice Media story of the day: The #StoryOfTheDay is brought to you by @RossIzard, Senior Education Policy Analyst at the Independence Institute: Poll Shows Private and Charter Parents More Satisfied Than District Peers. #SchoolChoice, #PrivateSchools, #CharterSchools, #EducationReform, #EDReform, #Schools, #Education, #Educational, #MomLife, #Mom, #Dad A video posted by Choice Media (@choicemediatv) on Dec 14, 2016 at 2:10pm PST The data included in this particular analysis comes from the annual, nationally representative Education Next poll, which we discussed back in August. There’s all kinds of interesting stuff to learn from that poll, including the fact that school choice appears to be gradually changing into a Democratic issue. That’s actually not terribly surprising given the importance of educational choice to many primarily Democratic constituencies, though some progressive leaders have yet to get the message. This new look […]