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This morning President Obama spent a 30-minute live interview on NBC’s Today Show talking about education. The headline from the President’s remarks, including in the Denver Post‘s featured AP story, was that money alone can’t solve education problems. True enough, and hats off to the President for acknowledging what has become abundantly clear to those studying the long-term trends in American K-12 public schooling. As my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow has noted on the Ed News Colorado blog, the challenge today is how we are going to stretch the school dollar. In his interview, President Obama also touted a longer school year, his Race to the Top grant program to states and a newly-proposed initiative to recruit 10,000 new teachers from the math, science and engineering fields. That’s all well and good up to a point. But sometimes it’s hard politically to get beyond the soft-sell. What most caught my attention was this section from the AP story:

Two days ago I commented on the big splash Denver Post story about a new study calling into question teacher performance pay. Today the Post‘s big headline touts that “Jeffco schools to increase some teachers’ pay to more than $100,000”: Top-level teachers in select Jefferson County schools could be paid more than $100,000 a year under a pilot program funded by a new $32.8 million federal grant…. Jefferson County and Colorado Springs District 11 learned Thursday that they were among 62 winners in 27 states of the federal Teacher Incentive Fund grants, which support performance-pay plans in high-need schools. [link added] More excellent coverage is available from Nancy Mitchell at Ed News Colorado, which proclaims “Jeffco launches teacher performance pay.” So given the previous news, is the state’s largest school district barking up the wrong tree?

I am so excited, I can hardly wait. Another great education movie is coming out, and this one may be the best of them all! Get a taste of Waiting for Superman by watching the trailer: After a lot of well-deserved attention, the movie’s national premiere comes tomorrow: Friday, September 24. To mark the opening of the movie, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute today issued a media advisory with quotes from some leading lights of education reform, including our own Ben DeGrow:

The Denver Post reports this morning (via the Washington Post) about a newly-released Vanderbilt University study on teacher performance pay: The study, which the authors and other experts described as the first scientifically rigorous review of merit pay in the United States, measured the effect of financial incentives on teachers in Nashville public schools and found that better pay alone was not enough to inspire gains. Advocates of performance pay did not immediately challenge the methodology of the study. But they said its conclusions were narrow and failed to evaluate the full package of professional development and other measures that President Obama and philanthropists such as Bill Gates say are crucial to improving America’s public schools. Does this mean we should throw out the whole idea of incentive or performance-based pay for school teachers? Not so fast.

Update, 10:30 AM: And surprise of surprises, more evidence emerges that the figures of teaching jobs lost — used to promote the Edujobs bailout — was wildly overblown (H/T Education Intelligence Agency). A couple weeks ago I told you about how the ill-advised Edujobs bailout discriminates against charter schools. So you’d think the national news service wanting to do a story on this would give little Eddie a call, right? Okay, not exactly. Last week Family News in Focus talked to my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow about this issue. You can listen to the brief news story with select interview clips, or read the story on Citizen Link: Ben DeGrow, education policy analyst for the Independence Institute, said that charter schools should not be discriminated against by public schools. “The education jobs bailout is reckless and fiscally irresponsible policy,” DeGrow said. “But, if the money is going to be spent, it should be given to public schools and public school teachers on a even playing field.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ben did write that op-ed on the Edujobs bailout in the Denver Post last month, so I guess he’s qualified and smart enough to make the comment. Maybe even […]

The new week brings an interesting Ed News Colorado story from new writer Katie Kerwin McCrimmon called “Keeping Up with the Dunruds.” The story highlights a Denver family with a boy about my own age who sounds like he shares some of my penchant for prodigy: Braeden Dunrud was riding in the family car when he saw a sign for the Spicy Pickle restaurant and asked his mom if it said “Spacey Pickle.” Pretty darn close for a 3-year-old. A short time later, Braeden revealed his reading abilities again. As he carried a can of root beer to the recycling bin, he called out, “Does it say Mug’s?” His parents looked at each other, stunned. Yes, as a matter of fact, it did say Mug’s, a brand name the parents never used. Clearly, Braeden was teaching himself to read. Now 5, Braeden is among 38 children in advanced kindergarten at the Center for Early Education in Denver, a stand-alone site that houses preschool programs for four southeast Denver feeder schools, along with both traditional and advanced kindergarten classrooms. The center opened in 2009 and expanded to provide preschool for 3-year-olds, along with kindergarten, this year.

The big local education news of the day is the release of the latest results from Denver’s School Performance Framework. SPF — which in this case has nothing to do with how much protection you get from the sun — takes into account a host of measures of how DPS schools are performing, with an emphasis on student academic growth. Based on their score, each school receives one of five ratings (from best to worst): Distinguished (Blue) Meets Expectations (Green) Accredited on Watch (Yellow) Accredited on Priority Watch (Orange) Accredited on Probation (Red) The rating determines whether individual schools receive greater autonomy and rewards or greater support and corrective action. Two major headlines come from Denver’s latest round of SPF results:

Flash back to last September. Remember the big brouhaha about President Obama’s speech to schoolchildren? I commented on it a few times. To me the big deal was the creepy notes created by the Department of Education for teachers that promoted a sort of worshipful, service-oriented attitude toward the President. But no need to rehash the past. Did you even notice President Obama spoke yesterday to school children across the country? Probably not, and that’s a good sign. Look at a copy of his remarks (H/T Sean Cavanagh, K-12 Politics). I like the heart of the President’s message, delivered at Philadelphia’s Julia R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School: But here’s your job. Showing up to school on time. Paying attention in class. Doing your homework. Studying for exams. Staying out of trouble. That kind of discipline and drive – that kind of hard work – is absolutely essential for success.

Back in March I pointed out how school teachers and other union members who belong to the National Education Association (NEA) have financially supported Obama Care whether they like it or not. This week brings an important update to the story. The NEA donated $50,000 to the committee opposing Colorado’s Amendment 63 “Right to Health Care Choice” Initiative, which would: Write into the Colorado Constitution that the State of Colorado cannot force its citizens to purchase a public or private health insurance product, either on its own, or on behalf of the federal government. In other words, Colorado would not be able to implement a Massachusetts-style insurance mandate (otherwise know as Romney Care). Interesting. Especially when the same kind of mandates in the federal health care legislation have had this sort of impact:

As a young edublogger, I hear from a lot of people and groups with their new education book. Some look more interesting than others, including this one that crossed my desktop today from the Capital Research Center (CRC): The Neighbor’s Kid tells the story of what twenty-four year-old Philip Brand discovered regarding American education when he drove his car cross-country during the 2008-09 school year visiting two schools in each of forty-nine states. The schools were public and private, religious and secular, urban and rural, typical and unusual. Brand wanted to learn first-hand what students, parents, teachers, and principals think about their elementary and secondary schools and what they expect from education. His principal discovery: When it comes to picking a school parents care most about the kids with whom their own children associate. Not the curriculum, not the teachers, but the other kids. That concern has important consequences for how school districts, states and the federal government set education policy. A second conclusion: Government policymakers cannot set standards of educational “achievement” because true education is intimately tied to the cultural and civic experiences of families and communities.