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I’m guessing that 2012 has been fairly busy for education policy researcher Dr. Marcus Winters. He started with the launch of his book Teachers Matter, which included visiting Denver as the first-ever speaker in the Independence Institute’s Brown Bag Lunch series. And he since has published work on school innovation and productivity, and the effects of Florida’s reading retention policy. This week he has released a Manhattan Institute report that should help inform Colorado’s ongoing implementation of Senate Bill 191, Transforming Tenure: Using Value-Added Modeling to Identify Effective Teachers. Winters looked at key Florida teacher data to help determine the effectiveness of value-added measures (VAM) in educator evaluations.

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:

Have you ever played the “one of these things is not like the other” game with only two things? The results usually are neither too difficult nor surprising. But playing a quick game, like we’re about to do, can still be informative in its own way. Okay, let’s go. The first item comes compliments of the Colorado Springs Gazette‘s Kristina Iodice, who shares the good news that Falcon 49 elementary teacher Melanie Dolifka has been nominated as a finalist for the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. Congrats to Ms. Dolifka, one of the brightest stars in an innovative non-union district, for the great honor! The second item comes from a new Colorado Watchdog story:

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:

Believe it or not, it’s been a whole three days since I last shared some thoughts on the exciting goings-on in Colorado’s third-largest school district. An arbitrator ruled that Douglas County leaders couldn’t get back all the tax-funded union leave dollars because they didn’t get a change to the collective bargaining agreement in writing. So Tuesday night at the Board meeting, one of the directors offered a peaceful compromise: [Craig] Richardson said he wanted the district to “pursue every remedy until we have our money back … and I will not relent.” That is, he said, unless the union accepted his challenge – to move what he described as the $52,000 balance from a union political account into a fund created by board members to help teachers pay for classroom supplies. (You can read Richardson’s entire statement online here.) Keep the money in a political fund or donate it to cover the costs of teacher supplies? An interesting choice faces the local AFT union leadership. The $52,000 in question comes out to slightly less than $20 per Dougco teacher. But every little bit helps.

Update, 8/22: Intercepts blogger Mike Antonucci makes some incisive observations about the need for better-informed voters while asserting that the PDK/Gallup results are not that significant, noting he “wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot poll.” It’s late August and back-to-school season, which means it’s once again time for the new Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) / Gallup “poll of the public’s attitude toward public schools.” Right up front, let it be known that this won’t be as “Pretty Darn Klever” as my commentary on last year’s results, but a few things of interest need to be pointed out from the results. The headline and the first question featured is “What do you think are the biggest problems that the public schools of your community must deal with?” Far and away the #1 answer at 35 percent was “lack of financial support.” Coming in a distant fourth was “overcrowded schools” at 5 percent. More interesting is what’s missing on the school finance topic from the poll of 1,000 American adults. Just a few weeks ago the Fordham Institute released its own national survey (with a nearly identical sample size). The question of what approach local school districts should take to meet existing […]

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:

Ed News Colorado reports today regarding a dispute over publicly-funded teacher union employees, that an arbitrator has ruled in favor of the Douglas County Federation of Teachers (DCFT) and against the taxpayers. At issue is $118,500 school district officials say the union president agreed to pay rather than be accountable for the use of tax-funded time: Emails provided by the district show Superintendent Liz Fagen approached Smith about changing the arrangement, saying she wanted to provide more accountability for taxpayer funds.