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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:

Since today is February 29, I’ll take a timely leap from some of my usual fare to point you to two new podcasts produced by my Education Policy Center friends. In the first, Gina Schlieman explains how school-level autonomy has empowered some positive changes in Britain. In the second, foundation president Tom Kaesemeyer highlighted a program rewarding high-poverty Denver-area schools that are getting good results, and observed that exceptional principal leadership was at the top of the list of common school factors. Next, a recently published op-ed by Ben DeGrow, who hosted both of the aforementioned podcasts, explains one of the key merits of Colorado’s 2010 educator effectiveness legislation: Principals as instructional leaders will share accountability with classroom teachers for promoting student growth, which must make up at least half of educator evaluations. In an unusual step, legislators and Governor Hickenlooper recently ratified some of the details for the state’s coming new educator evaluation system. It’s by design, not by accident, that the policy holds principals to similar standards as teachers. Such a system gives school instructional leaders more reason to retain or remove teachers based on their professional effectiveness at helping students learn. Will it be perfect? No. Are […]

The big news from the education reform world this week is the release of the School Choice Demonstration Project’s final reports evaluating five years of matched student comparisons between the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and the Milwaukee Public Schools. What can we learn about vouchers from the results of this program? The American Federation for Children summed up the top-level findings in a Monday press release: Students enrolled in the Milwaukee voucher program are more likely to graduate from high school and go to college than their public school counterparts, boast significantly improved reading scores, represent a more diverse cross-section of the city, and are improving the results of traditional public school students, according to a comprehensive evaluation of the program released today.

Many Colorado schools and teachers impart to their pupils the importance of fairness, whether through formal lessons, classroom conversations, special events or codes of conduct. Meanwhile, school officials could glean some important ideas about fairness from legislation being considered by our western neighbors in Utah. The grassroots reformers at Parents for Choice in Education are supporting Senate Bill 82, which “strengthens the Equal Access law for all employee associations.” What do they mean by “Equal Access”? Rather than trying to explain the problem that needs to be solved, I’ll just direct you to point number 8 in my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow’s 2011 issue backgrounder “Nine Key Changes at the Bargaining Table”: Nearly all of Colorado’s existing certified education employee bargaining agreements grant union agents exclusive access to school district property, events or information that is denied to other union or non-union membership groups. Common provisions include specified union authorization to contact teachers through workplace mailboxes, bulletin boards and district email systems; or special privileges to use district facilities for meetings at no cost.