Tag Archives: blog

Have you ever tried to pound a square peg into a round hole (or vice versa)? How about after that doesn’t work a couple times, you go out and buy 100 of the same square pegs to keep trying what already failed? It makes about as much sense as most systems we have today for training, developing, paying, and retaining teachers. Sure, we’ve seen some progress with performance pay programs — Colorado has produced some leading examples — but the old-fashioned salary schedule still persists. Pay teachers based on seniority and academic credentials. Never mind, as the Denver Post‘s Jeremy Meyer observes from Urban Institute education director Jane Hannaway (with supporting evidence compiled here), that teachers overwhelmingly improve during the first four years of their career and then just stop: “It’s one of our very consistent findings,” said Hannaway, presenter last week at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting in San Diego, citing at least two recent studies of teacher effectiveness. “The reason of course is not clear, but it’s in study after study,” she said. “Teachers do get better (in the beginning). If you look at the same teacher at Year One, they look a lot better at […]

Jay Greene’s blog has a humorous – but sad – story of how New York City teachers union operatives were caught red-handed passing out cue cards (including one with a misspelled word) to City Council members. Because we really need school boards and other policy makers to do the thoughtless bidding of adult interest groups rather than stand up for the interests of children and taxpaying citizens, right? I’m obviously being sarcastic there. But seeing that funny post made me wonder whether cue cards recently may have been passed out at the Colorado State Capitol: What cue cards were given to legislative opponents who slapped down school choice twice in the same day? Who wrote the script for the lawmaker who needed help from Grover to distinguish public from private (another legislator raised the same question on another bill at another hearing)? Who authored the cue cards for the education committee chair to ignore critical findings about school employee pensions so he could grandstand with frivolous attacks? What lobbying interest group told the same committee chair to thwart the will of the people and double-super kill school spending transparency? Or perhaps these lawmakers came up with these bad, silly, arrogant, […]

Way to go, U.S. Senate. You made a 5-year-old boy cry. How dare you vote to take away scholarships from D.C. kids who really need them! Have you seen these kids? Even the Eduwonk – no big fan of vouchers – says “the spectacle of forcing the kids to leave their schools before they age out is pretty cold-hearted.” Uh-huh. Fifty-eight U.S. Senators – including Colorado’s own Michael Bennet and Mark Udall – have decided to spend billions on wasteful pork projects, but can’t spare anything to keep 1,700 students from exercising the choice to enroll in a better school. And to think I’ve said nice things about Mr. Bennet before. I’m thinking about taking it back. Andy Smarick at the Flypaper blog asks: “Why are they doing this?” He makes some very good points, and I have to agree with him. But really, I’m just plain mad right now. I’ve even thought about throwing some of my Legos at the next U.S. Senator who comes my way. (Not that many ever have, mind you.) Will President Obama show the Senators who’s in charge? His press secretary said today that “it wouldn’t make sense to disrupt the education of those […]

I don’t know about you, but some parents give their kids money for getting certain grades on a report card. Not mine (at least they tell me they’re not going to), but that’s a different story. If Colorado were getting money based on how well it treated charter schools, how would it do? The Center for Education Reform‘s new report Accountability Lies at the Heart of Charter School Success says Colorado’s charter school law merits a B. Only eight states do better. Further, though our state’s charters receive significantly less funding than their other public school counterparts, their overall performance is commendable: In 2007, 74 percent of charters made federal accountability targets of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) while only 59 percent of conventional public schools did the same. Charter middle schools in Colorado are making the grade as well. In 2006, 55 percent of middle school charters were rated excellent or high by the state Department of Education, compared with 41 percent of conventional public middle schools.

Over on Jay Greene’s blog, Dr. Greg Forster has a valuable update for those of us who want a handy place to go to answer all those objections to school choice: …the Friedman Foundation has released a set of “myth buster” guides to the research on the six most common school choice myths. For each myth they’ve provided a brief, handy reference sheet and a slightly longer, more detailed guide to the research. Even the detailed version of each myth buster is still less technical than the other lists on my “meta-list” page, compiled by Jay and other scholars, but it does go over the most important technical issues (how do we distinguish the impact of vouchers from the impact of other factors like family influence?) and provides the references you’ll need to dig further if you wish. Mythbusters, eh? I hear there was a movie made a long time before I was born. Seems it had this memorable song. I think we could rewrite some of the lyrics to fit the topic at hand: If you’re stuck at school in your neighborhood Who you gonna call? – Mythbusters! If the unions say school choice is no good Who you […]

Thanks to Intercepts’ Mike Antonucci for bringing our attention to this story… San Diego Pulitzer prize-winning political cartoonist Steve Breen was invited to speak at a local public elementary school. A great opportunity for kids to see, right? Think about the kids in the school who are aspiring artists and creative thinkers. Right now, I like to draw pictures of race cars and army guys. Maybe I could do what Mr. Breen does someday. Anyway, there’s more to the story – he has been “disinvited” because of this cartoon he drew: Ed Morrissey at the Hot Air blog makes a great point about the cartoon: A little harsh? Perhaps; the state of California hardly got hijacked by the unions against their will, at least not “Sacramento” as representing its government. The Democrats who run the state willingly allied themselves with these powerful unions and stuck it to the taxpayers on their behalf. Rename the ship “California Taxpayers” and that may be more on target. Regardless, the union officials, school officials, or whoever is responsible for taking back Mr. Breen’s invitation only have helped to prove the point: It isn’t really about the kids, is it? It’s hard to deny that […]