Tag Archives: Center for Reinventing Public Education

I love when people talk about school choice as a “movement.” The word just does such a good job of conveying a sense of momentum and highlighting the fact that an increasing number of families are looking for more options for their kids. A Chalkbeat story illustrated that kind of momentum this morning, reporting that participation in Denver Public Schools’ SchoolChoice system jumped nearly 10 percent this year. More than a quarter of the district’s students are now using the system. In case you’re unfamiliar with the SchoolChoice system, it essentially creates an all-in-one application for families looking to get their kids into schools other than their neighborhood school. Families list their top five choices on the application, something magically administrative happens, and kids are (hopefully) matched with one of those choices.  This year, about 95 percent of kids got one of their top-five choices. Around 75 percent of students got their first choice.

Last week, I gave you quick rundown (okay, it wasn’t that quick) of two big charter reports. But a little guy can only write so much in one sitting, and there was still one more big report on public school choice from the Center for Reinventing Public Education to cover. We’ll do that today. The report sums up the results of a survey given to 500 parents in each of eight chosen cities, including Denver. There are some pretty big differences between the cities, so we’ll just focus on our capitol. Among other things, the survey finds that Denver parents have a more positive outlook on the direction in which their education system is heading than parents in most of the other cities. It also found that Denver parents feel pretty comfortable with their ability to find information on public school choice, don’t tend to struggle greatly with the choice application process, and feel that they have good public options available. Pretty rosy, right? Well, that’s just the good news.

By lobbying for an overhaul of tax-and-spending measures in the state constitution, the education establishment groups that came together to form Believe in a Better Colorado are barking up the wrong tree. Or at least they have put the cart before the horse. Pick your favorite overused cliche. Until we fix the way schools are funded, it’s a futile effort. That’s why my friends in the Education Policy Center recommend a careful look at Facing the Future: Financing Productive Schools from the Center for Reinventing Public Education. Co-authors include Paul Hill and Marguerite Roza, two of the sharpest minds to study the current school system and what could work better. Here is a key excerpt from the report explaining the problem: Overall, we have a system in which so much is controlled by decisions made in the past, sometimes for reasons and on behalf of people who are no longer in the system, and at such a distance from schools, that educators have scant flexibility to adapt to the needs of here and now. Teachers and principals, the people whose work the whole system is supposed to support, get complexity and constraint rather than help. In the meantime, the costs […]