Tag Archives: diversity

It’s back-to-school season in Colorado. Some kiddos started class today, and many more will be hitting the books again over the next couple of weeks. By the time August is over, most of Colorado’s 900,000 PK-12 students will be back to learning and growing in the state’s public school system. Well north of 100,000 of these students will be heading back to public charter schools. And as my policy friend Ross Izard points out in a recent column, that’s a pretty good place to be.

In the middle of July, education news and conversation tends to be slow. If they’re like me, people are more interested in the baseball All-Star game or in just hanging out at the beach. That’s why all I’m going to do today is bring your attention to an article in the Sunday Denver Post titled “Denver metro districts enroll diversity”. Reflecting larger demographic trends, Denver Public Schools has started enrolling a greater share of white students in the past 8 years. Meanwhile, every other district in the metro area has taken on more racial minorities — with Mapleton, Westminster, and Sheridan registering gains in minority student enrollment of 20 percentage points or more. Commerce City, Englewood, Cherry Creek, and Aurora have also made significant shifts in the same direction. What does it all mean for education policy?

Update: The good people of Ed News Colorado have also written about The State of Charter Schools in Colorado (PDF), breaking down some of the key information if you don’t have time to dig through the whole report. Do you need a good reference digest of important information on charter schools in Colorado? Well, my friend and Education Policy Center senior fellow Krista Kafer has done it again, joining Dr. Dick Carpenter to co-author another valuable report for the Colorado Department of Education. The brand new report is called The State of Charter Schools in Colorado (PDF). Skim through it, and you’ll see there really is no such thing as an average charter school. As the movement has grown in our state over the last 15 years, both the number and the diversity of charters has increased.

Forgive me if I act a little sleepy today. I stayed up past my bedtime last night to watch the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. And after that, I was too excited to go to sleep. When I’m old enough, I want to be on ESPN and national TV, too — competing for the top prize as spelling champion. Think I can do it? For now, I look forward to rooting for Tim Ruiter in 2010. The homeschooler from Centreville, Virginia, finished as runner-up this time around. (Next year, maybe Colorado spellers will advance farther, too.) I like Tim’s attitude. He told the Washington Post: Tim said that he plans to be back next year and that he’ll take only a short break — “I’ll go to bed” — before he resumes word study. “I’m glad that she won, because this was her last year,” he said.

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 […]

One option more and more parents take for their kids is homeschooling. Thousands of Colorado kids are being educated at home by their parents. Despite a great diversity in the families that undertake home education and the different kinds of programs used, there’s still a tendency among some to have stereotyped conceptions of what a “typical” homeschool family looks like. People who want to pigeonhole homeschoolers into a box really ought to read this Pajamas Media column by Kansas parent and writer Tony Woodlief. A key excerpt: Given preconceptions about this practice, I should note that we are not anti-government wingnuts living on a compound. We like literature, and nice wines, and Celeste would stab me in the heart with a spoon if I gave her one of those head bonnets the Amish women wear. We are not, in other words, stereotypical home-schooling parents. But neither are most actual home-schooling parents. Even though Ma and Pa Ingalls sent their children off to the little schoolhouse in Walnut Grove, we’ve decided to start our own. In the eyes of Kansas authorities that’s exactly what we’ve done; regulations require us to establish a school and name it. Ours is the Woodlief Homestead […]