Tag Archives: Education Policy Center

I’m pretty smart for a 5-year-old. But sometimes I wander into a topic that’s just over my head. That doesn’t mean it’s not important, but it’s probably just best if I let the big people talk about it themselves. My friends in the Education Policy Center released a new Issue Paper today, called Deferred Retirement Compensation for Career K-12 Employees: Understanding the Need for Reform (PDF). It was researched and written by Dr. Michael Mannino from the University of Colorado Denver. Rather than try to explain the paper myself, here’s the summary from the Independence Institute website: To improve understanding of public K-12 retirement compensation, this Issue Paper provides historical estimates using a substantial sample of retiree characteristics and salary histories. Deferred retirement compensation from a hybrid defined benefit plan is defined as the difference between an employee’s estimated retirement account balance and the greater pension value she expects to receive. When accounting for K-12 employee compensation, large amounts of deferred compensation should be included. For the 846 Denver Public Schools retirees in the sample, average lump sum deferred compensation is $627,570. Wow, it would take a lot of piggy banks to put that much money in. But I think […]

High school and college are still a long ways off for me, but I found this interesting for those of you who are interested in education. A recent report from the Colorado Commission on Higher Education (PDF) found that 29.9 percent (that’s almost 3 in 10!) of Colorado public high school graduates entering Colorado public colleges and universities in 2007-08 needed remediation. Wow, that’s a mouthful! And as Ed News Colorado points out, it isn’t good news, either: Remediation costs at least $27.6 million a year, $14.6 million in state tax dollars and $13 million in tuition paid by students, the report said. (The actual cost is higher, because some remediation costs, such as summer school, weren’t included in the total.) “It’s unfortunate,” said Gov. Bill Ritter, that money is spent on remediation “instead of investing those funds in financial aid, classroom instruction and innovative research. We can and must do better.” But has Colorado been doing better than in recent years?

I recently told you that Douglas County’s innovative new teacher training and licensure program would be up for review by the State Board of Education soon. Well, the good news is that today the Board unanimously agreed to extend the waiver so the program can continue to operate. In cheering what the program has accomplished thus far, State Board member Peggy Littleton even cited the report Douglas County’s Homegrown Teachers (PDF) written by my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow. It’s good to see successful local innovation encouraged rather than stymied. More effective and streamlined paths are needed to get high-quality teachers into classrooms. Kudos to Mike Lynch and the staff at Douglas County’s Learning Center. We hope to see the vision for their program grow and inspire action from other school districts in Colorado and across the country.

I just wanted to leave you with a quick reading assignment before the weekend comes. Writing over at National Review, Dan Lips from the Heritage Foundation says conservatives can’t give up on fighting for school choice but also need to focus their agenda broadly on a range of effective changes to the education system: First, principled support for aggressive reforms like vouchers has cleared a space for the types of reform policies that leaders like [Washington DC schools chancellor Michelle] Rhee are advocating. And, second, when it comes to systemic reform, conservatives have a broad agenda of policies that strengthen public education — and the results to prove it. Education reformers from across the political spectrum should give thanks to those who have spent decades promoting school choice. These efforts have yielded only modest (but increasing) enactment of voucher programs. But they have created political breathing room for less aggressive reforms — such as public school choice and teacher merit pay. Fordham’s Eric Osberg praises Dan’s article, adding: Of course we’ve said for years that choice and accountability go hand-in-hand, but also that such reforms to the structure of schooling have to be accompanied by changes in how schools and […]

My friends in the Education Policy Center enlisted the help of a veteran teacher in Jeffco Public Schools to briefly explain about this thing called the Every Member Option, or EMO. In this 2-minute video, you can watch Michael explain the EMO better than some union officials have tried to do. The Colorado Education Association‘s $39 EMO is collected from every CEA member along with their dues, and goes to fund political action. Some of the CEA local unions collect their own separate EMO worth as much as $24 this year. Teachers and other education employees who choose not to have this money spent on politics have the opportunity to ask for the $39 CEA refund before December 15. Go here to find more information about obtaining the local refund. As Michael says: “And remember, spending money on politics is your choice.” Spread the word!

Things are changing in Washington, DC, and my friends in the Education Policy Center are wondering what the new presidential administration will mean for school reform. That’s why they agreed to publish a paper by a really smart group of people – three professors from the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. The new paper is called The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Will President Obama’s School Reform Bring the Change Kids Need? (PDF). The authors are Robert Maranto, Gary Ritter, and Sandra Stotsky. You really need to read this paper if you care about education and the future of America. As a candidate, Barack Obama gave a lot of different messages about education reform. The authors of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly sort out the different competing proposals, and encourage the President-elect to “appoint a Democratic reformer who embraces the good, opposes the bad, and avoids the ugly, to serve as the nation’s next Secretary of Education.” The Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly has its ears to the Beltway grapevine, running a daily line to see who the favorites are to fill the Cabinet-level post. The latest entry has Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan […]

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 […]

The best education read of the Thanksgiving week goes to the Hoover Institution’s Terry Moe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: Democrats are fervent supporters of public education, and the party genuinely wants to help disadvantaged kids stuck in bad schools. But it resists bold action. It is immobilized. Impotent. The explanation lies in its longstanding alliance with the teachers’ unions — which, with more than three million members, tons of money and legions of activists, are among the most powerful groups in American politics. The Democrats benefit enormously from all this firepower, and they know what they need to do to keep it. They need to stay inside the box. And they have done just that. Democrats favor educational “change” — as long as it doesn’t affect anyone’s job, reallocate resources, or otherwise threaten the occupational interests of the adults running the system. Most changes of real consequence are therefore off the table. The party specializes instead in proposals that involve spending more money and hiring more teachers — such as reductions in class size, across-the-board raises and huge new programs like universal preschool. These efforts probably have some benefits for kids. But they come at an exorbitant price, […]

It’s now official. The latest Issue Paper in the *Innovative Colorado School District Series, written by my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow, has been released: Douglas County’s Home-Grown Teachers: The Learning Center Waiver Program (PDF). The Independence Institute website explains what the paper is all about better than I can: Seeking a creative solution to shortages in various teaching positions, Douglas County School District received a waiver from the state of Colorado to license and train its own teachers through the Learning Center. The district currently is able to license teachers in areas such as math, science, and world languages; to provide special education endorsements to teachers in other specialties; and to equip unlicensed professionals with the basic skills to teach more highly specialized courses to high schoolers. The waiver is scheduled to be renewed at the end of 2008, contingent on Douglas County meeting certain performance goals. If it’s true that this means a way for schools to get more skilled and effective teachers in our classrooms to help kids learn better, then more power to Douglas County. And I hope other school districts pick up on it, too. Anyway, the paper is kind of long. As usual, […]

There are plenty of kids in Colorado who live out in the country or in remote small towns. I don’t know many of them myself. Yet while I’m sure they have their own challenges in learning and education, they don’t get as much attention as those of us who live in and around the big city of Denver. That’s part of the reason why my friends in the Education Policy Center put together a project looking at the academic performance of Colorado’s rural school districts, compared with the numbers of poor and non-white students they serve. The author of the newly-released Assessing Colorado Rural Public School Performance (PDF) is Paul Mueller, who spent the summer working in our offices. (Just in case you were wondering, I didn’t see much of Paul, because I spent much of my summer months off school playing outdoors rather than visiting the Independence Institute.) Anyway, for those of you who don’t have the time to read Paul’s paper, you can listen to him and Pam Benigno talk about the findings of the report – including a couple school districts that succeeded at “beating the odds” despite high-poverty or high-minority student populations – on an iVoices […]