Tag Archives: effort

It’s Lego-time around here, so I don’t have long to blog right now. But I did want you to hear about how Colorado families and schools are working together to enhance the online education experience and make our state’s thriving cyberschool community the talk of the nation. Click the play button below to listen to a new iVoices podcast as my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow discusses with Judith Stokes of the Colorado Cyberschools Association and Lori Cooney of the Colorado Coalition of Cyberschool Families about their collaborative effort to benefit students: As always, you can learn more about ALL your Colorado education options at our fabulous School Choice for Kids website. And now back to my Legos….

Alyson Klein, one of the ladies who cover happenings related to education on Capitol Hill for Education Week, reports about an important committee vote yesterday: A bipartisan effort to boost funding for the Teacher Incentive Fund by an extra $100 million went down to defeat today during the full Senate Appropriations Committee’s markup of the bill funding the U.S. Department of Education in fiscal year 2010. The bill already includes $300 million for the TIF, a teacher performance-pay program that is currently funded at $97 million. The proposed increase in the failed amendment would have been paid for by taking $100 million out of the federal State Grants for Improving Teacher Quality program. TIF provides competitive grants to state agencies, school districts, and charter schools that develop quality performance pay programs for teachers and for principals. As my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow has outlined in his issue paper Denver’s ProComp and Teacher Compensation in Colorado (PDF) and elsewhere, local Colorado school districts have applied for and received a significant share of TIF grant money. Besides Denver, they include Eagle County, Harrison (El Paso County), and Fort Lupton. Our K-12 education compensation system badly needs a serious overhaul, and […]

Sometimes even shameful things can work out for good, with good people working hard to make sure kids can keep the quality education options they have received through school choice. In Arizona, thankfully they worked very quickly. Things went awry on March 25, when the Arizona Supreme Court ruled on a shameful lawsuit by shutting down two voucher programs that served special-needs and foster care kids. Even then, though, as my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow reported for School Reform News, there was a ray of light: [Executive director of the Arizona chapter of the Institute for Justice Tim] Keller said that remains a possibility in Arizona, where it could be accomplished by popular vote either through a legislatively initiated referendum or a citizens’ petition drive. “Right now, every conceivable legal option is still on the table,” he said. Fast forward 65 days to this monumental press release from the Alliance for School Choice:

President Obama made some remarks about education yesterday, and my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow got a chance to respond in this piece from Face The State: Ben DeGrow, education policy analyst for the Independence Institute, said he is glad to finally see Obama taking a strong position on education. “Obama the candidate and Obama the President has been all over the place on education reform, and it’s been hard to pin him down,” said DeGrow. “The comments in [Tuesday’s] speech are mostly promising, and we need to hold him to those comments.” [link added] In the Face the State piece, State Board of Education chairman Bob Schaffer also raised the point that Obama has given no indication of wanting to help stop an effort by Democrats in Congress to take away private tuition scholarships from poor kids in the nation’s capital. Still, the President’s message yesterday was largely on the right track. Among the less traditionally Democratic education reform ideas Barack Obama embraced are charter schools, accountability, and teacher performance pay. In the latter case, Obama seems to grasp the importance of the current problem with teacher quality: In his speech, the president issued a call for a […]