Tag Archives: interesting

Some day I might grow up to be cynical about education politics, but for now I see a big glimmer of hope. What do I mean? Look at yesterday’s Wall Street Journal: Low-income families in the District of Columbia got some encouraging words yesterday from an unlikely source. Illinois Senator Richard Durbin signaled that he may be open to reauthorizing the Opportunity Scholarship Program, a school voucher program that allows 1,700 disadvantaged kids to opt out of lousy D.C. public schools and attend a private school. “I have to work with my colleagues if this is going to be reauthorized, which it might be,” said Mr. Durbin at an appropriations hearing Tuesday morning. He also said that he had visited one of the participating private schools and understood that “many students are getting a good education from the program.” This could be the sign of a big turnaround for the influential Democratic senator, whom I have rightly critiqued in the past. At the Flypaper blog, Andy Smarick says Durbin’s statement “was a major step in the right direction”, and wonders if the D.C. 6’s dramatic sit-in a few weeks ago had an impact.

When not typing like I do for the blog, I use crayons (especially my favorite colors blue and green) to write in large block letters. On paper, mind you, not walls. I’ve learned that lesson! Anyway, that’s why I found interesting the new article in the Denver Post “Cursive increasingly out of loop in schools”: West Virginia’s largest school system teaches cursive, but only in the third grade. “It doesn’t get quite the emphasis it did years ago, primarily because of all the technology skills we now teach,” said Jane Roberts, assistant superintendent for elementary education in Kanawha County schools. For Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of “a gift.” Gulp. Not sure what different Colorado schools do about teaching handwriting, but I’m curious to know. Does anybody out there teach cursive with crayons? Or maybe I can just use one of those “script” fonts here on WordPress. Does anybody know how to do that?

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?

For teachable purposes, I like clear contrasts. You know: Black vs. white, Up vs. down, Chocolate ice cream vs. broccoli. But what about the world of education reform — specifically, teacher tenure? Two stories in particular popped up within hours of each other, and what a contrast they present. First, there’s this news from our neighbor to the east: A Kansas teacher says he was wrongfully terminated for his conservative views. Tim Latham has been teaching history and U.S. Government for over 19 years. But after teaching for just one year in the Lawrence School District in Lawrence, Kansas, Latham says his contract was not renewed because school officials did not like his conservative views — particularly a teacher website that Latham hosted and paid for himself. A teacher coach confronted him on that issue. If this indeed proves to be true, how sad it would be to see a teacher not only get persecuted for his unorthodox conservative patriotic views (unfortunately, it happens more than you may think) but also lose his job over it. He isn’t working for a private school. He’s working for a public school funded by taxpayer dollars! Latham has filed a grievance and said […]

Updated for accuracy (6/9) For 15 years we’ve had charter schools around in Colorado. By giving strong accountability along with a new level of freedom, our state has been one of the leaders in fostering innovation through charters. Going along with that, charter schools have now established themselves with strong bipartisan political support. Witness our own Democrat lieutenant governor Barbara O’Brien, who offered testified before a Congressional committee on Thursday. Denise at Colorado Charters highlighted the factors O’Brien pointed out as reasons for charter school success. But I thought this was the most interesting part of what Lt. Gov. O’Brien had to say:

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.

School choice doesn’t provide all the answers to our education challenges, but it’s becoming very hard to deny that choice in itself yields some positive results. Look at the new results (PDF) from the University of Arkansas’s School Choice Demonstration Project for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). Milwaukee isn’t just famous for that show about two women who work as brewery bottlecappers. The Wisconsin city is the granddaddy of school choice programs, and probably the best place for in-depth studies of all sorts of issues surrounding choice. And the School Choice Demonstration Project has brought together some of the best and most experienced education researchers – including Patrick Wolf, John Witte, and Jay Greene – to do just that. The series of studies released this week focus on everything from fiscal impacts to parental satisfaction to academic growth and real estate prices. Some of the more interesting findings:

The fight isn’t over yet, but things aren’t looking good for the 1,700 poor Washington D.C. kids who benefit from the federally-funded voucher program – kids like those featured in this compelling Heritage Foundation video (H/T Flypaper): Are you listening, Congress? Are you paying attention, President Obama?