Tag Archives: Parents

I deserve to go to school in a safe, well-constructed facility. But my parents and I also deserve a clearer accounting of how the money is to be spent. Colorado school districts are putting a record $2.5 billion in construction bond proposals on this November’s ballot. Do the people going to the polls have the information they need? One of my friends here at the Education Policy Center has good reason to think that isn’t the case: “My hypothesis is the larger turnout means (districts) are reaching into a voter base that is generally less informed about local issues and more inclined to give money to schools because it sounds like it is the right thing to do,” said Ben DeGrow, education-policy analyst for the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank based in Golden. Denver Public Schools is asking for $454 million, Douglas County $395 million, and Jefferson County $350 million, not to mention the proposals of 12 other school districts. And not to mention proposed mill-levy increases that add to the total. DeGrow, however, said he thinks Colorado residents might be growing weary of tax increases. “Taxpayers keep getting taken for more and more,” DeGrow said. “That adds up […]

Yesterday I told you about the Democrats’ national education platform. So what about the other side? I had to go to bed while it was still going on, but my mom and dad said that Republican presidential candidate John McCain gave an important speech last night. He talked about education: Education — education is the civil rights issue of this century. Equal access to public education has been gained, but what is the value of access to a failing school? We need… We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empower parents with choice. Let’s remove barriers to qualified instructors, attract and reward good teachers, and help bad teachers find another line of work. When a public school fails to meet its obligations to students, parent — when it fails to meet its obligations to students, parents deserve a choice in the education of their children. And I intend to give it to them. Some may choose a better public school. Some may choose a private one. Many will choose a charter school. But they will have the choice, and their children will have that opportunity. Sen. Obama wants our schools to answer to unions and entrenched bureaucrats. […]

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 […]

According to the Rocky Mountain News, some educators in the Denver area – at least at one elementary school – are starting to adjust the school day to help boys: A not-so-quiet revolution is taking place in reading and writing instruction inside some classrooms at Hackberry Hill Elementary School in Arvada. Students are encouraged to get up and move, stretch and talk about their work every 20 minutes or so. Brain breaks, Principal Warren Blair calls them. In some cases, boys are also allowed to write about things that might have previously been frowned upon — bodily functions come to mind, or anything with a good gross-out factor. It’s part of the school’s attempts to address a global phenomenon, reinforced by recently released Colorado Student Assessment Program test results, showing boys consistently scoring lower than girls in reading and writing. Hey, I like this idea of a brain break. Sometimes you have to be creative to find ways to address the needs of different students. But I was left wondering what Hackberry Hill parents think of the idea. It would be interesting to see what moms and dads think. After all, they know their kids best. In writing about the […]

More clear, accurate, available and usable information about public education is a good thing – good for parents, teachers, policy makers, and taxpayers — and ultimately for students like me. One good example of a step forward in this area is the Colorado Department of Education (CDE)’s new student growth model, featured in today’s Denver Post: The model shows how students have grown academically compared with peers in the same grades with similar scores on the Colorado Student Assessment Program over the past two years. “The bottom line is, the model tells us how much growth the child has made and whether that growth is good enough to meet state standards,” said Richard Wenning, associate education commissioner. Other states have adopted growth models, but Colorado is the nation’s first to use percentiles to describe the growth, Wenning said. Fortunately, the growth model doesn’t just compare students with their peers. It also uses an objective standard: