Tag Archives: positive

It’s Thursday, and that means it’s Jefferson County day for yours truly. Okay, I made the Thursday thing up just now, but we are indeed going to talk about Jeffco. Don’t suit up and brace yourselves for more negativity quite yet, though; today’s post will isn’t about teacher sick-outs, student protests, or an inexplicable disdain for more representative curriculum review committees. Instead, I’d like to highlight a Denver Post article about some positive efforts by a group called the Edgewater Collective to improve educational outcomes for some of Jeffco’s most at-risk students. As you may have noticed, many anti-reform groups try to whitewash any assertion that Jeffco may have some room for improvement by arguing that the district as a whole is doing well compared to neighboring districts. As much as I wish that rosy picture were entirely accurate, it isn’t. It masks the fact that certain areas within Jeffco are in desperate need of attention. And even when that fact is acknowledged, it is too often swept aside as “unfixable” or “out of our control.” Nowhere is the need for change more obvious than the Jefferson Articulation Area within Edgewater, where the overwhelming majority of students are low-income and […]

I don’t know a lot about India, except that a whole lot of people live there and my parents love the food (Me? I’ll stick with hot dogs and mac & cheese). But then yesterday I found this story about a study of India’s education system (PDF): We find that the teacher performance pay program was highly effective in improving student learning. At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in comparison schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations (SD) in math and language tests respectively….

I like feeling safe. My parents like knowing I’m reasonably safe from all kinds of violence when I go to school, too. A lot of times where we live, we can take that kind of school safety for granted. But as a new report co-produced by the Heritage Foundation and the Lexington Institute (PDF) chronicles the dangers many students face in D.C. Public Schools and the need for greater choice: In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education reported that 11.3 percent of D.C. high school students reported being “threatened or injured” with a weapon while on school property during the previous year—a rate well above the national average…. The data reveal that during the 2007–2008 school year, police responded to more than 900 calls to 911 reporting violent incidents at the addresses of D.C. public schools and more than 1,300 events concerning property crimes. The data reveal a wide variance in the locations of these reported incidents. Some public schools with high rates of 911 calls are located within high-crime neighborhoods. In addition, while one should use these data with care when comparing the relative safety of public, charter, and private schools, this data set shows that a drastically higher […]

The more parents know and experience school choice, the more satisfied they are with it. The Friedman Foundation’s newly-released survey of 808 parents who have participated in Florida’s scholarship tax credit program is just the latest and most overwhelming proof. Florida’s eight-year-old program provides full tax credit to corporations donating to qualified scholarship granting organizations. Those groups provide scholarships worth up to $3,950 (or full tuition) for low-income students to enroll in the private school of their choice. According to the Friedman report, the latest numbers show 23,259 Florida students attending private school on a tax credit scholarship. Simply put, participating parents love it:

Last year Colorado passed the Innovation Schools Act, which I applauded as a positive step forward. But our state isn’t the only one to see greater need for public school flexibility to make personnel decisions in the best interests of students. Look at Michigan. The Detroit Free Press recently reported on a legislative proposal “to allow teachers and parents to convert their local schools into independently run schools with more flexible rules.” Known as Senate Bill 636, the proposal would enable the creation of so-called “neighborhood schools”, especially targeted toward high at-risk student populations.

Yesterday I brought news of a troubling development at the State Capitol. Today, I decided to shift to the positive — because hope for autistic children in Colorado is just a bit brighter. School choice champion Senator Nancy Spence‘s Senate Bill 130 passed one house of the state legislature, reports Colorado Senate News: Spence, a leading statehouse voice for school reform, faced months-long opposition from charter school opponents, who argued that the plan would take money away from public schools and provide an unnecessary service to children with autism. Spence maintained that the bill isn’t about taking on the public-education bureaucracy or taking funding from public schools; it’s about providing autistic children with a school that specifically serves their unique needs, she said. “We have a responsibility to do more for families struggling to address the needs of their autistic kids,” Spence said. “Children suffering from this disorder are just one small subsection of our society that aren’t being adequately served by our public schools.”

Rather than dwell on the latest anti-D.C. scholarship program developments that have me burning angry again (I hope this group stands up and does something about it), I decided to focus on the positive this Monday morning. Colorado’s charter school parents and other school choice supporters have another great resource at their disposal. If you haven’t checked out the new website A Parent’s Voice, you’re missing out on a terrific resource – one that complements our own School Choice for Kids site. Recently, my Education Policy Center friend Pam Benigno sat down with A Parent’s Voice creator and charter school mom Donnell Rosenberg to discuss the background and features of the site. You can listen to their iVoices podcast conversation here: Right now, Colorado is relatively blessed by our political situation as it pertains to school choice. But none of it — whether it’s open enrollment, charter schools, or online education — should be taken for granted. To ward off potential anti-choice political attacks like what’s transpiring in Washington D.C., as well as to enhance your child’s educational opportunities (both present and future), it is very important to arm yourself with the best information tools possible. A Parent’s Voice is […]

Every child is always a winner … Children just need better self-esteem … We only need to use positive incentives to help children learn more … Let’s reward the good but pretend like the bad doesn’t exist … I’m only 5 years old, and I get that this is marshmallow world nonsense. In fact, it’s the kind of silliness that makes many people question (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) the value of much of what goes on in public education. It gets even worse when the principle is applied not only to students, but also to teachers. At least if the union has its way. Witness the evidence from Chicago, a city with many failing schools: principal evaluations found only 3 out of every 1,000 teachers had unsatisfactory performance. While unions thrive on fears of bogeyman administrators who take out their vindictiveness on good teachers they don’t like, this evidence at least indicates the problem tips in the other direction. In any case, wouldn’t a more objective data system be better?

I’m at home. My parents said the break from school is for something called Presidents Day. Among other things, our greatest presidents were gifted with tremendous common sense. While that often doesn’t seem to be the case with the way our public school system is run, a couple stories in the news give me a little hope that this might change. First, it’s good to see Boulder students tell their peers that the idea to rename a high school after a President who has been in office less than a month, who has accomplished nothing of significance, and who already has broken several campaign promises, is truly the height of silliness. Second, it’s good to see Aurora student Marie Morrow, who was busted for having a fake gun drill prop in her truck at school, is not suspended anymore. Now if we can do something to fix the “zero-tolerance” absurdity, we may have gained something positive from this experience. It’s truly hard to imagine what great men like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln would have to say about cases like the ones in Boulder and Aurora. But welcome to Colorado in the year 2009.