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.

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According to reliable Rocky Mountain News education reporter Nancy Mitchell, the name of Denver Public Schools superintendent Michael Bennet is being bounced around as a serious candidate to serve as Secretary of Education:

The Newsweek columnist who broke the story of Barack Obama’s presidential bid is betting on Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet as the next U.S. secretary of education.

“I have my money on Bennet,” Jonathan Alter writes in the soon-to-be-printed Dec. 15 issue.

The others on Alter’s short list are Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Arne Duncan and Paul Vallas, head of New Orleans’ public schools.

The usually accessible Bennet is being coy about the column. He declined to comment directly.

Being superintendent of an urban school district is a tough job. From the standpoint of teacher innovation, parental choice, local empowerment, and student opportunity, it’s easy to argue that Michael Bennet has done better than most. The CSAP results that have come in show some small positive gains in DPS, but there is still much work to be done.

As this 2007 New Yorker feature story (Word document) shows, Bennet has worked tirelessly to take on the challenges. He has hit his share of bumps and made a few mistakes along the way, but he has continued to move forward and keep his focus on key reforms – all while avoiding the trap of popular discontent:

Van Schoales, urban education officer for the Denver-based Piton Foundation, said Bennet is one of the few U.S. superintendents able to implement painful changes – such as school closures – and keep his job with an elected school board.

“It’s important to have someone who can be articulate about what needs to happen,” Schoales said, “but do it in a way that doesn’t so alienate teachers and community folks.”

Barack Obama certainly could make a lot of worse appointments than Michael Bennet. Then again, it’s just the prediction of one Newsweek columnist. As of now, Bennett hasn’t even appeared on Fordham’s list of potential education secretary picks.

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With her column published yesterday, Independence Institute senior fellow and Face The State columnist Krista Kafer drops a fly or two into the early childhood education debate soup:

In Colorado, taxpayers spend $29 million a year on state preschool programs. Denver voters passed a sales tax in 2006 to subsidize preschool. According to a Denver Post article by Jeremy P. Meyer, 3,650 students receive subsidies. James Mejia, director of the Denver Preschool Program, told Meyer that “Studies show that for every dollar you spend on early childhood education, you will get back $10 to $12 in services you would otherwise be spending on social services, incarceration, remediation.”

Sounds great, but upon closer examination, this just isn’t true. The cost-benefit analyses routinely bandied about by advocates come up short. The analysis is largely based on exaggerated claims from a tiny subset of studies misrepresented as the whole. When the vast majority of research is considered, it becomes clear that preschool does not reap the amazing benefits touted by advocates.

Four decades of legitimate research actually shows that the majority of low-income children experience only short-term positive impacts and there is little long-term impact from preschool participation. Research also shows that preschool participation has no positive impact on children from middle or high income families, another ill-supported claim by advocates. Worse, preschool can have negative effects. Researchers at the National Institutes for Health and various universities have found adverse effects on children’s behavior resulting from early childhood education programs.

With the way some people are diving head first onto the universal preschool bandwagon, you’d think this issue were far more clear cut than it really is. Before dedicating public resources to any early childhood education program, people need to step back and take an honest look at the costs and benefits – benefits for kids, not for adults. They may be buying a Matchbox car with a broken wheel.

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Thanks to Intercepts’ Mike Antonucci for bringing our attention to this story…

San Diego Pulitzer prize-winning political cartoonist Steve Breen was invited to speak at a local public elementary school. A great opportunity for kids to see, right? Think about the kids in the school who are aspiring artists and creative thinkers. Right now, I like to draw pictures of race cars and army guys. Maybe I could do what Mr. Breen does someday.

Anyway, there’s more to the story – he has been “disinvited” because of this cartoon he drew:

Ed Morrissey at the Hot Air blog makes a great point about the cartoon:

A little harsh? Perhaps; the state of California hardly got hijacked by the unions against their will, at least not “Sacramento” as representing its government. The Democrats who run the state willingly allied themselves with these powerful unions and stuck it to the taxpayers on their behalf. Rename the ship “California Taxpayers” and that may be more on target.

Regardless, the union officials, school officials, or whoever is responsible for taking back Mr. Breen’s invitation only have helped to prove the point: It isn’t really about the kids, is it? It’s hard to deny that teachers union officials have a tight grip on the schools – at least those in California – seeing as how they have exalted their organization into such a sacred cow. That kind of hypersensitivity only makes them look more foolish to the rest of the world, including a 5-year-old from Colorado like me.

I’ve posted the cartoon in protest. Maybe your blog could do it, too.

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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 districts actually operate—e.g., in their curricular, hiring, and staffing practices.

Where else do choice and accountability “go hand-in-hand”? With my friends here at the Education Policy Center. I think Dan and Eric both are onto the right education reform message.

Don’t forget: only 19 shopping days ’till Christmas to find something for your favorite young edublogger prodigy…

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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!

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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 as the continuing frontrunner, with New York schools chancellor Joel Klein in second, and various Democratic pols like Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, former Mississippi Gov. Ray Mabus, and North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley in contention.

As for me, I’d like to see someone like Washington DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee in the job – someone who is no-nonsense about fixing the system to work for kids, no matter what the adult lobbying groups may think.

Who knows who it will be, though? I just hope that the paper from our friends at the University of Arkansas is at least a little bit persuasive.

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Reforming how teachers are paid to better match the goals that benefit students in our education system is a tricky business. On one hand you have some people who oversimplify the issue of “merit pay” and think that it should be quite easy to implement a new system that has a positive impact on student achievement. (Of course, there is a significant grain of truth in what they advocate, as an analysis of a pilot program in Little Rock has shown.)

On the other hand, you have entrenched opposition within elements of the education establishment who find it too hard to overcome the inertia that keeps the lockstep salary schedule in place. Paying teachers strictly for years of service and degrees is inefficient and ineffective, but a variety of obstacles are readily summoned to trip up any momentum toward compensation reform.

That’s why it’s great news to read about a Colorado school district like Eagle County that at least has been working outside the box for the past six years to re-design teacher pay. Most noteworthy is that their system not only includes significant rewards for boosting student test scores, but also that it’s showing broader support among district teachers.

Eagle County isn’t alone in our state. Other school districts have been fairly good on this front – with innovations from Denver’s ProComp (PDF) to Douglas County, Fort Lupton, and Harrison – but no one has moved completely away from the old salary schedule like this mountain district has done.

It’s been a developing process, one of improvement, but what Eagle County now has in place sure beats the old salary schedule. The Denver Post story explains how pay-for-performance was turned from a net negative to a net positive in their school district. More districts should pay heed and learn a lesson: not that leaving the old salary schedule is a scary step to be avoided, but that the road to reform has been paved by the experiences of others – creating an opportunity ready to be seized.

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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 of everything are hidden, and people who would like to make trade-offs in pursuit of more effective schools cannot do so.

Our school finance system has:

• a lot of money in it;
• considerable diversity in how much is spent, per state and per district;
• great complexity in terms of the financial interactions between states and localities and the federal government;
• patterns of inequitable distribution of state and local funds;
• federal programs that only partly compensate for inequities in state and local fund distribution;
• course funding practices that provide higher-paid teachers and smaller classes for students in elective classes; and
• complex expenditure patterns at the local level that cannot readily be tied to student outcomes.

Let’s talk about new and effective ways to revamp Colorado’s school finance system that address these issues. If you’re serious about the topic and want to learn more of the how as well as the why and wherefore, please read the entire paper (PDF).

We need to fund students, not programs and bureaucratic mandates. And more flexibility is required for local schools to spend money innovatively and effectively while being held accountable for the results. This shouldn’t be too much to ask. Then I might be able to believe in a better Colorado.

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