Monthly Archives: December 2010

Colorado is a truly interesting place when it comes to education reform. If you follow this blog at all, you know what I mean. But seriously, how many states have a State Board of Education chair who is such a bold spokesman for empowering students and parents rather than propping up politics and the current system? Bob Schaffer isn’t your everyday education official. Don’t believe me? Check out what the former Congressman and Senate candidate (and current charter high school principal) wrote in his latest entry of the National Journal “experts” blog when asked about the turnaround process and the U.S. Department of Education’s school improvement grant program. Here’s an excerpt for the flavor: Only from behind the haughty parapets of Washington, D.C., would anyone consider it “good news” that taxpayers of a bankrupt government are dropping heaps more of yet-to-be-printed money on 730 failing public schools. It’s a bizarre stratagem, unashamedly rewarding failure with billions more of other peoples’ hard-earned cash. How otherwise sane people can actually expect the long-term outcome of this audacity to be anything but more failure is beyond the rest of us out here in the commonsense parts of the country.

It’s always fun to discover a great new education blog on a Friday. I’m talking about the blog “redefinED: the new definition of public education” by Florida reformers John Kirtley and Doug Tuthill (H/T Eduwonk). A series of their recent entries report and provide analysis from Jeb Bush’s very recent Excellence in Action conference in Washington, D.C. — including the hot topic of digital learning. More to come on that front later. Overall, the blog offers some interesting insights from a couple of experienced and thoughtful leaders in the movement to expand school choice and make our schools better. I agree that a large part of the battle of ideas surrounding education reform falls in the lap of how public education is understood to be defined, and look forward to reading Kirtley and Tuthill’s blog regularly.

I’m super busy working on a new Lego project today, so forgive me for keeping this one short. But I wanted to bring your attention to an investigative piece by Greg Campbell at the online Colorado news service Face The State. The story? “Stimulus funds lavished on special ed – even where the need is in decline.” Apparently, the $150 million in special education dollars kicked down from D.C. to Colorado in the 2009 stimulus (aka the magical money tree) isn’t necessarily paying attention to where the special education students are: In the Sheridan School District in Arapahoe County, for example, enrollment in special-ed programs fell 22 percent from 2005 to 2009. And yet the amount of federal money the district can spend on such programs ballooned by more than 105 percent between 2009 and 2010, thanks to an infusion of cash from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Likewise, Colorado Springs School District 11 saw its enrollment in special ed decline by 12 percent from 2005 to 2009, but the amount of federal money available to run such programs increased by 114 percent from 2009 to 2010. The same is true of several other districts, large and small, including […]