Monthly Archives: July 2012

Friday means I’m taking it easy, and leaving the work up to Choice Media TV‘s Bob Bowdon, who interviewed Jeff Kwitowski of K12, Inc., to talk about online education in this 8-minute video:

Not many people out there get the joy out of school funding figures, but understanding them clearly is crucial to the debate. Part of the problem? Depending on which source you look at, per-pupil spending and revenue data don’t always line up, something my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow pointed out in his 2006 backgrounder Counting the Cash. Last month, when the U.S. Census Bureau released its Public Education Finances report (PDF) for the 2009-10 school year, the Business Journals Network dryly proclaimed, “Public schools spending rose in fiscal 2010.” Interestingly enough, that’s not as much of a “dog bites man” headline as it would be for most years. Thinking back to 2009-10 (I was 5 then… big shock), and the recessionary effects of the financial crisis on tax revenues, it’s somewhat remarkable that spending rose nationwide. Of course, the borrowed spending of federal stimulus dollars chipped in. When are we going to be able to pay for it all? That’s another story for another day. Anyway, somewhat less shocking is the response analysis of the Colorado School Finance Project (COSFP), a group that makes a living off habitual claims that Colorado K-12 education is underfunded. Their latest output […]

For the record, it’s been more than three weeks since I’ve mentioned anything here about Douglas County. (So yes, I was gone for about two weeks of that, not blogging at all, but anyway….) In the meantime, quite a bit has happened — such as the 60,000-student school district became the state’s largest without a recognized teachers union. As of July 1, when the collective bargaining agreement expired, Dougco also stopped collecting dues for the union and its political activities. On June 21, receiving a clear signal that the reform-minded Board of Education wasn’t going to back down on its key proposals, the Douglas County Federation of Teachers (DCFT) sent a letter to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE) requesting state intervention. Read for yourself, but as best as my Education Policy Center friends can tell, union leaders’ argument boiled down to this: The Board made big changes to its proposals midway through the renegotiation process, right before open bargaining sessions began [without noting that the union’s very same request for intervention included several points in which the union was backing out of previous agreement]; We’ve had this monopoly bargaining power for 40-plus years; Our exclusive representative status […]

Even though it’s the middle of the summer, your (no, really, it will be fun) homework assignment is to read the new Wall Street Journal guest opinion column by the Cato Institute’s Andrew Coulson: Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers’ aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs.

While I was gone fishing, the National Education Association had its annual representative assembly. Apparently, nothing took place there like in 2009, when the outgoing NEA general counsel proclaimed the union’s true priorities. Actually, it’s more along the spirit of last year, though, when NEA delegates took both sides in the debate over using value-added measures for evaluations. Reading NEA Assembly reports from the Education Intelligence Agency’s Mike Antonucci, like this one, have become a belly-tickling annual tradition:

I left you with a school choice summertime smile, took a couple weeks to bask in the sun, only to return to find a host of good news on which to report: A bipartisan group of New Hampshire legislators overrode their governor’s veto to enact a brand-new tax credit scholarship program — the Cato Institute’s Adam Schaeffer highlights a couple of novel features that support parental choice to provide home education and allow the program to expand automatically to meet growing demand; Pennsylvania not only expanded its decade-old tax credit scholarship program for low- and middle-income families but also created a new program that expands choice for students in the lowest-performing 15 percent of schools; A June 27 bill signing by Gov. Bob McDonnell added Virginia to the growing number of states with educational tax credits, a move that offers opportunities to low- and middle-income families and many disabled students; and Mississippi became the 11th state to create a private school choice program for students with disabilities, in this case benefiting those with dyslexia. So yours truly leaves town for a couple weeks to get some fun and sun, and four states introduce or expand school choice. Do you think […]