Monthly Archives: June 2014

I had planned to post this good news with you on Monday. But then sickness intervened. Not me, mind you. But the website itself was maliciously attacked, perhaps by someone who doesn’t like what this little kid has to say. Well, better late than never. And more to come soon. You hang around these big policy wonk people long enough, and sometimes you can be overwhelmed by all the “nuance” and “qualifications” and “ambiguity.” It’s not every day you get to see the guys in the black hats flummoxed, foiled, and defeated, while the guys in the white hats celebrate a clear-cut victory. Maybe on one of my grandpa’s old cowboy shows, or on one of the silly cartoons my parents watched growing up. But not so often in education news — unless you count late Friday afternoon:

Another Jeffco school board meeting, another set of fun or crazy things to talk about. These meetings have become a regular kind of twisted entertainment for my family, I think. As best as I can tell, three big items went down last night. The Denver Post and some other major media focused on the finalized contract for Dan McMinimee — which meets my expressed hopes of sending “the right message to tie a significant portion of the new superintendent’s pay to measures of performance.” Chalkbeat reporter Nic Garcia covered a second important development, namely that the school board rejected the teachers union contract proposal

Time flies when you’re young and enjoying early summertime fun. Why, it was only last week I told you all about the bad smell left by a new book attacking private schools with weak and questionable data. Thanks, Patrick Wolf and Education Next. However, in writing that post, I may have made a mistake. It’s not easy for a stubborn little edublogger to admit he should change his mind, but a new development this week might just do it. I wrote the following sentence: “It’s extraordinarily challenging to make broad, facile comparisons between the two sectors of education.” It may not be terribly challenging at all to make simplistic comparisons. What’s more, it appears eminently possible to make meaningful comparisons between public and private schools on a number of academic data points. Yesterday, the local nonprofit group ACE Scholarships released a pilot analysis showing how scholarship students in 6 of their 150 partner schools fare compared with charter and other public school options available.

I have my reasons for doing so. But today’s entry will be easy on both of us (unless perhaps you’re a legislator or other policymaker). The Friedman Foundation has done it again, releasing last week a thorough and thoughtful study of state regulatory impacts on private schools — before and after choice is enacted. So easy because author Andrew Catt’s research led to the development of this: Breaking Down "Public Rules on Private Schools: Measuring the Regulatory Impact of State Statutes on School Choice Programs" from The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice