Search Results for: krista kafer

A couple days ago I brought your attention to the closure of a struggling Denver charter school, but made the point: For every Amandla that (as far as I can tell) deserves to be shut down, there is a Cesar Chavez, West Denver Prep, Ridgeview Classical, and many other Colorado charter schools that are doing great work providing families successful alternatives to the traditional public education model. That’s great, you might say, but how can I figure out what makes a charter school good or not? Well, have no fear. My friend and Education Policy Center senior fellow Krista Kafer has co-authored a report for the Colorado Department of Education called A Typology of Colorado Charter Schools 2009 (PDF). The more dedicated among you may want to dive right into the report, but I suggest you whet your appetite for this important topic first by listening to a brand-new iVoices podcast that Krista recorded with Center director Pam Benigno: Near the end of the podcast, you also will hear Krista talk about her newly updated issue paper A Chronology of School Choice in the U.S. (PDF). If you haven’t read it already, please check it out!

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 […]

Yes, I’m not ashamed to admit it: I’m a big (and maybe the youngest) fan of Krista Kafer. The column Krista wrote for yesterday’s Rocky Mountain News is just the latest reason — even though she does tell readers to do more homework: While rankings and other analysis can provide the public and parents confidence in charter schools as a whole, school-by-school information is actually more important to individual families. When considering public schools – whether district-run or charter – the [School Accountability Report] is great place to start when choosing a school. Parents shouldn’t stop there. They should check out other sources of information such as www.greatschools.net, www.schoolmatters.com and www.schoolchoiceforkids.org. Next they should visit the school’s Web site and the school building. You don’t have to be an education expert to recognize student disengagement, apathy or boredom. Kids wandering aimlessly, teachers yelling angrily or trash scattered about the floor – these would be bad signs. Talking to other parents, teachers and students is a must. Families who want to look for a charter school for their child, or to take advantage of the open enrollment process and find a different traditional public school, you have to read the whole […]

Today seemed like a good day to get out of the hot kitchen and look at a topic I haven’t addressed in awhile: blended learning. You know what I mean. According to the Clayton Christensen Institute, it’s: a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online learning, with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace; at least in part in a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home; (3) and the modalities along each student’s learning path within a course or subject are connected to provide an integrated learning experience. Fittingly, then, a new piece by the Christensen Institute’s Michael Horn shares how his group is partnering up with Evergreen Education “to find more districts that are obtaining good results for students—concrete and objective—from blended learning.” This is just the kind of needed project to track the particulars of an emerging education program trend. What’s working, what’s not, etc.?

The great blended learning experiment continues its historic ascension in our beautiful Rocky Mountain state. Independence Institute education senior fellow Krista Kafer has documented it better than anyone. Last year it was The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning in Colorado. Apparently, the not-so-long-ago, cutting-edge sphere of blended learning has not just made it past the ground level but is heading into the lofty (or should I say friendly?) skies. Just this week my Education Policy Center friends released Krista’s awaited sequel School District Partnerships Help Colorado K-12 Blended Learning Take Flight. Take flight? Can’t you picture me wearing my goggles, flying a World War I-era Sopwith Camel? Better yet, behind the controls of a state-of-the-art Rocketship heading to explore strange new worlds in outer space? Or maybe just playing in the back yard (away from power lines) with my new kite? Seriously, though, Krista’s report follows the action in some key places in various parts of the state:

It’s Friday, time for my version of the Dagwood sandwich, the supreme pizza, or burrito with everything (please!). The only difference is this hodgepodge is going to be about online and blended learning. I’ll leave it up to you to find a way to “blend” all the pieces together before pouring some chili sauce on top. Okay, not literally. First, one of the most successful and noteworthy blended learning providers is expanding to another major city. Blast off with me in celebration at the news that Rocketship Education will be opening a school in the nation’s capital in 2015: Hooray!! Add Washington, D.C., to the list of Milwaukee and Nashville as expansion sites from the original California launching pad.

You may not know what blended learning is. You probably can’t recite all the different categories of blended learning — though you would stand a better chance if you had read Krista Kafer’s paper on The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning in Colorado. One particular passage in Kafer’s paper highlights the rise of a particular form of blended learning that certainly seems to owe its origins to Colorado:

What would it be like to be the youngest person (by far) in a class? Would the situation be better if the class were a virtual one? Well, count me in, or at least count some of my Education Policy Center friends in for this free opportunity from the Clayton Christensen Institute: There’s plenty of buzz around blended learning [link added] and its transformational potential. But what does it really mean? You can now get the inside track on this growing movement by participating in our upcoming Blended Learning MOOC—a massive open online course—taught by our own Michael B. Horn, Brian Greenberg of Silicon Schools Fund, and Robert Schwartz of the New Teacher Center. The course begins October 15, so be sure to register as soon as possible. The class will explore the different types of blended-learning models as well as key issues that impact students, teachers, and schools. Specifically, the instructors will examine these issues through the lens of three high-performing schools that each implements a different model of blended learning. A few of the key topics will include:

The birthday of the late, great economist Milton Friedman is in two days. He would have been 99 years old. Since the anniversary of Friedman’s birth falls on a Sunday and I won’t be blogging then, what better time to commemorate him and his passionate life’s work to expand school choice? In the Education Policy Center’s ever-evolving issue paper — A Chronology of School Choice in the U.S. — senior fellow Krista Kafer describes the seminal contribution he made to this important movement: At mid-century, the concept of a ‘voucher’ for parents first appeared in 1955 in the article “The Role of Government in Education” by economist Milton Friedman, who would later win the Nobel Prize in economics. [link added] Robert Enlow, who heads up the Foundation for Educational Choice (created to carry on Milton and wife Rose Friedman’s legacy of school choice advocacy), penned a great op-ed yesterday that brings together a confluence of important events:

If you gave me a big box of crayons and asked me to write a manifesto, it’s probably not what I would have come up with. But I am glad to give it a big thumbs up, and hope that lots of big people sign on. What am I talking about? Closing the Door on Innovation: Why One National Curriculum is Bad for America: We, the undersigned, representing viewpoints from across the political and educational spectrum, oppose the call for a nationalized curriculum in the Albert Shanker Institute Manifesto “A Call for Common Content.” We also oppose the ongoing effort by the U.S. Department of Education to have two federally funded testing consortia develop national curriculum guidelines, national curriculum models, national instructional materials, and national assessments using Common Core’s national standards as a basis for these efforts. We agree that our expectations should be high and similar for all children whether they live in Mississippi or Massachusetts, Tennessee or Texas. We also think that curricula should be designed before assessments are developed, not the other way around. But we do not agree that a one-size-fits-all, centrally controlled curriculum for every K-12 subject makes sense for this country or for any […]