The kids in Denver were big winners when the local school board and teachers union headed off a potential strike at the eleventh hour. They also won when it was agreed that tense negotiations would be averted for another three years. But how well did they fare from the actual terms of the final compromise agreement made between DPS and DCTA?

Considering what might have been, Denver Public Schools students came out pretty well. Why? As the editors of the Rocky Mountain News pointed out yesterday, the school district’s nationally-known teacher performance pay program got a boost toward meeting its original purpose:

First, it dramatically increases the incentives available under ProComp. Several key bonuses for early and mid-career teachers will more than double, from $1,000 to $2,345 a year each. These incentives reward teachers who choose difficult-to-teach subjects, work in hard-to-staff schools and whose students improve in the classroom.

In that regard, a new incentive will be available to teachers in the schools ranking in the top 50 percent in growth of student achievement.

These changes will ensure that, compared with the existing agreement, much more money provided by the ProComp mill-levy will wind up with top-performing teachers and not sit in the bank.

The district now also will be better equipped to offer more in starting salary to attract high-quality candidates into the teaching workforce. Both of these factors are steps in the right direction. They address some of the weaknesses in the original ProComp, as highlighted by our own education policy analyst Ben DeGrow.

It now is up to the school board and teachers union members. For the sake of the students, their charge is clear: to ratify the agreement and move forward.

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If you are going to enter a debate with Dr. Jay Greene over what the research on school choice says, you had better at least come in fully armed. Leo Casey, the blogger for the American Federation of Teachers, made the accusation that Greene cherry-picks evidence, but he probably wasn’t prepared for this kind of intellectual smackdown:

If Leo Casey is going to make the charge of cherry picking and improperly citing evidence, he has to deliver proof of those charges. To the contrary, the facts indicate that Casey is the one cherry picking and improperly citing research.

Is there a union for playing fast and loose with the truth? Maybe Leo Casey should join it. Oh, I forgot. He’s already a member of the AFT.

By the time he had delivered this rhetorical punch, Greene had already dismantled Casey’s arguments in effective and short order. When will they ever learn? Never, of course. Admitting that 9 of the 10 high-quality school choice studies show solid evidence of academic gains would be self-defeating. (Then again, another new study has just shown positive results from the Ohio EdChoice voucher program.)

After digging into the question of how well school choice works, you may also want to educate yourself about the historical background of School Choice in the United States.

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Retiring Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo - and former president of the Independence Institute (long before I was even born) - has a great piece published in today’s Rocky Mountain News. Most people associate Rep. Tancredo with the issue of immigration, but his deepest roots go back into education as a former public school teacher and as regional representative for the U.S. Department of Education during the 1980s.

As he gives advice to Colorado’s current governor and one of his recent predecessors, the themes in Rep. Tancredo’s Speakout column are not novel or startling, but they’re important reminders we can’t hear enough:

Last week, Gov. Bill Ritter and former Gov. Roy Romer wrote a column about the state of education in America. In it, I believe they’ve unwittingly made a powerful argument for precisely the kind of educational reform that they have publicly opposed for many years: school choice….

If history has taught us anything, it is that solutions to some of the world’s most complex problems have come only when we have unleashed the power of the free market. The answer to the education problem, simply put, is more choices for parents, and more competition by schools for students. It is not another ambitious big government “solution” put together by the same special interests that have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo - a status quo that even Romer and Ritter admit leaves our students lagging far behind youngsters from Seoul and Singapore as they enter a newly competitive global economy.

In case someone reading this post is new to the site, I don’t mind repeating myself, too. The best tool to help parents understand and take control of their educational options in Colorado is our School Choice for Kids website. Check it out!

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Last week I told you about how charter schools in Aurora were getting shortchanged in a proposed bond measure. The local newspaper, the Aurora Sentinel, fired back at the charter schools with a strange and poorly informed editorial.

There’s no need to rehash all the places where the newspaper’s editors went wrong. Denise at Colorado Charters took care of it pretty well with a two-part series (here and here).

According to a 2007 Harvard University national survey, most Americans don’t really know much about charter schools. Though interestingly, support for charters and equalized funding for charters is much higher among those who actually understand how they work. Perhaps if the Aurora Sentinel editors were similarly well-informed, their opinion would change.

But the reason I wanted to bring this all to your attention was the full and fresh treatment given today at the online news shop Face The State. One of the Education Policy Center’s own is quoted in the story:

“The claim that charter schools lack accountability is laughable,” said Ben DeGrow, an education policy analyst with the Independence Institute, a Golden-based free market think tank and frequent supporter of charter schools. “In many ways they’re more accountable than traditional public schools. If charters are managed poorly or fail to meet academic performance standards, they actually can be shut down.” [link added]

That’s somebody I want to grow up to be like. Anyway, you really ought to read the whole story, and then work to help my friends here in the Education Policy Center educate the public about school choice in Colorado — and particularly in this case, charter schools.

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In an interview yesterday with reporter Nelson Garcia of 9News, our own Ben DeGrow offered a different point of view on the bevy of school district bond and mill levy elections slated for the Denver metro area this November (H/T Mount Virtus):

Ben DeGrow is the education policy analyst for the Education Policy Center within the Independence Institute, which is a conservative political think tank. DeGrow says too many middle class families are coping with high gas prices and a poor real estate market to think about raising their own property taxes for schools.

“This may be a tough year for JeffCo and other metro school districts to be asking for money,” said DeGrow.

JeffCo is just one of the major districts around Denver poised to ask voters for money this fall. Denver, Aurora, and Cherry Creek have also expressed the intent to place bond issues or mill levies on the November ballot along with a number of other districts across Colorado.

DeGrow says school districts place bond issues and mill levies on the ballot during presidential elections because that means more un-informed voters will come to the polls.

“You’re reaching into a base of voters who don’t necessarily have as much information who may be inclined to just give more money to schools because it sounds like the right thing to do,” said Degrow.

DeGrow says, instead, people should be asking districts how it can spend the money it already has more efficiently instead of trying to fix all problems by throwing more money into the system.

“Most studies show, there’s no connection between how much is spent and what the results are as far as student tests,” said DeGrow.

You can also find the video by following the link to the story. Ben’s interview follows up on similar points that Pam Benigno made to 9News a couple months ago.

As highlighted in this backgrounder Ben wrote, Colorado still ranks 26th in per-pupil spending at roughly $10,000 per pupil. It’s time for more school district budget transparency.

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The Education Policy Center people said they’re a little busy today. So instead of having them write anything, I asked them to show you this video, which makes a very compelling argument for school choice:

This clip from the 1980s British sitcom Yes Prime Minister should be required viewing for education policy makers. It may come from overseas, and it may be 20 years old, but the brilliant common sense that flows through the satire in this piece feels like a breath of fresh air for Colorado. Of course - for the choices already available to them, Colorado families have a great resource in the School Choice for Kids website.

(H/T Jay Greene, via What’s Wrong With the World?)

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Okay, I think it’s a long and boring paper, but Ben in the Education Policy Center says the new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality is very important.

What it boils down to is there are a lot of rules, mostly written by well-meaning people, that end up negatively affecting how well kids learn in the classroom. The NCTQ report Invisible Ink in Collective Bargaining proves the realization that more damage is often done by lawmakers at the state level than by the private union negotiations at the local level.

The report’s authors say there are three major reasons this “preeminence of state authority” is so poorly misunderstood:

• The old media doesn’t much either understand or pay attention to the issues that govern education–namely, “few have focused on the outsized influence of the teachers union in the statehouse.”
• Neither school district or union officials have a vested interest in bringing public attention to their private bargaining sessions. Short of threats to strike, the media doesn’t get how the issues that are negotiated locally have an impact on education’s bottom line.
• Few scholars have researched the impact of collective bargaining on — or “the origin and history of state involvement in” — public education. Into this vacuum, pro-union and anti-union ideologies devolve into shouting matches.

One good example of research that others could emulate can be found in Dr. Terry Moe’s Collective Bargaining and the Performance of Public Schools. Interestingly, my friends in the Education Policy Center also are among the few that have paid attention to these issues. The Independence Institute has focused on these broader concerns through local Colorado examples, with such reports as Take Public Funds off the Negotiating Table and Nullifying the Probationary Period.

Because more research is badly needed, the general proposal of the NCTQ report is a great idea:

Better data and more transparency can dismantle myths and assumptions about collective bargaining and the role of unions, calling to task ideologically based positions. It is the surest path to achieving more informed negotiations and responsible results out of statehouses and decisions that are geared toward the best interests of school children.

Hey, that includes me! Okay, I guess I like this report, too.

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There’s a big hubbub today about CSAP results being announced. For those of you who don’t know, CSAP stands for Colorado Student Assessment Program - it’s the battery of tests in reading, writing, math, and science that help people to see how well schools and students are performing. The folks in the Education Policy Center and others like them get really excited on days like this, because of all the new information and what story it might tell. I guess this year is really special, because a new “growth model” has been introduced that allows for better measurement of individual student and school progress from year to year.

Me? I haven’t had to take any CSAPs yet - frankly, I could do without tests altogether. But I understand why many people might think they are important.

Anyway, the Rocky Mountain News has the basic rundown on the latest CSAP scores, and once again, hoped-for progress is not being achieved:

Results were up in 11 of the 24 tests given in reading, writing and math in grades 3 through 10. Scores were down in seven tests and unchanged in six.

Reading and math scores were generally up, with more grades seeing declines in writing.

Combining all grades, 67.8 percent of test-takers achieved proficiency in reading — considered grade level. In writing, 53.4 percent were proficient or above and, in math, 53.2 percent achieve proficiency.

On the state science exams, given only in grades 5, 8 and 10, 45.8 percent of students scored proficient or above.

Older grades continued to produce the lowest scores. Fewer than half of the state’s ninth- and tenth-graders were proficient in writing and math.

Not so good. The Republicans in the state senate are saying this is all the more reason for advancing education reform, and not taking any steps back:

[Assistant minority leader Nancy] Spence, a veteran voice for education reform at the Capitol, also denounced repeated attempts by some legislative Democrats to gut the hotly debated CSAP testing program.

“They don’t like getting bad news. Well, neither do I,” she said. “Just because kids aren’t making significant gains on the test doesn’t mean you throw it out. You don’t shoot the messenger, you fix the problem.”

I can’t help but agree with Senator Spence. Colorado took a small step forward in school autonomy and innovation this year, but it isn’t time to give up on accountability and it’s definitely time to move forward on empowering parents through school choice.

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Clint Bolick - one of the heroes of the school choice movement - had a piece in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week about the political possibilities of reaching out to Hispanics on the school choice issue (H/T Matt Ladner):

Hispanic votes will be crucial in key battleground states, including Florida, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. George W. Bush won 40% of Hispanic votes in 2004, but support slipped to 30% for GOP congressional candidates in 2006. Mr. Obama fared poorly among Hispanics in the presidential primaries, while Mr. McCain carried 74% of Hispanic votes when he won re-election to the Senate in 2004. All that adds up to this: Hispanics voting on school choice could tip the balance of the election.

Hispanic voters are overwhelmingly young and have exhibited a propensity toward political independence — and no issue is more tangible for them than educational opportunity. If Hispanics align their voting with the educational interests of their children, it could alter the electoral landscape — not merely for this election, but permanently.

Of course, a great tool for parents - including Hispanics - to learn more about their Colorado educational options is the School Choice for Kids website … available both in English and en Espanol.

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My parents and my friends at the Education Policy Center say that school is a place for learning what I need to be successful some day, and that includes hearing both sides of an argument. It’s kind of scary then to see that some schools are busy indoctrinating kids.

As the Heartland Institute points out, the British High Court ruled that due to at least 11 scientific errors contained in Al Gore’s feature-length movie An Inconvenient Truth, schools who show the movie to students in class must balance the presentation with contradictory evidence.

In Colorado, our Governor Bill Ritter has made it clear he wants all K-12 students “to understand the science of climate change.” Yet as more students are exposed to this topic, it is important they receive a balanced presentation and not an uncritical indoctrination from Al Gore’s movie.

The British approach is to make a universal mandate for all their classrooms. But in Colorado, we value local control. One way then to ensure your public school student is not being indoctrinated in climate change hysteria or anything else is to petition the local school board or your school principal. Of course, school leaders are more likely to listen to the concerns of students and parents where they have the power of choice and can use their feet to find someplace that doesn’t indoctrinate.

An important tool helping parents to become good education consumers is our School Choice for Kids website - search to find the right school near you! As for me, I’ve still got a lot of time before school begins again. I’m going to go enjoy it.

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