It’s a busy Friday at the end of a sad and difficult week. So I’m happy just to follow Mike Antonucci’s witty lead. Today on his Intercepts blog he pointed out some true “Hedge Fund Hilarity” in a Wall St. Journal column about national teachers union president Randi Weingarten “trying to strong-arm pension trustees not to invest in hedge funds or private-equity funds that support education reform.”

(That’s the same Randi Weingarten who has stepped forward as the face of the opposition to Douglas County’s bold agenda of innovating and re-imagining public education.)

To which Antonucci cuttingly replied:

Am I the only one who sees the irony in the American Federation of Teachers bellyaching about people using teachers’ money for causes they might not support?

At the risk of sticking my neck out there by responding to a rhetorical question, even this naive young edublogger has to answer, No, you’re not alone. Sigh. Is it the weekend yet?

2 Comments »

Update, 3/25: Happy endings don’t usually come so quickly. But just one week later, Dougco has made and received confirmation on a number of online transparency improvements to now receive an A-minus grade.

If you’ve followed little old Eddie for any length of time, you know I’m a fan of the following two things: open government and the education reform pioneers on the Douglas County school board. So needless to say, when I learned that the group Sunshine Review gave DougCo a ‘D’ letter grade for transparency, I did a double-take. Huh?

After all, this was the first school district in Colorado to open and advertise all its union negotiations so the public could look on. They showed that honest discussions about important but sometimes controversial policies can be held in the light of day without causing any harm or great expense. Sunshine Review didn’t seem to take that much into account.

Going back even further, before the law required them to do so, DougCo and Jefferson County were the two premiere leaders in creating a searchable online database of all expenditures. And if anything, it’s even better and more user-friendly today. Not to mention all the other financial information they’ve appropriately posted online. DougCo also has gone above and beyond with a series of videos to explain the budget and budget process. Shouldn’t that be given more weight?

So what in the Sunshine Review formula downgraded DougCo so badly? Union leaders and other reform opponents hang their hat on a complaint the extra amount of time the Board has to spend behind closed doors in executive session dealing with legal matters. One Board member, Craig Richardson, explained the situation aptly: “I particularly find difficult to swallow the concept that parties can sue and then complain about the amount of time we spend talking to our lawyers.” Continue Reading »

2 Comments »

A powerful research report released today from a big study confirms what anyone paying attention to the urban charter school movement already should have noticed. KIPP produces big gains for students:

KIPP middle schoolers learn significantly more than comparison students, concludes a report by Mathematica Policy Research on 43 schools in 13 states plus the District of Columbia. Three years after enrollment, the average KIPP student gained an extra 11 months in math, moving from the 44th to the 58th percentile, and eight months in reading, moving from the 46th to the 55th percentile. Science gains equalled an extra 14 months and social studies an extra 11 months.

Following up on research released in the summer of 2010, Mathematica confirmed earlier findings that KIPP doesn’t benefit from attracting more gifted students than those left behind in surrounding schools. Mike Feinberg, the cage-busting co-founder of the national, no-excuses charter school network, notes among other findings: Continue Reading »

1 Comment »

The last couple days I’ve been pretty busy playing outside, given all the snow we’ve been covered with here in Colorado. You should see the snow fort my friends and I put together in my backyard. We’ve set it up so no one else can get in — especially icky girls! If you try, beware of a barrage of icy cold snow balls!!

Apparently, that’s kind of like the attitude many teachers union officials have about schools. They’re a little more sophisticated about it, of course, writing rules that keep competing professional associations outside school walls so teachers can never hear from them. An almost-hot-off-the-virtual-presses School Reform News article by my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow tells how some teachers are urging Kansas lawmakers to change the policy: Continue Reading »

No Comments »

A few weeks ago an article by the I-News Network (“an independent, nonprofit journalism project that creates long-form investigative reports, in partnership with major daily newspapers and has recently accepted significant funding from wealthy Democrat activist Tim Gill”) portrayed Colorado minorities as victims of inadequate tax funding of education:

Regardless of which way the causal arrow runs, poverty and education are intertwined across the range of societal distress. Several experts said the state’s pullback in funding education over the past two decades has narrowed the path for escaping poverty.

Between 1992 and 2010, according to Census data, Colorado plunged from 24th to 40th on overall state spending per student for K-12 education. When compared to per capita personal income, Colorado ranked 45th among the states on K-12 spending.

Today The Gazette in Colorado Springs published a powerful response from my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow: Continue Reading »

No Comments »

Back in early December my Education Policy Center friends helped put on a State Capitol event, laying out ideas for dramatic “backpack funding” reforms that need to be at the heart of this year’s keystone school finance debates. We’ve been waiting awhile now to see what Senator Johnston’s “Grand Bargain” legislation might look like.

I can get impatient about these things. As Ed News Colorado reports, the time is drawing near, but legislative leaders are proceeding deliberately: Continue Reading »

No Comments »

Thanks to Ed News Colorado, my attention today was brought to an interesting Education Week story by Stephen Sawchuk that says colleges of education are graduating too many elementary school teachers:

Finally, the tendency toward oversubscription in the elementary fields is also a function of candidates’ interest, said Amee Adkins, an associate dean of the college of education at Illinois State University, in Normal, and the president of the Illinois Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.

“It’s content material they were less intimated [sic] by,” she said, ticking off a list of reasons. “Kids are cuter when they’re little. And it’s probably when [the candidates] remember having the most fun in school.”

The Education Intelligence Agency’s Mike Antonucci has been on the case of “teacher shortage alarmists” for quite awhile now, a much needed service. But I don’t think that until now there has ever been evidence so compelling to shoot down the alarmists’ case. Continue Reading »

No Comments »

I love lists, I love education, and I love to tell people about things. So it should be no surprise that my attention was caught by yesterday’s news release from Stanford: “Hoover Institution Education Experts Identify News Media Hits and Misses in 2012 Education Coverage.” The Koret Task Force on Education named five stories that were well-covered and five that were neglected. First, the hits:

1. Charter schools
2. Teachers’ unions
3. Special education
4. Pre-Kindergarten education
5. No Child Left Behind

Next, the misses: Continue Reading »

No Comments »

A new Cato Institute education blogger, Jason Bedrick, highlights the work of the Independence Institute’s Education Policy Center in a posting today with a message that certainly needs to be repeated: “Public schools cost more than Americans think.” Bedrick cites Ben DeGrow’s recent interview with 9News disputing Colorado school funding figures, and makes a couple salient observations:

1. Bedrick attacks the news report’s underlying notion that “the amount of money spent per child in the public schools is a matter of political opinion to be legitimately debated rather than an empirical fact” — don’t take the dollar figures someone states at face value; check out the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) data!
2. Bedrick also believes reporter Nelson Garcia was asking the wrong question: “He wanted to know the amount of state tax dollars that public school districts receive per pupil. The more relevant question is what is actually spent per pupil, including local and federal sources of funding.”

Continue Reading »

1 Comment »

With spooky Halloween almost upon us, it’s probably not terribly surprising to witness the one-sided horrible picture of TABOR painted in yesterday’s Colorado Springs Gazette (H/T Complete Colorado). Under the headline, “TABOR has decimated education, critics say,” we are given such insights as the following:

“It’s been devastating,” said Gustafson, Colorado Springs School District 11’s chief financial officer.

When asked about TABOR, Gustafson nearly exploded. He said that over the past six years, his district has lost 
$35 million because of 
TABOR. In response to the spending restrictions, he said, the district has slashed teacher salaries, closed nine schools, increased class sizes twice, eliminated new programs, haven’t updated technology or books, dropped maintenance hugely, and even lowered school temperatures in the winter.

“Our grounds look like crap because we can’t even afford to water them,” Gustafson said.

I’m glad he didn’t explode! When you make comparisons afforded by the most recent available numbers from the Colorado Department of Education, the devastation becomes, well, less apparent for District 11. From 2000-01 to 2010-11: Continue Reading »

No Comments »