At the other end of the poverty – and fund-raising – spectrum is Johnson Elementary in southwest Denver, which reported fewer than $3,000 in private gifts in 2010-11.

If a donation of five or six figures came through the door of the school, where 96 percent of students are low-income, said Principal Robert Beam, “You’d be writing a story about a principal who is dancing in the streets all day long.”

The timing of the story is remarkable. Why? Yesterday substantial checks went out to 14 metro area public schools and 2 public charter management organizations (CMOs) serving high-poverty student populations, with awards totaling $500,000. And they didn’t just go out to schools based on need, but to schools with a proven record of serving their students well:

Award winners were selected based on a variety of factors, including academic performance and growth, percentage of students qualifying for the Federal free and reduced lunch benefit, school culture, leadership, and instructional effectiveness.

So states the media release from the benefactor Foundation For Great Schools, a coalition of five private Colorado foundations, including the Daniels Fund (which also helps support my Education Policy Center friends). When they cite “academic performance and growth,” they aren’t kidding. All 16 recipients earn an A or B from the new Colorado School Grades site:

• Montview Math and Science Elementary (Aurora)
• Tollgate Elementary (Aurora)
• South Elementary (Brighton)
• Ricardo Flores Magon Academy (Charter School Institute – Westminster)
• Community Leadership Academy middle school (Charter School Institute – Commerce City)
• Beach Court Elementary (Denver)
• Bryant Webster Dual Language K-8 middle school (Denver)
• Denver School of Science and Technology CMO (Denver)
• Girls Athletic Leadership School (Denver)
• Greenwood ECE-8 middle school (Denver)
• KIPP Sunshine Peak Academy (Denver)
• West Denver Prep CMO (Denver)
• Deane Elementary (Jeffco)
• Stein Elementary (Jeffco)
• East Elementary (Littleton)
• Valley View K-8 elementary school (Mapleton)

I haven’t seen any reports indicating increased street-dancing activity taking place near any of the above schools. Yet while various kinds of celebrations may take place at each of those centers of learning, I will study up on the definition of this great word philanthropy. Remember: You can find more information on Colorado schools and the open enrollment process at the fantastic, parent-friendly School Choice for Kids website.

This made for useful sound bites, but was always problematic because the definition of classroom spending was amorphous. Principals and curriculum specialists weren’t classroom spending, but teachers’ dental benefits were. There was bound to be a lot of cheating to reach the magic number. Unions hated it. And even though unions hated it, I didn’t like it either. In 2006, I wrote that I remained “doubtful that meeting such a threshold has any effect on the quality of instruction or on student performance.”

Very similar points were made by my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow when Colorado’s Amendment 39 and Referendum J were on the ballot in 2006 — before my time. He noted that unions and established interest groups were on the right side of the issue, if largely for the wrong reasons. While the proposals crashed and burned here in Colorado, apparently a few other states like Georgia latched on.

The “65% Solution” still had enough mojo to emerge as part of a Florida ballot initiative package in 2008. In one of my first-ever postings here, I speculated about the danger of mixing good & bad policy for short-term political benefit. Since then, though, the report from Georgia is the first I’ve heard on the issue.

Another lesson? Not all reform fads are good. The so-called 65% Solution neglected the root of a systemic problem in K-12 education. Reshuffling dollars spent with new bureaucratic titles or accounting categories sells the problem short. Let the money follow the student based on need and parental choice, and we won’t need to worry about changing state law or the constitution to require certain shares of K-12 dollars fall into a certain category.

That would be change we could all rally behind. No dustbins needed.

One such major issue is how Colorado K-12 public schools recruit, hire, pay, evaluate and retain their teachers. The implementation of the state’s educator effectiveness law occupied a lot of time and attention last year, and an important — but unusual — deadline comes up next month. The rules adopted by the State Board of Education either must be ratified or repealed by the state legislature by February 15.

The hope also remains that this debate propels more local momentum toward important educator compensation reforms like those highlighted in my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow’s 2011 issue paper on the subject. Time to stay tuned in….

Meanwhile, the national debate on teacher quality presses forward. And that brings an important contribution compiling all the key research on the question in the new book Teachers Matter by Manhattan Institute senior fellow (and now one of Colorado’s own) Marcus Winters. This professionally-made 5-minute video, including a few key interview excerpts with the author, frames the issue well (H/T Jay Greene):

Nice. So this is 2012, huh? Well, I’m sure you’ll be hearing more from me and my Education Policy Center friends about educator effectiveness in Colorado as the pages on the calendar keep turning. And that’s just one of the important issues on which we’ll keep focusing. It’s good to be back.

Yesterday brought the release of a three-year study on the eight earliest Denver innovation schools — including Bruce Randolph, Cole, Manual and Montclair. One key, hopeful finding? Successful innovation schools exhibit “positive cultures,” which contributes to steady, effective principal leadership.

Still, the two news stories on the study make similar points. The Denver Post highlights that innovation status is simply a tool, not a magic bullet. Meanwhile, Ed News Colorado’s headline trumpets the major (and not terribly surprising) finding that the “innovation law doesn’t spark major change.” One point in the study touched on in the latter story did cause me to roll my eyes a bit:

In particular, according to the report, principals, teachers and parents cited as positives greater control over how and when they hire, the ability to opt out of direct teacher placements by the district and the use of one-year contracts to ensure new hires are a good fit with the school’s mission.

Still, the findings on innovation schools’ staff were acknowledged as a concern by some, including Carolyn Crowder, executive director of the Denver teachers’ union. The report noted teachers at the eight schools were less experienced – by about three years – and less likely to have master’s degrees than teachers in five comparison schools.

For anyone primarily concerned about what innovation status means for improved student learning, the only response is: So what??? Every shred of research shows no connection between teacher master degrees and student learning. Nearly all research shows that teacher effectiveness plateaus after three to five years of acquired experience.

And guess what? The study’s detailed findings reveal that average teacher experience in innovation schools is about 6 years, as opposed to 9 years in non-innovation schools. Of all the findings to be concerned about in the report, this one should hardly cause more than a yawn.

I still have some hope for innovation schools — some will succeed. Though in the end charters are a more promising option. But the new report certainly leaves some food for thought about the ambiguities that remain unresolved, as well as some questions about which schools will fulfill their potential effectiveness.

Pretty much nobody is in school today, as we all gear up for the big turkey feast tomorrow. As my parents constantly remind me, the fourth Thursday in November is about more than food and football. Yes, Thanksgiving is about giving thanks. While I could gratefully mention the standard fare — family, friends (like those big people in the Education Policy Center), freedom, our big screen TV, and my growing (ahem!) Legos collection — more fitting for the blog are seven things to be thankful for in Colorado K-12 education:

1. While nobody asked Colorado teacher union members before taking political contributions from their paychecks, at least they can ask for the money back by December 15;
2. While the state senate president hasn’t given up his attacks on the online education option for parents, at least his attempt to push a selective audit was defeated;
3. While a number of pro-reform school board candidates lost and many inside the “education bubble” were distraught at the crushing defeat of the Prop 103 tax hike, at least the opportunity for truly creative innovation lies ahead with a number of new pro-reform board members ready to step up;
4. While a Denver judge went out of his way to shut down the Douglas County Choice Scholarship Program, at least the rays of hope for a successful appeal on behalf of students and parents are growing brighter;
5. While a lot of hard work remains to be done, at least the State Board of Education has continued to push for a top-notch educator evaluation system through the rule-making process;
6. While the open enrollment process is less than perfect and opportunities could be expanded, at least Colorado still has one of the strongest laws and Denver Public Schools is making it easier for parents to exercise their options; and
7. While we still have a long way to go in ensuring the best in public school financial transparency, at least some more districts and other K-12 agencies are making progress to comply with the 2010 law.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I will be back on Monday, with my turkey sandwich and leftovers.

…it strikes me as ludicrous for the unions to sit quietly by and share the blame for timid, tepid leadership, or when unions passively take the blame for weak teachers when teacher preparation programs produce graduates of dubious merit. In doing so, teachers and unions become complicit. The problem, I think, is a variation on Ted Sizer’s famed “Horace’s Compromise.” Teacher unions, superintendent and principal associations, schools of education, and school boards avoid calling each other out on such things, while focusing their energies on presenting a united front demanding more money and deference from taxpayers and policymakers. By the way, this phenomenon is part of what drives “reformers” to distraction. They can’t understand why so many supes and school boards seem to placidly accept onerous collective bargaining requirements, or why quality-conscious teachers don’t do more to call out feckless leadership.

Read it once, let it sink in, and then go back and read it again. Hess’s observations touch on some of the larger, more intractable problems in K-12 education reform and explain the behavior of key interest groups. Why don’t teachers unions strongly support more effective school-level leadership? Why don’t they make calls to reform the nation’s inefficient teacher preparation system? On one hand it is ludicrous, but on the other hand they obviously don’t see a compelling reason to call out their allies. Union leaders must believe they can continue to take most of the lumps.

I agree that the desire to maintain a unified front in support of feeding the establishment with more tax dollars certainly provides a large part of the explanation for union behavior. (There’s something to be said for shared cultural sympathies, too.) With school districts and other K-12 agencies facing tightened revenues for the first time in a generation or more, how will the dynamics of the relationship change? What does it mean for education reform? I’m sure more than a few smart people are pondering questions like these.

While you’re chewing on Wednesday’s food for thought, might I suggest that those who want to dig much deeper on the union topic find a copy of Dr. Terry Moe’s new book Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools? You won’t be disappointed.

Nearly a quarter of Colorado school districts have applied to participate in field-testing of new principal and teacher evaluation methods.

It was “a surprise and an encouraging message” that the Department of Education received 41 applications, said Diana Sirko, deputy commissioner. “We look at is as very encouraging.” She said CDE had expected a couple of dozen applications at the most.

According to the Denver Post, another CDE official indicated realistic hopes were for only about 10 positive responses from Colorado’s 178 school districts. Talk about the second local major education reform program of the year in which participation has exceeded all expectations. The more than 30 private schools that applied to be partners in Douglas County’s groundbreaking local voucher program (19 have been approved, as of this date) inundated staff who planned for about half the response.

All in all, it appears to be a positive sign that a large number, and wide variety of (rural, suburban, urban), Colorado school districts want to be a part of piloting the educator effectiveness law, which garnered national attention last year as SB 191. You know, the bill that ties teacher and principal evaluations — and ultimately job status — more closely to measured student growth. A lot of thought has gone into the process of making the law a reality across the Centennial State, and those who have worked on the implementation deserve some commendation.

Not that there isn’t room for some healthy skepticism about the implementation. After all, the last line of the Post story raises some eyebrows:

Statewide implementation of the system will be required by the fall of 2013, though tying the evaluations to probationary status and tenure will not go into effect statewide until 2016.

Amy Spicer from Stand for Children Colorado assures readers that the rulemaking development is positive, though she has a somewhat different (and more reliable) take on what the rule actually is:

During the 2013-2014 school year, the evaluation system will go statewide. Those ratings will only count for probationary teachers and will go toward earning non-probationary status. During the 2014-2015 school year, ratings will start to count for all teachers—both for earning and losing status.

Sounds better. But the law — Colorado Revised Statutes 22-9-105.5(10)(IV)(B) states:

During the 2013-14 school year, teachers shall be evaluated based on quality standards. Demonstrated effectiveness or ineffectiveness shall begin to be considered in the acquisition of probationary or nonprobationary status.

My Education Policy Center friends read that to mean that the evaluation ratings earned will have an impact on all teachers’ probationary or non-probationary status in 2013-14. If I am missing something, please let me know. Maybe this is a question for the Educator Effectiveness crew at CDE. Just want to make sure everything is done right, and done to help students. Wish the whole process were simpler, but sometimes that’s the way it is.

“It’s really catching fire,’’ said Paul Reville, the state’s education secretary. “I would predict innovation schools in a relatively short period of time could surpass the number of charter schools in the state if the growth continues at the rate we’ve seen recently.’’ …

Innovation schools and the state’s 56 independently run charter schools are similar in that decisions about curriculum, staffing, and budgeting are made by a school-based governing board with the goal of crafting programs that meet the specific needs of their students.

But unlike charter schools, which report directly to the state, innovation schools must negotiate the extent of the freedom to make their own decisions with the superintendent and School Committee, and are bound by most provisions of the district’s teachers union contract.

Now I’ll be honest with you. Other than sharing the same name and some of the basic features as provided in this article, I don’t know precisely how Massachusetts innovation school policy compares with its Colorado counterpart.

But the timing of the article was perfect, given a thoughtful new Ed News Colorado blog piece by Peter Huidekoper. The author makes a strong case that our state’s Innovation Schools Act has not fulfilled its promise. Huidekoper’s posting is based on his recent interview with Rob Stein, former principal of Denver’s Manual High School, one of the state’s first “innovation schools.” Among the real and possible problems identified that may limit the law’s effectiveness:

• A reticent K-12 education culture that has embraced the innovation school process somewhat in Denver, but very little around the state;
• Conversely, an application process that may make it too easy to obtain innovation status;
• Innovation school principals remain employees of the district, bringing more confusion than clarity to the school’s mission and direction; and, on a related note,
• Ambiguities concerning who is in charge of the school, leading to tensions in Denver that still remain unresolved more than a year after I brought the topic to your attention. (“[Stein] now says that the lack of clarity on how much authority the school and principal have with the Innovation status makes ‘charters a better model. They have worked out the kinks.’”)

Let me be clear: I believe there is still a place for the Innovation Schools Act. But 1) it may be time for lawmakers to look seriously at how the rough edges of the law can be fixed and improved, and 2) it should never, NEVER be seen as a tool to supplant charter schools. In which case, the Massachusetts’ education secretary’s quote you read at the beginning of this post could be seen as a red flag warning.

Huidekoper’s piece offers some great reminders: Do all our education reform ideas come to fruition as we planned them? Are we content to compare our education reform plans with the status quo, or are we at all interested in looking for ways to make them better? The challenge lives on.

The big, hard-to-ignore education news of the week comes from Atlanta, Georgia, in the sunny South. The Christian Science Monitor’s Patrick Jonsson reports:

Award-winning gains by Atlanta students were based on widespread cheating by 178 named teachers and principals, said Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal on Tuesday. His office released a report from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that names 178 teachers and principals – 82 of whom confessed – in what’s likely the biggest cheating scandal in US history.

This appears to be the largest of dozens of major cheating scandals, unearthed across the country. The allegations point an ongoing problem for US education, which has developed an ever-increasing dependence on standardized tests.

Let me tell you: If I got caught cheating, I couldn’t even imagine the consequences my parents would bring down on me. No trips to the beach all summer? No dessert for a month? Grounded from playing with Legos AND video games? (Oh, it’s too hard to even think about…) Have my blogging privileges revoked? Some of you would like that, I’m sure. But just imagine the devastation for a little kid like me.

Anyway, a cheating scandal of Atlanta’s magnitude, combined with other smaller instances around the country, sets off the alarm bells. For some, it means responses like this one from a certain well-known figure with an agenda of undermining test-based accountability for schools:

Maybe if I were clever enough I could have responded on Twitter:

Response to Atlanta scandal totally predictable. High-stakes cheating incentivizes overreactions from test-based accountability foes.

When certain students conspire to steal test scores from a teacher, or traffic in plagiarism, do we end the practice of graded tests and reports? When some of the old black-and-white TV quiz shows were caught rigging outcomes, did we ban Jeopardy! and The Price is Right from giving out prize money? What happened in Atlanta is serious and cannot be treated lightly, but we must not forget that the perpetrating educators made decisions to cheat. For all its flaws, No Child Left Behind didn’t make them do it.

One expert quoted in the Christian Science Monitor story made a salient point:

“I think the broadest issue in the [Atlanta scandal] raises is why many school districts and states continue to have high-stakes testing without rigorous auditing or security procedures,” says Brian Jacob, director of the Center on Local, State and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan.

Time to take a deep breath and handle the situations — both the cheating scandal in Atlanta and the lack of reasonable test security and auditing procedures in various districts and states — with some grown-up responsibility. Hence, I hand it over to Peter Meyer writing at the Flypaper blog:

We need to know that our teachers are teaching and that children are learning. We need tests. And we need accountability. The next move in Atlanta is crucial to restoring credibility to a discredited school system. But what will that move be?

You also need to read Matthew Tabor’s initial reaction, complete with extra intriguing details and some witty retorts.

Tennessee’s State Board of Education has ratified new rules requiring that student test scores factor in evaluating, paying, and promoting educators.

The rules tie 35 percent of teachers’ professional evaluations to their students’ results on the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS). Teachers of tested subjects will be rated according to their students’ test score growth, while principals will be judged on school-wide gains.

A law Tennessee lawmakers adopted last January requires linking 50 percent of educator evaluations to student growth. Promotion and retention, as well as pay raises and tenured status, will be affected by recorded learning gains.

Tennessee’s 2010 law is similar to Colorado’s SB 191, in that it requires 50 percent of evaluations to be tied to measures of student academic growth and that decisions to grant or revoke tenure-like privileges depend on evaluated performance. The Volunteer State goes further, though, by requiring the evaluations to impact how teachers are paid as well. While many local Colorado districts and charter schools are pioneering performance pay and strategic compensation, it would be great to see the implementation of the educator effectiveness law push even more in that direction.

Following Wednesday morning’s State Board meeting, CDE will post a webinar online Friday that “will provide a summary of draft rules and information about how to submit comments.” Then the next Tuesday, June 14, is an opportunity for you the people to chime in with public testimony. Colorado may be a little bit behind Tennessee, but you can lend your support to push the reform conversation forward and to help make sure our students have the best educator evaluation system possible.