Update, 10/21: Joshua Dunn dissects the decision in writing over at the Education Next blog. Check it out.

I haven’t had a chance to take a course yet in Colorado civics and government, so maybe I’m just a bit confused. Isn’t the legislature supposed to make the laws, and the courts just supposed to interpret them? Well then, how do you explain this overreaching 4-3 decision from the Colorado Supreme Court?

The Lobato case started in 2005 when large group of parents from eight school districts across the state and 14 school districts in the San Luis Valley sued the state, claiming that Colorado’s school finance system violates the state constitution’s requirement for a “thorough and uniform” public education system.

In March 2006 Denver District Judge Michael Martinez ruled against the plaintiffs, concluding the current system meets the requirements of Amendment 23, isn’t subject to court review and that the school districts didn’t have standing to sue.

A Colorado Court of Appeals panel upheld the district court decision in January 2008.

The high court’s decision Monday overturned all that and sends the case back to district court for trial.

Continue Reading »

1 Comment »

If my mom and dad were to sign me up for one of Colorado’s many public online education programs, what would my school experience look like? Would I be chained to the computer all day, blogging for the Independence Institute? Okay, I’m teasing. Of course not. But you may be really surprised to find out what it’s like.

If you or someone you know are considering the cyberschool option, you really ought to listen to our latest iVoices podcast. Click the play button below to hear Colorado’s online elementary teacher of the year Christina Narayan explain how she teaches reading and math to students all over the state while building a sense of community and cooperation:

Mrs. Narayan, a teacher for Branson School Online, really seems like a remarkable lady. But what’s even more noteworthy is how her passion and excitement for what she does reflects the bright future for this increasingly popular education option.

That, and the fact she got to throw out the first pitch last month at a Colorado Springs Sky Sox game. I’m so jealous!

No Comments »

It’s Lego-time around here, so I don’t have long to blog right now. But I did want you to hear about how Colorado families and schools are working together to enhance the online education experience and make our state’s thriving cyberschool community the talk of the nation.

Click the play button below to listen to a new iVoices podcast as my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow discusses with Judith Stokes of the Colorado Cyberschools Association and Lori Cooney of the Colorado Coalition of Cyberschool Families about their collaborative effort to benefit students:

As always, you can learn more about ALL your Colorado education options at our fabulous School Choice for Kids website.

And now back to my Legos….

No Comments »

For teachable purposes, I like clear contrasts. You know: Black vs. white, Up vs. down, Chocolate ice cream vs. broccoli. But what about the world of education reform — specifically, teacher tenure? Two stories in particular popped up within hours of each other, and what a contrast they present.

First, there’s this news from our neighbor to the east:

A Kansas teacher says he was wrongfully terminated for his conservative views.

Tim Latham has been teaching history and U.S. Government for over 19 years. But after teaching for just one year in the Lawrence School District in Lawrence, Kansas, Latham says his contract was not renewed because school officials did not like his conservative views — particularly a teacher website that Latham hosted and paid for himself. A teacher coach confronted him on that issue.

If this indeed proves to be true, how sad it would be to see a teacher not only get persecuted for his unorthodox conservative patriotic views (unfortunately, it happens more than you may think) but also lose his job over it. He isn’t working for a private school. He’s working for a public school funded by taxpayer dollars!

Latham has filed a grievance and said he plans to continue fighting the job action. It will be interesting to see what the union will do — if anything — on his behalf. Maybe Mr. Latham just picked the wrong place to teach. Or the wrong reason to get the axe. Continue Reading »

No Comments »

Updated for accuracy (6/9)

For 15 years we’ve had charter schools around in Colorado. By giving strong accountability along with a new level of freedom, our state has been one of the leaders in fostering innovation through charters.

Going along with that, charter schools have now established themselves with strong bipartisan political support. Witness our own Democrat lieutenant governor Barbara O’Brien, who offered testified before a Congressional committee on Thursday. Denise at Colorado Charters highlighted the factors O’Brien pointed out as reasons for charter school success.

But I thought this was the most interesting part of what Lt. Gov. O’Brien had to say: Continue Reading »

No Comments »

A couple months ago I told you about the Kansas teachers local that fought for and won its independence from the state and national union.

I’m excited, because the podcast I posted up there was quoted in the latest edition of School Reform News:

In a March 30, 2009 interview with the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank based in Golden, Colorado, [Riley County Educators] spokesman Gary [sic] Sigle explained that last year only 14 of the county’s 56 teachers were NEA members, which gave those 14 members exclusive bargaining power. Others wanted a greater say in what was going on locally.

Sarah McIntosh, the writer of the story, also interviewed my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow to get his take on the issue: Continue Reading »

No Comments »

Recently, a group of public school teachers in rural Kansas were tired of being represented by the nation’s largest teachers union and decided to do something about it. From Education Week:

Teachers in Riley County have voted to decertify from the Kansas National Education Association and the National Education Association.

The approximately 58 teachers in the district voted earlier this month to have Riley County Educators serve as their negotiating agent.

Riley County High School industrial arts teacher and track coach Garry Sigle, who also serves as spokesman for the Riley County Educators, was kind enough to record an iVoices podcast explaining why he and the other teachers chose this course of action and what the process is like:

The Association of American Educators (AAE), which has provided assistance to the teachers in Riley, explains that these teachers in the Kansas district are not the first local to decertify from NEA in recent years. It has happened in several other states, though not yet in Colorado.

My Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow tells me he is working to get more information on the decertification option to put up on the Independent Teachers website. I’ll keep you updated.

2 Comments »

President Obama made some remarks about education yesterday, and my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow got a chance to respond in this piece from Face The State:

Ben DeGrow, education policy analyst for the Independence Institute, said he is glad to finally see Obama taking a strong position on education. “Obama the candidate and Obama the President has been all over the place on education reform, and it’s been hard to pin him down,” said DeGrow. “The comments in [Tuesday’s] speech are mostly promising, and we need to hold him to those comments.” [link added]

In the Face the State piece, State Board of Education chairman Bob Schaffer also raised the point that Obama has given no indication of wanting to help stop an effort by Democrats in Congress to take away private tuition scholarships from poor kids in the nation’s capital.

Still, the President’s message yesterday was largely on the right track. Among the less traditionally Democratic education reform ideas Barack Obama embraced are charter schools, accountability, and teacher performance pay. In the latter case, Obama seems to grasp the importance of the current problem with teacher quality:

In his speech, the president issued a call for a new generation of teachers.

“America needs you,” he said. “We need you in our suburbs. We need you in our small towns. We need you in our inner cities. We need you in classrooms all across our country.”

Merit pay is one side of the teacher quality coin. Removing tenure is the other. As the Denver Post’s Jeremy Meyer reports today, Denver Public Schools and others are doing a poor job of weeding out ineffective instructors: Continue Reading »

No Comments »

High school and college are still a long ways off for me, but I found this interesting for those of you who are interested in education.

A recent report from the Colorado Commission on Higher Education (PDF) found that 29.9 percent (that’s almost 3 in 10!) of Colorado public high school graduates entering Colorado public colleges and universities in 2007-08 needed remediation. Wow, that’s a mouthful! And as Ed News Colorado points out, it isn’t good news, either:

Remediation costs at least $27.6 million a year, $14.6 million in state tax dollars and $13 million in tuition paid by students, the report said. (The actual cost is higher, because some remediation costs, such as summer school, weren’t included in the total.)

“It’s unfortunate,” said Gov. Bill Ritter, that money is spent on remediation “instead of investing those funds in financial aid, classroom instruction and innovative research. We can and must do better.”

But has Colorado been doing better than in recent years?
Continue Reading »

No Comments »

There are plenty of kids in Colorado who live out in the country or in remote small towns. I don’t know many of them myself. Yet while I’m sure they have their own challenges in learning and education, they don’t get as much attention as those of us who live in and around the big city of Denver.

That’s part of the reason why my friends in the Education Policy Center put together a project looking at the academic performance of Colorado’s rural school districts, compared with the numbers of poor and non-white students they serve.

The author of the newly-released Assessing Colorado Rural Public School Performance (PDF) is Paul Mueller, who spent the summer working in our offices. (Just in case you were wondering, I didn’t see much of Paul, because I spent much of my summer months off school playing outdoors rather than visiting the Independence Institute.)

Anyway, for those of you who don’t have the time to read Paul’s paper, you can listen to him and Pam Benigno talk about the findings of the report – including a couple school districts that succeeded at “beating the odds” despite high-poverty or high-minority student populations – on an iVoices podcast:

I hope you walk away with a sense of what successful practices are being used to make a difference with rural students, and of what the opportunities for open enrollment across school district boundaries might do to enhance outcomes. For the sake of those other kids in faraway places, let’s keep the debate and discussion going.

No Comments »