More clear, accurate, available and usable information about public education is a good thing - good for parents, teachers, policy makers, and taxpayers — and ultimately for students like me. One good example of a step forward in this area is the Colorado Department of Education (CDE)’s new student growth model, featured in today’s Denver Post:

The model shows how students have grown academically compared with peers in the same grades with similar scores on the Colorado Student Assessment Program over the past two years.

“The bottom line is, the model tells us how much growth the child has made and whether that growth is good enough to meet state standards,” said Richard Wenning, associate education commissioner.

Other states have adopted growth models, but Colorado is the nation’s first to use percentiles to describe the growth, Wenning said.

Fortunately, the growth model doesn’t just compare students with their peers. It also uses an objective standard: Continue Reading »

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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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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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Probably the best state for Colorado or any other to look to as a model in education reform is Florida. Education reform was the primary focus of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush during his eight-year tenure, and he was able to make progress on many fronts. The remarkable success yielded by years of systematic advances in school choice, accountability, standards, and teacher pay makes the Sunshine State worthy of emulation:

Government-gathered data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that Florida has outpaced Colorado and the national average in nearly every measure of math and reading proficiency.

In that light, it was important that Heritage Foundation education policy analyst Dan Lips was able to sit down and interview Jeb Bush (H/T Matt Ladner) at a recent education reform summit in Orlando. Here are a few key excerpts of Bush’s remarks from the interview transcribed at National Review Online:

We need all schools — here in Florida and in 49 other states — to get better for our country’s future. The only way to improve student performance is through continual and perpetual reform of education. America needs a 21st century education system for a 21st century world….

Raising standards, measuring progress, grading school performance, providing educational options and targeting resources to reward success and reverse failure are all tools that are transforming schools and raising student achievement.

However, success is never final. I hope we never stop trying to implement more innovative and audacious reforms….

I also believe we need to better apply free-market principles to the way we deliver education in order to improve the entire system. We should expand educational options so all parents can make the best choices for their children. Teachers and principals should be paid based on performance. Educators that teach subjects with a shortage of teachers, teach in low-performing schools or carry increased responsibilities should be paid more. We should also give merit pay to teachers based on student learning gains and other objective measures….

People from across the ideological spectrum can agree that improving the quality of education for students from every background, from pre-K through high school, is the great challenge of our time. We need to put partisan rhetoric aside and work together to raise student achievement through reforms that produce measurable results.

Go and read the whole thing. For the sake of myself and other kids, too, it would be great if Colorado could have a leader as bold, articulate, and visionary as Jeb Bush.

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One of the most common critiques of No Child Left Behind is that its goal of achieving proficiency in reading and math for all students by 2014 is impossible to achieve. While it may be impossible for all American public schools to achieve the 100 percent proficiency marks, should we let that excuse stop many schools from achieving 100 percent proficiency, schools that really are able to get there?

The Washington Post highlights a Maryland elementary school that already has hit the mark:

Last spring, all 184 students in the third and fourth grades at Ocean City Elementary School passed the Maryland School Assessment, or MSA, a battery of tests given by the state every year since 2003 to satisfy the law.

The school was the first in the state, apart from a few tiny special-education centers, to meet the goal that has defined public education this decade.

“We think of MSA as the floor, as sort of the basics of what all students should be doing,” Principal Irene Kordick said. “We shoot for the ceiling.”…

The school serves 568 students in a coastal resort town with an odd mix of families — in oceanfront condominiums, middle-class colonials and Coastal Highway trailers. The student population is 89 percent white, 5 percent Hispanic, 3 percent black, 2 percent Asian and 1 percent American Indian. Twenty-nine students have limited English proficiency, and 134 qualify for subsidized meals because of low family income.

If you read the story, you get a strong sense of some of the things school leaders have done to make its performance exceptional. Yet with all the tax money funding K-12 education, Jonathan Butcher at Jay Greene’s blog points out wasteful examples of federal education spending, and the absence of focus on replicating school models, like Ocean City, that work.

I guess the moral of the story is that kids like me deserve schools that make fewer excuses, and parents deserve the power of choice to demand these kinds of schools to serve them. After all, as our own Pam Benigno wrote several years ago, No Child Left Behind Mandates School Choice. But if you leave it up to politicians to fund education programs, the money is going to feed all sorts of crazy pet projects before it reaches places that work.

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