There are a few possible explanations for all those shouts of “May Day” Coloradans may have heard yesterday. Some might have been the annual calls for an imaginary workers’ paradise, while others might have been desperate pleas of displaced Texans and Californians calling for relief from the late-season snow. In my education policy wonk world, though, “May Day” was code for a noteworthy coincidence. Have you heard?

As Ed News Colorado reports, the state legislature yesterday put the finishing touches on Senate Bill 213, the new school finance bill tied to some form of a billion-dollar tax increase initiative. Finishing its partisan course, the senate approved house amendments by a party-line 20-15 tally. Every legislative vote cast for SB 213 has come from Democrats; every vote against has come from Republicans. The Governor, also a Democrat, has given every indication of signing it into law.

The strict partisan divide may have something to do with all the bill’s missed reform opportunities, including continued inequities for charters and only a tiny share of total funds assigned to student “backpacks” (and in the final version of SB 213, pgs 139-140, even that small amount of principal “autonomy” is subject to district-level review). Then there’s the issue of “phantom students,” an ongoing problem of inequity left completely untouched by this new legislation.

That brings us to the May 1 coincidence. The same day as Colorado’s SB 213 received its final stamp of legislative approval, the smart people over at Education Next published a research-based commentary by Marguerite Roza and Jon Fullerton titled “Funding Phantom Students: State policies insulate districts from making tough decisions.” Continue Reading »

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Interesting news this week out of Phoenix, Arizona, where a judge ruled it unconstitutional for taxpayers to fund police union “release time” activities, and put an injunction on the practice. We’re talking about two different states, and two different sectors of government, but one has to wonder whether a similar case could be made about underwriting Colorado teachers’ union business?

It may not be happening through the courts, but it appears officials in Colorado’s fifth-largest school district are taking a second look at a policy that in 2009-10 cost taxpayers more than $187,000 to release three union officers. The District Twelve Educators Association (DTEA) recently announced to its members that the Adams 12 school board is proposing changes to the part of the union contract that grants the tax-paid release time. Continue Reading »

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Writing over at Hot Air, Mike Antonucci came up with some new ways to measure how much is spent annually on public education. He digs into the data from 2010 to make some interesting calculations at a national level. Well, using the help of my Education Policy Center friends, here are comparable numbers for Colorado, looking at the year 2010: Continue Reading »

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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?

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I was going to say that sometimes my blog can sound like a broken record, but I’m too young to know what a record even is. So how about, please forgive me in advance if this post sounds like an MP3 file on a repeat loop. (Someone else can figure out how to smooth out the metaphor so it rolls off the tongue.)

Even so, the news to be shared is too significant to put on the shelf just because it sounds like something you may have read here last year. I’m talking about too many Colorado high school graduates needing extra academic help in college:

I’m sure almost no one is satisfied with the progress or the results in the area of remediation. Any suggestions that more money simply be poured into the status quo model need to be greeted with a hefty dose of skepticism, though.

I wrote that in 2012 when the newest data showed a remediation rate for Colorado high school graduates of about 32 percent. Well, here we go again. As the Denver Post‘s Anthony Cotton reports, the situation really hasn’t improved much at all: Continue Reading »

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Often it’s very easy to get bogged down in a big education policy debate like Colorado’s SB 213 school finance reform proposal. Then along comes a Denver Post op-ed piece by a motivated citizen that exhales a breath of fresh air:

Colorado currently spends about $10,600 per student per year on K-12 education. You can get a pretty good private education for that. Sen. Johnston wants to increase school spending to nearly $12,000 per student. But without changing the design of the system, why should anyone expect different results?

Let’s stop funding the education establishment and instead fund parents and children. In a state-regulated environment, let’s give that $10,000 to parents for each child they have in school and let them decide how and where the money used to educate their children should be spent.

The author is Littleton’s own John Conlin, founder of the small nonprofit activist group End the Education Plantation. True fans may recall his appearance several months ago in an on-air interview with my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow. Continue Reading »

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In case you haven’t been following me on Twitter (which raises the question: Why not?), you may not have noticed that the big education bill of the 2013 Colorado legislative session has made its way through the State Senate. As a new Ed News Colorado story by Todd Engdahl highlights, Senate Bill 213 has advanced as a purely partisan piece of legislation:

The Senate approved Senate Bill 13-213 on a 20-15 preliminary vote, which is expected to be the same party-line total when a final vote is taken later.

That final vote occurred earlier today by the same 20-15 margin. And thus the 174-page legislation motors on over to the House now. Still not really much choice or backpack funding at all. Changing from a single count date to average daily membership is great, but not worth a billion smackeroos. As the Education Reform Bulletin proclaims about SB 213, raising taxes trumps reform. Continue Reading »

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It’s been several days since I’ve had a chance to write here. The end of my spring break provided a lot of time for reflection on some issues that really have been bothering me. Now that I’ve had time to re-evaluate my well-known positions on some key education issues, I feel it is my obligation to share with you the following:

1. When it comes to education, I’ve come to agree with Diane Ravitch that parents don’t really know what is best for kids. They should leave it all up to the experts in the classroom and the school district administration building. (I would also like to apply this logic to the question of eating vegetables, an area in which I’m now considered an expert.)
2. As a result, I now believe this whole idea of school choice is really overblown, and actually undermines the great work professional educators do on our behalf every day. Instead of celebrating the recent Indiana Supreme Court decision, we all should be sobbing our hearts out right along with the Hoosiers fans, whose team went down hard in the Sweet 16.
3. I’ve also made a resolution to stop spending nearly so much time praising the innovative, transformational work going on in school districts like Douglas County and Falcon 49. In fact, I feel really bad for all the time and energy I’ve spent undermining the great traditions of public education unions and bureaucracy.

Continue Reading »

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While the big school finance reform legislation at the Colorado State Capitol explores reshuffling the dollars in a 20th century system — and dashing my youthful hopes along the way — other states continue to plow ahead with the idea of course choice. Students are enabled to customize their education by choosing courses regardless of school and district boundaries, mainly through the use of digital technology.

Well, count Florida among the states seriously looking at revamping a system to promote flexibility and reward student mastery, rather than just continue to fund learning based on seat time. With Utah and Louisiana already pioneering in this area, it’s great to hear redefinED’s Ron Matus talk with national blended learning guru Michael Horn about the new world where the change might lead us and speculate how it might unfold: Continue Reading »

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Update, 5:10 PM Extra audio added.

So some of you may have been missing me since a couple days ago when I asked a dozen questions regarding the major school finance bill, SB 213. Many of my questions remain unanswered, and the first committee vote on the bill itself isn’t slated until this afternoon. But a couple interesting conversations sprung up around the first question I asked:

To what extent does the legislation provide for true course-level choice?

Especially since it won’t go into effect unless voters approve a billion-dollar tax hike this November. That’s when I saw a document handed out by state senator Michael Johnston‘s office to explain the bill. On page 3 in the left-hand column it lists “High School Voucher for 9-12″ as a component of base funding in the newly proposed formula.

Well, you can guess that perked up my hopes, the idea that a new school finance system might offer students breakthrough opportunities to take a portion of their funding and choose courses from private schools or other providers. At Tuesday’s nine-hour marathon hearing, dozens of witnesses came before the Senate Education Committee. Senator Scott Renfroe (R-Greeley) surprised one of them, CEA executive director Tony Salazar, by asking about the concept of “high school vouchers.”

Johnston chimed in to point out that was not the intention of the bill, which culminated in a “you said-you said” disagreement between Johnston and Renfroe and the teachers union leader reiterating his organization’s opposition to the idea of private school choice. (Listen to the 5-minute audio clip here.) Continue Reading »

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