Schools for Tomorrow Blog

It’s exciting to read about the budding New Schools Collaborative, an effort to bring to Denver the kind of wholesale school reform that has shaken up Chicago and New York school districts. Read Nancy Mitchell’s article and get excited. Ignore most of the comments below the article, written by ignorant buffoons.

The Denver effort is led by The Daniels Fund, The Piton Foundation, and The Donnell-Kay Foundation, which also happen to be the biggest funders of Education News Colorado.

So, just to prove we’re not overly beholden to our masters, let me pose a couple of questions to the collaborative’s honchos:

1) Do you have the attention span to stay focused on this effort for as long as needed for it to take root and produce results? We’re probably talking...

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The legislative session is over. Collective sighs of relief can be heard from many quarters across Colorado. But enjoy the warm weather while it lasts, as it only draws us closer to the black hole of a costly and contentious November election.

There may end up being several initiatives on the statewide ballot that end up having a direct impact on the world of education. Unless I’m missing something, one measure already qualified for the ballot that figures to have no such impact is the Right-to-Work initiative. Nor the counter-measures for which union leaders are seeking to collect signatures. These are all about the conduct of private sector business-labor relations.

Both the opposition to Right-to-Work and the support for the counter-measures are being run through a committee known as Protect Colorado’s Future. Though interest is denied in promoting the counter-measures, teachers union leaders say they’re on board with the campaign against right-to-work, and...

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Governor Ritter’s plan to direct funding to higher education is drawing controversy from university presidents, who say they are disappointed that the plan focuses only on scholarships.  The initiative would use money from an increased tax on the oil and gas industry.  The Post reports:

"This proposal does nothing to address (our) general fund," said Steve Jordan, president of Metropolitan State College of Denver, who wants to hire dozens more tenure-track faculty.

The severance tax increase would bring about $200 million a year to the state, enough to aid about 60 percent of the college-age students in Colorado with their tuition, backers of the plan estimate. Eligibility for the program, called Colorado Promise Scholarships, would likely be based on income and grades.

Choosing between scholarships and the schools...

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The most substantial proof yet of its kind: the American public has no idea how much public school teachers earn or how much schools are spending. In fact, a whopping 96 percent underestimate the real costs. From Professors William Howell and Martin West comes the survey that shows just how much people are low-balling the costs:

The amount of money actually spent annually on children in school districts across the United States varies widely. For the districts in which our sample members live, per-pupil spending in 2004–05 ranged from $5,644 to $24,939,with an average of $10,377. This last figure is slightly higher than the true national average of $9,435.

How well informed is the public about these financial commitments? Not very. Among those asked without the prompt listing possible expenses, the median response was $2,000, or less than 20 percent of the true amount being spent in their districts....

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The reality of yet another year of basically flat third grade CSAPs scores, after more attempts at reforms, generated a lot of heat on this blog, with everyone trying to figure out what it means for future reforms.  

But, I continue to be frustrated by the ad hoc nature of the ex poste “spin” around test score results.  How about a discussion of what we would realistically hope to see from CSAPs, or other standardized tests.

Before the full results come out this summer, what would a positive result look like for Colorado?  We know that a decline in test scores would be considered quite bad, though for districts or schools undergoing major reform it is usually optimistically called an “implementation dip.”  Flat is not very impressive.

But, how positive should positive be?  NCLB wants no child left behind and all students up to proficiency by 2014.  For third grade reading statewide, with 71% proficient, that would require...

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This week’s release of lukewarm third-grade CSAP scores comes at a bad time for those trying to save CSAP testing from an untimely death.  The Rocky reports:

Colorado’s $22 million testing program appears headed for replacement after more than a dozen years and scant evidence of improvement in recent results.

Thursday’s release of third-grade scores found seven of 10 children reading at grade level in February, a figure that has fluctuated little since at least 2001.

That figure means more than 40,000 mostly 9-year-olds could pick out main ideas and summarize what they’ve read, among other comprehension skills, at a level deemed proficient by state educators.

It also means nearly 17,000 children across Colorado could not.

But...

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I’ll leave it to others to parse the new CSAP third-grade reading scores released yesterday by the Colorado Department of Education. I worry sometimes, as do many others, about an over-emphasis on test scores.

But there’s one word to describe the trend highlighted by yesterday’s results: flat. And no matter how cheerleaders try to spin it, that’s really bad news. Anyone who takes a clear-eyed look at test scores since the inception of CSAP over a decade ago will notice that the trendline is essentially flat. There are ups and downs from year to year, but there’s no steady, upward progress. Close to a third of our third-graders can’t read at grade level. The numbers are far worse for low-income kids of color.

While the federal government’s Adequate Yearly Progress measure (aimed at getting all kids to proficiency by 2014) is patently absurd and unrealistic,  flatlining is unacceptable. It suggests that nothing is working across the board. And anyone...

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It’s a landmark day. One year ago today this site launched, and one year ago today I wrote my first post for what was then known as the HeadFirst blog about a new report “depolarizing the teacher pay debate.”

I specifically cited a quote from the report made by a team of award-winning teachers: “Like the dusty blackboards still found in some school classrooms, the single-salary schedule has served its purposes and outlived its usefulness.”

In the meantime, the Governor’s P-20 council convened and voted on a recommendation to reform teacher pay systems. I harshly noted back in November:

The recommendation for “alternative compensation systems” says that “sustained adequate funding” is needed before any changes can be made. The Tough Choices call to redirect the excess...

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