Schools for Tomorrow Blog

There are rumblings emanating from Boulder Valley School District, and they don’t have anything to do with exploding tofu factories or yoga studios.  Rather, the hubbub is due to a parent petition that would split the district right down the middle. 

The move is opposed by district bigwigs, including the superintendent and the president of the school board, and for good reason.  Splitting the district would not only be logistically onerous, but it would compromise the quality of one of the best school districts in the state.

BVSD is surprisingly diverse.  It’s 55 schools are spread over 500 square miles, and encompass affluent Boulder enclaves, newer suburbs, working class neighborhoods, and mountain towns.  The petition highlights an ongoing conflict in Boulder and other districts throughout the country.  A natural tension exists between the parents, usually white and affluent, who are deeply involved in their children’s schools, and the district and community at large,…

Two nearly polar opposite educational approaches are touted in today’s local news pages. Both are rooted in different philosophies, attract different kinds of support, and have fundamentally different demands. Yet both elicit some level of disdain from the education establishment.

Alan explores the better-known piece in his post today, relaying strong criticisms of the first draft of the bipartisan “Colorado Achievement Plan for Kids” (CAP4K) bill. The entire post is worth reading, but a synthesis of the reviews points to a well-intended but vague, overly prescriptive, and heavily bureaucratic proposal that effectively would narrow the focus of K-12 education into the needs and demands of university curricula.

On the other hand, many officials are at least as uncomfortable with an educational approach that gained full-length feature treatment in today’s Denver Post: “un-schooling.” Now, even as the article acknowledges, this style of non-traditional, unstructured home-based learning has been around—and in Colorado—for quite awhile. Following…

When I read the heading to last week’s Blogfather post “Is the school district an obsolete construct?”, I instinctively nodded my head. How I appreciate the bold and visionary like Peter Huidekoper who dare to question governmental constructs too often taken for granted.

But then I talked myself back to reality, musing once again in vain to figure out what it really would take to move beyond the school district concept, short of an immense and imminent crisis. Maybe that’s what it would require to summon the political will to change.

With this week’s news from the Colorado Commission on Higher Education regarding public college admission standards, it seems clear that we’re stuck in a rut. The editorial in today’s Rocky Mountain News had it about right:

[A]t least the commission rejected pleas to push back the effective date of the requirements to 2012 or even later - and you can bet that if…

A disturbing article in today’s Boston Globe shows that Boston’s Pilot Schools (at least the high schools) have established admissions criteria (aka hurdles), which would seem to undercut their reason to exist.

According to the Globe article:

Boston’s superintendent and others say the hurdles fly in the face of the pilot schools’ original purpose, which was to show that given more freedom in budgeting, teaching, and hiring, they could produce higher test scores with the same pool of students. The goal was to have traditional Boston public schools then replicate the success.

Some anti-charter school advocates have long complained that charters "cream," an argument for which I have little patience. Schools that can engage bright, motivated students who founder in traditional schools aren’t creaming, they’re doing vitally important salvage work.

The pilot schools, however, should be different, as the quote above explains. The fact that these schools are, in fact, cherry-picking (a practice few charters actually…

Educator Peter Huidekoper suggests this may be the case. Peter is a true iconoclast, a free-thinker who shuns all manner of orthodoxy. His wonderful newsletter, Another View, which is featured on the HeadFirst website, is always worth reading. In coming days, we hope to post several of his past issues on the site. I fear Peter may reduce his production, because he returns to the classroom this fall. If he does scale back, students’ gain will be our loss.