Schools for Tomorrow Blog

There was a compelling - and overlooked - perspective in the Denver Post by the ever-interesting Marguerite Roza on how productivity has transformed most American workplaces and some suggestions on applications to education. HERE is the piece.

The Education News Colorado website has published several stories over the summer that cast the Aurora Pubic Schools regime of Supt. John Barry in a generally favorable light. Read stories here, here, and here, for example.

But one area where Barry’s forward-thinking regime has been slow to see the light is on charter schools. Last night, the Aurora school board decided to asked voters to approve a $215 million bond issue this fall. From that amount, the district is ofering a total of $750,000 to the district’s six charter schools. That’s a grand total of one third of one percent of the proceeds.  Not exactly generous. Still, better than Denver, Adams 12 and Douglas, which are planning to leave charters out altogether.

In this article in this issue of the EdNews enewsletter, Jim Griffin, executive director of the Colorado League of Charter Schools, laid out the challenges faced by charters in Colorado when attempting to share in the bounty of school district bond issues. Aurora has reinforced Jim’s worst fears through its actions last night.

Read this article for an account of last night’s vote.

We all know politics can get ugly. Education politics can get even uglier. Six weeks ago I wrote about the “hornets nest” stirred up in Westminster over the use of school bond money. Today, the Denver Post’s Monte Whaley brings us up-to-date, as two conflicting efforts to recall a total of three school board members—Kevin Massey, Vicky Marshall, and Marilyn Flachman—appear to have blown the lid off the debate:

“It’s appalling what they are doing to this district,” said Dino Valente, who is pushing for the recall of Massey and Marshall.

He said there is an organized campaign to defame Flachman and her supporters through drawings and hate mail.

Massey claims Flachman’s backers also are slinging disinformation around the community to tarnish his and Marshall’s reputation. “A ton of what they are saying is simply untrue,” Massey said.

My goal is not to wade into the acrimonious he-said, she-said, though undoubtedly it would be helpful to get to the bottom of the story. Instead, allow me to take a birds’ eye approach with some thoughts for both sides, in case they have yet to be considered. What do I mean?

To the citizens angry about the decision to spend all the money on Westminster High School and who launched the initial recall: Be careful of getting fixated on the characters rather than the structure. Even if you’re right, the “throw out the bums” approach yields only a temporary salve. Let’s also look constructively at ways to change the governance of our school system, maybe devolving power away from school boards to an even more local form of control—maybe Weighted Student Funding, with greater school-level autonomy and parental choice.

To the board majority’s defenders launching the counterattack: If you are in the right, it would be best to look beyond the current heated dispute as much as possible. Think about the vital interests and the potentially loud voice of taxpayers now on display, and how such anger might have been averted with greater transparency. From more detail on budget line items to more open access to the decision-making process, ponder how the high ground attained from this sort of policy could strengthen your defense and your case for leadership.

Just a few stray thoughts as I read the story this morning. I may be a bit of a rosy-eyed optimist, but it would be very satisfying to see some sort of productive systemic reform move forward as a result of the ongoing dispute in Westminster.

You may say I’m a dreamer…

Boulder Valley School District is facing a split, DPS and other large districts around the state will be asking for more money this fall, but smaller districts around the state are facing tough decisions this summer as well.

The ( Longmont) Daily Times-Call is reporting this week on the ongoing deliberations by the St. Vrain Valley School District Board of Education to put both a bond issue and mill-levy override on the November ballot. This, as everywhere, is a potentially contentious issue in the face of rising prices and a weakened economy, and the Times-Call’s regurgitation of whatever the school board tells its reporters would seem to bear this out.

Interestingly, the bond issue has weaker support than the mill-levy override, which right now would seem to be passable — a first ever for this much less affluent Boulder County school district. And according to the district’s consultants, a smaller bond issue has a better chance of passing.

On one hand, this may be good news if the limited funds actually go towards shoring up existing buildings — the district is preparing to open two outlying high schools in the next several years while some of its central schools struggle with declining enrollment, disappointing student achievement, and deteriorating facilities.

Those surveyed by the district’s consultants seem to be more supportive of fixing what they have (and improving class size, etc. for students and existing teachers) rather than building more schools. There’s no indication in the story, however, of whether the board might allocate less bond money, if they choose that route. Unfortunately, the story also does not seem to include its own, even informal and anecdotal, poll of taxpayers regarding these proposals. Maybe next time.

It’s a huge political year in Denver, with the Democratic National Convention arriving into town. So when I read in yesterday’s Rocky Mountain News that Denver Public Schools is planning to put a nine-figure bond issue on the November ballot, I gave pause. Is this really a good idea, especially when enrollment is flat and the district is closing so many school sites? Still, DPS officials are faced with the tough choice of how much they’re willing to beg for:

Details such as, should the city school district ask for $300 million or go for broke at $600 million?

“We’re not assuming a $600 million bond issue, but that’s the sum total” of the identified need, Bill Mosher told DPS board members. He is co-chairman of the citizens committee exploring the bond question.

The board approved a resolution Thursday to notify the Denver Elections Commission that the district plans to participate in the fall election, a decision required to secure a spot on the ballot.

I’m not a gambling man myself, so I don’t have advice for the school district from the perspective of putting the city’s successful tax increase streak on the line. But a glance at the article’s comment section suggests that there might be some traction to an “enough is enough” No campaign. Several longtime Denverites I know have moved outside the city limits in the past year, and the common complaint is the unending growth to the homeowner’s tax burden.

Depending on how critical the school district’s identified needs are ($50+ million to renovate one high school?), DPS probably shouldn’t risk the whole kit and caboodle on the $600 million granddaddy proposal. It will be harder to overcome the opposition of justifiably disgruntled taxpayers with Mayor Hickenlooper otherwise preoccupied with the DNC. Yet even if he does find time to film an ad, what can he do to top his previous performances? Drive a motorcycle off a ramp through flaming hoops onto the roof of a school, Evil Knievel-style?

(And it’s not just Denver: Based on this Rocky article, it’s possible the state’s six largest districts, representing more than 40 percent of Colorado’s public school population, could all be pleading for more money this November. Who can blame them for trying? In recent years, citizens of this state have time and again generously given approval to requested tax hikes.)

However, the bureaucrats and officials who think it’s just another year and another time to burden taxpayers more may wish to think again. A perfect storm of rising energy prices on families, a growing backlash against Gov. Bill Ritter’s unauthorized property tax increase “for the children,” and the potentially costly and disruptive DNC hoopla may add up to a less hospitable climate for 2008 school district bond and mill levy requests.

There’s nothing like reading about an acrimonious political dispute in a local school district to stir up an otherwise unseasonably dreary day. From the Denver Post:

Bitterness in the Adams County 50 School District over how best to spend a $96.8 million bond issue is prompting a recall attempt of two school board members and the involvement of the district attorney.

Petitions asking for an election to recall Adams 50 board president Vicky Marshall and board treasurer Kevin Massey began circulating May 23. Proponents need to collect at least 2,507 valid signatures by late August.

If enough signatures are validated by the county clerk, the recall question will go before voters.

“In the first week, we’ve already gathered close to 400 signatures,” said recall supporter Dino Valente. “This is not a hard sell for a lot of people.”

Valente is a member of Restore Our Schools, a group of parents and residents upset over plans to use at least $90 million of the bond proceeds to refurbish Westminster High School, including $2 million for administrative offices.

The group claims that, prior to the 2006 bond election, they were promised that the entire amount would be used to upgrade existing elementary schools and construct a new high school. But in February, the school board decided to use virtually all the money to pay for revamping Westminster High.

Sure, it’s not quite as salacious as last year’s Boulder High School “sex talk” controversy, but Westminster taxpayers have seen their school district make plenty of unwanted news recently. While the controversy over how to spend the bond money has emerged several times in the local press, there also was last month’s CBS4 investigative report that uncovered the district’s careless dealings with an architectural firm hired to implement the bond-funded construction and renovation. Inquiring minds watching from the outside are curious to know how the two stories might connect, whether the change of construction plans in any way relates to the sloppy dealings with the architect.

Then there was last year’s decision to make Westminster the first Front Range school district to give all starting teachers $40,000 in base pay, while missing the chance to implement performance incentives.

While we don’t have the details of who is responsible for what, it seems clear Mr. Valente and his cohort have a strong case of district mismanagement to kindle the fires of their attempted recall election. Some might say that regardless of your point of view, the opportunity for the recall shows that “local control” really works. But I think it also makes the case to take “local control” one step further: to empower parents with more choices so their schools treat them as something more than sources of state tax revenue, namely like customers who may be lost.

Our state suffered a setback for school funding this week:  A district judge ruled Friday that Governor Ritter’s mill-levy freeze is unconstitutional.  The Post reports:

… The mill-levy freeze amounted to a change in tax policy and, thus, should have been approved by voters under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR amendment. She said earlier votes in the vast majority of school districts to shed TABOR revenue limitations were not sufficient to have approved the freeze.

"Because the undisputed fiscal impact of (the freeze) was to increase the size of state government, in this court’s view, this requires compliance with the ‘voter approval’ requirements of TABOR," Habas wrote.

The freeze was passed last year as part of Senate Bill 199, the annual school-finance act. It holds mill levies — the rate at which taxes are charged — in place when they normally would fall, allowing local school districts to collect more tax money. The state, in return, can use the money it saves for other purposes.

The freeze would have brought in $117 million this year, and nearly $3.8 billion over ten years, money which, if spent sensibly, could help hundreds of thousands of children.  Opposition to this urgently needed reform was brought by the Independence Institute, always at the ready to protect taxpayers against those citizens who foolishly attempt to pool our resources to help disadvantaged children.  It has been said, and can be said again:  TABOR simply doesn’t work.  It hasn’t improved our economy, it hasn’t improved our schools, and it hasn’t improved the lot of most Coloradans.

The ruling itself, and its pending appeal, are based on varying interpretations of the requirements of TABOR and on whether the freeze would result in an increase in property tax revenue collected and thus  be subject to TABOR voter-approval requirements.  Whatever the legal technicalities behind the ruling, the fact is that Ref C was not enough:  more needs to be done to surgically excise this financial cancer from our state’s economy.

This week’s Gadfly points to a fascinating article from the Baltimore Sun on Baltimore’s implementation of weight student funding, and principal autonomy.

The bottom line is that more budget authority for principals is not easy for them to manage.  They have hard choices to make.  And, as is necessarily the case, some schools gain funds under WSF, while others lose funds, though the district has worked hard to keep these changes from being too major right away.

Interestingly, some schools have difficulty jettisoning jobs that are not particularly important or necessary to school success, but that relate more to personal relationships – it is harder to do this at the ground level, perhaps, than at the district level.  But, it also follows the theory that the principals know better what they do and don’t really need, to make their school work better.

The experience in Baltimore is important because lots of urban districts are now experimenting with various forms of weighted student funding, including DPS.  I think it is an equitable, potentially efficient, and important reform idea, and districts should try it, but one shouldn’t underestimate the challenges districts and principals will face, nor the need for better training of some new kinds of principals, to make it work well.