From the editor

"It's the deep breath before the plunge," as Gandalf the wizard tells the hobbit Pippin on the cusp of a cataclysmic battle in Lord of the Rings.

Neither the post-holiday resumption of school nor the State Legislature gearing up resembles the siege of Minas Tirith, but they will have to do for now. After a few weeks of blissful quiet on the education front, things are about to get busy -- and interesting.

Here's what we can expect this week alone:

• The aforementioned opening of the legislative session. See Todd Engdahl's excellent pieces in the new issue of HeadFirst Colorado for a preview of what we might expect from our local solons on the education front.
• A decision by the leadership of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association on whether the union will support Bruce Randolph School's bid for autonomy from union rules and district bureaucracy. The Denver school board upped the ante on the union just before the holidays by unanimously approving the Randolph request. Should the union oppose the move, it will confirm the suspicions of many that teacher unions, particularly those affiliated with the National Education Association, have become among the biggest obstacles to meaningful school improvement.
• An appeal hearing before the state Board of Education on the rejection of a charter school application in the mountain town of Ridgway. It's a small matter, in some ways, but it also presents an interesting test case on what, if any, limitations should be placed on school choice, particularly in small, rural communities.

Undoubtedly, there will be much more to come as the spring progresses, much of it unanticipated. We'll make sure to keep you informed.

Our new, enhance web site, Education News Colorado, launched this week. The new address is www.ednewscolorado.org The site includes HeadFirst Colorado magazine and all other features of the current web site, as well, as significant new features.

Our regular rotation of articles will resume with next week's newsletter.

--Alan Gottlieb

Blog highlights

After a 10-day holiday hiatus, Schools for Tomorrow leapt back into action January 2.

Ask tough questions about full-day K

Thursday, January 3, 2008
Written by: Uncle Charley

One week out from the start of the legislative session, Gov. Bill Ritter needs to be careful about what he's promising Coloradans with his proposal to expand full-day kindergarten:

Ritter wants to spend $25 million in the 2008-09 school year, building to $100 million over six years, to send 22,000 more children to full-day kindergarten. School districts that want to offer full-day kindergarten would have to seek the funds.

The proposal, which grew out of Ritter's P-20 Education Coordinating Council, has not found many outspoken detractors. ("Few have criticized the idea, but no one has a plan on how to fund it," Ed Sealover wrote in the Colorado Springs Gazette today.)

But then along comes an analysis like this one from the Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP), which carries out professional non-partisan research for the Washington State Legislature. WSIPP researchers carefully analyzed 23 academic studies in which the effects of full-day kindergarten on different groups of students could be isolated, and came up with the following conclusion:

Based on our analysis, it is clear that full-day kindergarten provides academic benefits by the end of the kindergarten school year but that the effects erode almost completely in grades one through three.

And:

Because full-day kindergarten is often offered to disadvantaged children, we also analyzed from five studies reporting on low-income and minority children separately. Exhibit 9 shows the results at kindergarten and later for these groups. The exhibit indicates that the short-term benefits decrease significantly, in a pattern similar to that of the entire sample.

And:

The lesson seems to be that for full-day kindergarten to generate long-term academic benefits, public policies need to examine how to sustain the early gains from any investments in full-day kindergarten.

Of course, this study is not the final word on the topic. But anyone purporting that an expansion of full-day kindergarten is the answer to our educational woes needs to address such findings head on. Namely, why should we use taxpayer funds to push thousands more Colorado kids into full-day kindergarten without knowing how to make it work and whether it can be done? Ask the education bureaucrats and union who stand to benefit the most from such a policy change.

In Washington State, the cost of switching to full-day kindergarten was estimated at $2,611 per pupil:

Without sustained benefits beyond the end of kindergarten, we would estimate no long-term financial benefits for full-day kindergarten. Thus, the net result is a negative benefit of -$2,611….

"The net result is a negative benefit"? Should this really be Ritter's top priority for

One Response to "Ask tough questions about full-day K"

1. Van Schoales Says:
   January 3rd, 2008 at 12:20 pm

I suspect you and the folks at WSIPP are spot on regarding the long term impact full day K but that does not diminish the importance of having full day K as an option for all in CO. It is a critical but insufficient solution to our P-20 woes. Full day K helps get kids ready but you need the rest of the first grade to college pipeline to carry them and the current system can not do it as currently operated. The whole pipeline must be shored up and changed if we are get more kids prepared for work, life and citizenship. Full day K is probably the easiest fist step. The dramatically more difficult step will be grades 6-14.

Another ride on the reform roller coaster

Thursday, January 3, 2008
Written by: Captain Haddock

The Democratic Presidential candidates don't talk about education much, but when they do, they have one talking point:  Get rid of No Child Left Behind.  The New York Times reports:

Teachers cheered Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton when she stepped before them last month at an elementary school in Waterloo, Iowa, and said she would "end" the No Child Left Behind Act because it was "just not working."

Mrs. Clinton is not the only presidential candidate who has found attacking the act, President Bush's signature education law, to be a crowd pleaser — all the Democrats have taken pokes. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico has said he wants to "scrap" the law. Senator Barack Obama has called for a "fundamental" overhaul. And John Edwards criticizes the law as emphasizing testing over teaching. "You don't make a hog fatter by weighing it," he said recently while campaigning in Iowa.

NCLB has deep flaws, and it should be "fundamentally" overhauled.  But completely eliminating the policy may just continue the see-saw of education policy we've been mired in for 30 years.  

The problem, besides motion sickness, is that we rarely have the opportunity to see what works.  None of these reforms is perfect; few are wholly without merit.  By simply scrapping the previous system, mostly because it was associated with the opposite party, we lose the ability to make incremental change, building on positives and weeding out negatives.  Let's get ourselves off of the reform roller coaster.

The best charters require extra money

Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Written by: Quique

My thankless role here has often been to throw cold water on unfounded enthusiasm about purported benefits of charter school policies. But I also think it's important to note that the charter sector includes some wonderful schools. One such school was highlighted in the Christmas edition of the New York Times. The school is everything we all would hope for in a charter school (or any school): it's innovative and caring, and it serves an at-risk population of students who very often fall through the cracks in other schools.

The charter school profiled is near Atlanta. It serves, among others, refugees from about 40 countries. It also enrolls a wider variety of local children (in terms of parents' jobs and wealth) than we usually see. The result is a heartwarming Christmas story; I encourage everyone to read it.

A couple notes of caution, however, are due. First, the article notes that the school could not survive without outside funding. Just like back home in Denver, where the Randolph reform is being undertaken with considerable financial assistance from Piton and others, this Georgia school "must … raise some $400,000 a year" and benefits from unspecified hours of volunteer time. Among other things, this money seems to be used to keep class size at 18 and employ classroom assistants. Let's keep this lesson in mind: more funding can't guarantee better schools, but we probably can't get many of those better schools without spending quite a bit more.

Second, the article raises a cautionary note at the end, concerning the increasing Adequate Yearly Progress requirements under the No Child Left Behind law. Sure, the school enrolls refugees from across the globe, and some (many?) of them arrive illiterate and innumerate, but those kids must still score proficient on the standardized exams, or the school becomes a failure. Fortunately, it is looking more and more like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act's next reauthorization won't follow the NCLB approach.

One Response to "The best charters require extra money"

1. Van Schoales Says:
   January 2nd, 2008 at 2:10 pm

Well Quique, I totally appreciate your thoughtful posts even though I generally agree more with the pro-charter folks on these issues. We need to have much deeper and more nuanced discussions.

You are right that good schools require more money than is currently being provided in Colorado but unfortunately adding general operating funds will do nothing in regards to student outcomes without more radical reforms on the system. The current system is relatively inefficient and inflexible. Any increase in funding needs to be tied to greater equity, flexibility, transparency and efficiency in the school finance system.

I do agree that we need to totally overhaul and increase the funding for school facilities so that every child in Colorado can have a safe and inviting place to learn. It's ridiculous that some kids in rural Colorado have leaky school roofs while others in charters are learning in old store fronts or mold infested trailers. We need more and more equitable funding for facilities in Colorado.

The recent study, "Getting Down To Facts" (http://irepp.stanford.edu/projects/cafinance.htm) by a team of high powered researchers from Stanford about California's system (similar to Colorado) sums it up nicely.

"It is clear for example, that solely directing more money into the current system will not dramatically improve student achievement and will meet neither expectations or needs. What matters most are the ways in which the available resources are used."

The revolution starts now (?)

Thursday, December 20, 2007
Written by: Alan Gottlieb

Bruce Randolph School's bid for autonomy won unanimous approval from the Denver school board tonight.

Board Resolution 3060 basically codified Randolph's "Professional Autonomy Agreement," submitted to Denver Public Schools and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association earlier this month. Until and unless otherwise specified in the agreement, Randolph is now free of burdensome aspects of district regulations and many provisions of the union contract.

Rather than having to navigate two bureaucracies to specify what it wants to opt out of, the school instead gets a clean slate, and can choose which pieces of the contract and the bureaucracy it wishes to embrace.

Under a best case scenario (with apologies to singer/songwriter Steve Earle), the revolution starts now. "My hope is that we will soon have 20 proposals like this on our desks," school board President Theresa Peña said, moments before voting.

That degree of solicited chaos makes some people nervous, including board member Jeannie Kaplan, whose yes vote came "with an asterisk." Kaplan's support was qualified, because, she said, the district needs to get a handle on how it will consider future requests of a similar nature, and measure the success, or lack thereof, of schools set free.

Randolph teacher Margaret Bobb, who dissented from the majority view at her school, made a reasoned plea for a different approach. She asked the board to take a deep breath and wait until at least January to vote. Everyone needs more time, Bobb argued, to digest the magnitude of the potential changes, and to assess whether giving the school a blank slate was the best way to proceed.

But there was no slowing down the Randolph express tonight. Representatives of community organizing groups Metro Organizations for People and Padres Unidos spoke in favor of the Randolph plan. So did representatives of the Donnell-Kay Foundation and the Daniels Fund, as well as a slate of Randolph teachers, rookies and vets alike.

The DCTA board will vote on the Randolph proposal in early January. Despite opposing the plan up to now, it's hard to believe the union will continue to fight a popular, audacious proposal that has such demonstrably widespread support. We shall see.

Now comes the hard part. Randolph will be under tremendous pressure to use its newly-won freedom to continue making steady, sustainable gains in student achievement. The odds are daunting. But this is clearly a tough and dedicated group. I wish them all the best.

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