We hold our kids accountable. We have them expelled or suspended for their behavior. I think the same rules apply for everybody.

The husband-and-wife educator duo look to be in hot water. According to the CBS4 report, the decision to pursue firing Johnny and Pamela Trujillo followed an internal district audit. I’m not able to comment on the specifics of the case to presume anyone’s guilt, but if further investigation confirms the truth of the serious charges, it also reflects on an important policy: teacher tenure (aka “due process”).

In our state tenure reform is still a live issue, with some of the best reasons articulated by Dr. Marcus Winters in his April 12 Independence Institute talk on Teachers Matter. After three years, Colorado teachers automatically acquire a special property right to their job. Eventually, a 2010 state law will tie earning the right to three years of demonstrated effectiveness in the classroom. But even if SB 191 had taken effect by now, it wouldn’t affect a case like the one taking place in Adams 12.

I was left with a few questions after watching the CBS4 investigative report, such as: Is the union representing the accused teachers? How much has the district spent, and how much does it expect to spend, in legal fees to prosecute the dismissal? How many more appeals remain, and how long before the issue will be settled?

Notable past cases in Colorado show that it easily can cost more than $100,000 to remove a tenured teacher and take several years to reach an outcome. Adams 12 officials must believe they have a strong case, because that’s not money and time to be taken lightly.

On a related note, Ed News Colorado reports a different kind of investigation — this one requested of the state department of education by Denver Public Schools — to determine whether two schools cheated on state tests to get their good results. I certainly hope it turns out not to be true. Most educators have a lot of integrity, but a few bad apples can spoil a lot.

Anyway, as the case regarding Beach Court Elementary and Hallett Fundamental Academy unfolds, please take into advisement my comments from last year’s Atlanta scandal about a “predictable overreaction.”

We conservatives make the case day in and day out that the feds are constantly overstepping their bounds. One way in which they do that is precisely this case – trampling on states that exercise their 10th amendment rights. In most cases we fight back in unison. But in cases where we don’t like the state law or don’t agree with the policy, many on our side fail to speak up on behalf of the state. Take for instance medical marijuana. Like it or not, our state can and has made medical pot legal. Whether you agree with that or not only makes a difference in your criticism of our STATE law. It should have no bearing on whether you stand up for Colorado against the feds.

Take a look at this: Our Colorado delegation voted recently on whether to continue funding the federal government’s war against the legal medical pot industries in states like ours. A principled defender of the 10th Amendment would vote against funding federal encroachment on state affairs. Unfortunately, our Colorado Republican delegation all voted FOR funding the federal war (Colorado dems voted against). Medical pot advocates have rightly pointed out the Republican hypocrisy regarding their “love” for the 10th Amendment as simply “selective.” I could not agree more. It is selective.

It’s very simple folks: the 10th Amendment applies universally – even for state laws you don’t like. Go ahead and criticize state laws if they are bad. But please stand up for our state when the feds decide that their prerogative reigns supreme over our state law when we have jurisdiction. The states created the federal government, not the other way around.

First is last week’s awful news from Alabama. The local Decatur Daily reported:

Proponents of charter schools will likely have to wait at least another year as an Alabama House panel Thursday effectively killed a measure that would have allowed for the creation of the taxpayer-funded, privately-operated schools.

It’s sad to see that even public school parental options can’t gain any real traction in the Heart of Dixie. The teachers union, the Alabama Education Association (AEA), led the charge against choice. As the Education Intelligence Agency’s Mike Antonucci observed, the result should cause some reconsideration of what we describe as “strong union” versus “weak union” states. He also found that AEA’s anti-charter campaign was aided online by thousands of phony Twitter followers. Creative.

But seeing as how I like to save the better news for the end, we can celebrate yesterday’s awesome development from Arizona. Following last year’s successful adoption of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) for special-needs students, Grand Canyon State Governor Jan Brewer yesterday signed into law a program expansion that makes ESAs available to students from military families and students in failing schools:

The Arizona-based Goldwater Institute estimates some 11,500 school-age children of active military members and more than 94,000 students in public schools or school districts graded D or F by the state will be ESA-eligible. Currently, 125,000 students with special needs qualify for ESAs.

“This expansion gives more parents the ability to customize their children’s education,” said Jonathan Butcher, Goldwater’s Education Director. “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts are a 21st century model for education other states would be wise to consider.”

Hear, hear. Now nearly twice as many Arizona kids are eligible to exercise greater choice through the groundbreaking ESA model. Perhaps it’s time for Colorado to take a look? When it comes to school choice, better to be like Arizona than be like ‘Bama.

In its relentless never-ending quest for more power to track and follow American citizens through their smartphones, the Department of Justice (DoJ) requested last week that Congress give them easier access to location data stored by cellphone service providers.

Jason Weinstein, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s criminal division, argued that requiring a search warrant to gain such access would “cripple” his department’s efforts to investigate crime and criminals. Said Weinstein,

There is really no fairness and no justice when the law applies differently to different people depending on which courthouse you’re sitting in.

For that reason alone, we think Congress should clarify the legal standard.

In other words, because the laws protecting privacy vary somewhat depending upon where an individual citizen lives, Congress should come along and override them all and provide a federal, looser standard, all in the name of security.

The increasing sophistication of cellphone and communications technology in general allows service providers to track virtually every movement of an individual, day or night, at home or work, in a bar or on a golf course. Malte Spitz, a German politician and privacy advocate, obtained his own

Continue reading The DoJ Wants to Track Your Smartphone Without a Warrant

We’ve translated President Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy before. Basically, it’s to rid the US of energy from fossil fuels. Now, no translation is needed.

Dan Arvizu, director of Colorado’s own National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a taxpayer-funded arm of the Department of Energy, says “fossil fuels should be phased out by 2040 to blunt man-made climate change” reports the Denver Post.

Arvizu refers to natural gas as simply “a nice bridge technology, but not the answer we are looking for in terms of a transition and transformation,” away from fossil fuels and toward alternatives such as wind, solar, and biofuels, of which NREL is a champion.

NREL has seen its budget and influence grow under the Obama administration. We reported in September of last year that NREL’s budget exploded 63.4 percent from 2007 to 2010. While taxpayers suffered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, NREL received nearly $300 million in “stimulus” funds to create 219 jobs. To put that in perspective, Colorado’s oil and gas industry “directly employs over 40,000 people and supports over 107,000 jobs in the state and provides $6.5 billion in total labor income and $31 billion in economic output annually,” according to the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA).

Even if COGA is off by a factor of half, the oil and gas industry is economically more beneficial to Colorado than NREL, which claims substantial increases in economic benefit but still doesn’t equal the percentage increase in its taxpayer-funded budget according to an NREL press release.

NREL’s economic impact grew 41 percent from FY 2009’s $588.3 million, and 12 percent from FY 2010’s $742 million, as construction continued on energy-efficient research and office buildings that will house employees leading the nation to a clean energy future.

So taxpayer-funded NREL wants to get rid of privately-funded fossil fuel industry. We now know what President Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy looks like and doesn’t really include all sources of energy.

So I’m not the only one who likes to see what kind of progress we’re making on the CSAP TCAP. In the past five years, 3rd grade reading scores in most of the state’s 10 largest districts have been flat with very slight upticks. The notable exceptions are from the lower performers with greater student poverty. Aurora Public Schools improved from 46 percent proficient in 2007 to 51.5 percent in the latest round.

Even more remarkable, Denver Public Schools has made the leap from 50 percent proficient to 59 percent over the same five-year span. As DPS superintendent appropriately noted in his email announcement:

As pleased as we are with the growth, it is clear that we have much more work in front of us to continue to improve our elementary literacy.

Likely sharing the same attitude is one of DPS’ exceptional improvements, my friends at the Cole Arts and Science Academy innovation school. In this school with a 96 percent student poverty rate, 3rd grade reading proficiency more than doubled from 22 to 48 percent on the CSAP TCAP. Hooray! A DPS turnaround school that made an even bigger improvement, Greenlee Elementary, earned a feature on 9 News for boosting the success rate from 21 to 55 percent.

On the opposite end, the highly-touted recent success of high-poverty Beach Court Elementary has taken the plunge from 85 percent proficient 2 years ago and 78 percent in 2011 to only 40 percent this time around. Ongoing success is not guaranteed. What exactly has changed deserves a closer look.

To a lesser extent, Harrison School District’s Wildflower Elementary — which last year proudly claimed 100 percent proficiency with three-fourths of its student population in poverty — came in above average at only 84 percent on this year’s CSAP TCAP.

Wildflower was one of eight elementary schools statewide last year to register a perfect mark in 3rd grade reading proficiency. (Please note that some schools might be omitted because the sample size, or number of students in the grade, was too small.) This year there were 11, including rural Valley Re-1’s Caliche Elementary with a 47 percent poverty rate. One school repeated the feat in consecutive years, Cherry Creek’s Challenge School. The other nine 100-percenters on the 3rd grade reading CSAP TCAP are as follows:

• Aurora Quest K-8
• Carbondale Community Charter School
• Liberty Common Charter School (Fort Collins)
• New Emerson School at Columbus (Grand Junction)
• Polaris at Ebert Elementary (Denver)
• Steck Elementary (Denver)
• Swink Elementary
• University Hill Elementary (Boulder)
• Wilder Elementary (Littleton)

Onward and upward for next year’s batch of Colorado 3rd grade reading scores!

In a recent hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy said under questioning by U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., and Committee Chairman Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., that her agency – despite issuing regulations that will have a profound affect on electricity production in the United States – “doesn’t live in the energy world.”

“Tri-State is a wholesale electric power supplier in Colorado that is owned by the 44 cooperative, generating – transmitting electricity and has come to my office multiple times trying to talk about their compliance with EPA’s Utility Max standards and…their estimate is that it would likely cost them $1 million …I’m asking you to comment on the rural co-ops which are non-profits.

Ms. McCarthy confirmed that some ratepayers would see their rates increase by about 3%, which the EPA calculated to be about $3 a month for the average family, there was this exchange between the panel and her:

Rep. Gardner: ”And so that – the only way they can do that is to pass those increased costs on to their ratepayers?”

McCarthy: “I have trouble answering that question because I don’t live in the energy world, but my understanding is that compliance can be achieved by lower demand, as well as increased generation, fuel switching, and a number of techniques.”

Whitfield: “I think that’s the point that we’re trying to drive home. You’re right, Ms. McCarthy, you do not live in the energy world. But then you make extrapolations on gigawatt issues that are a reliability concern based on the chart I saw. DOE rolls over in acceptance of your electricity generation, or lack thereof, analysis, and when you have the people in the field who are disputing that analysis on the gigawatt issue, we’re debating with an environmental agency, not our Department of Energy. And if the analysis was close to what industry, financial people, FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), EEI (Edison Electric Institute) say then, we would cut some leeway.

“But the administrations proposal – actually, the environmental rules – and the effect on the electric grid, of 10 gigawatts, is laughable. And so, you can do all the analysis on emittants you want, but we reject the premise that you are experts in electricity generation, the cost of building plants, and developing those.”

Rep. Whitfield’s point is that the opinions of actual experts – which seem to be in broad agreement that the EPA rules run the risk of reducing the US’s overall electricity output – are being subordinated to the judgments of the EPA, which, by its own administrator’s admission, doesn’t live “in the energy world.”

Is it true? Well, the EPA estimates a loss of 10 gigawatts (GW) of electrical generation nationwide as a result of its new rules. This estimate is indeed not only out of line, but well out of line, with a variety of other estimates from Credit Suisse (50 GW realistic, 60+ GW possible), Friedman Billings Ramsay (45 GW), the North American Electric Reliabiliy Corporation, or NERC (33-70 GW), the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator, or MISO (13 GW immediate, up to 61 GW retrofitted), and the Institute for Energy Research (34 GW).

It’s one thing to be independent of the industries you’re supposed to be regulating. But even independent regulatory bodies shouldn’t be making rules based on assumptions and models whose results virtually nobody in the field takes seriously. Maybe the EPA should live a little more “in the energy world,” a world it so closely regulates.

Recently, WhoSaidYouSaid showed Colorado state Rep. John Soper, D-Thornton, telling public school employees to “go someplace else” if they didn’t like being due-paying members of the Colorado Education Association. Soper was speaking in opposition to HB12-1333, a bill that would have permitted teachers to opt out of union membership any time, with a 30-day notice.

The Democrats’ opposition, as you can see from our distilled video above, was largely based on the idea of local control of schools, enshrined in the Colorado state constitution. The repetition of the phrase by Rep. Millie Hamner, D-Summit, and Rep. Judy Solano, D-Brighton, struck me as a drinking game.

The problem is that “local control,” while it does extend beyond curriculum, is not absolute. According to the Colorado Department of Education, “local control” encompasses:

“Both by citizen preference and law, Colorado is a ‘local control’ state. This means that many pre-kindergarten through 12th grade public education decisions – on issues such as curriculum, personnel, school calendars, graduation requirements, and classroom policy – are made by the 176 school district administrations and their school boards.”

Local control would, according to the categories listed above, include things that actually affect the relationship among teachers, schools, parents, and children, but doesn’t seem to include the internal relationship between the teachers and their union.

In practice, according to David Kopel, research director for the Independence Institute, Colorado case law limits exclusive local control more than this definition – and Reps. Solano’s and Hamner’s insistence – would presume.

The state legislature can set ground rules for teacher dismissals. (Blaine v. Moffat County School Dist. Re No. 1, 1988, 748 P.2d 1280.)

Therefore, sect. 15 does not grant school districts absolutely immunity from legislative regulation of employee relations.

“For purposes of state constitutional provision giving ‘control of instruction’ to local school boards, local board discretion can be restricted or limited, where specific local board decisions are likely to implicate important education policy, by statutory criteria, judicial review, or both.” (Board of Educ. of School Dist. No. 1 in City and County of Denver v. Booth, 1999, 984 P.2d 639.)

As for Rep. Solano’s somewhat snarky assertion that, “If you’re for local control for one thing, it’s very difficult to be against local control for something else,” historically, that’s been far from true for either party. Insistent on local control in this case, the Democrats have, in the past, overridden it to press for Race to the Top funds, establish an arts curriculum requirement, and set sex education standards.

However, what has been true is that the left has been all too willing to use the facade of “local control” as an excuse to stifle reforms both large – as in the statewide school choice program struck down by the courts – and small, as in this case of letting teachers escape unwanted union membership, when they see them as a threat to the entrenched power of the teachers’ union.

On to the links.

Colorado

• Rep. Scott Tipton is trying to turn Chimney Rock into a National Monument.
• The definition of terrorism has been expanded to include high school pranks.
• Rural elementary schools in the San Luis Valley are improving. I thought that wasn't possible because a lack of funding.
• Speaking of the SLV, US Fish and Wildlife is looking at locking up 5.2 million acres if land land in "conservation areas". That would prevent that area, which is mostly desert, from being used for solar development.

Everywhere else

• After the drubbing Barack Obama's been getting in coal heavy West Virginia, he's decided to "support" clean coal.
• The rest of the world knows Obama is a failure, too.
• Call me a prude if you want but I think 9, 10 and 11 years old is a little young to be showing films about sex slavery.
• 180,000 non-citizen voters in Florida? Obviously, this isn't a problem.
• Energy facts! Get yer energy facts here. I should also mention that a new oil share deposit gives the US more oil than the entire world's prove reserves.
• The EPA has released a cap and trade game that proves that implementing such a system would kill energy production.

What do skeptics from Denver and conservatives from the Heritage Foundation have in common? More than you might initially guess.

We suppose Ari is one of the few people to have attended both a Heritage event and a Skepticamp (a day filled with talks critical of mysticism and the paranormal). He may be the only one to have done so on back-to-back weekends.

During the last weekend of April, Heritage sponsored a two-day event in Colorado Springs for free-market activists. On May 5, Denver-area skeptics organized a Skepticamp in Parker. Ari attended both events, and the juxtaposition of ideas merits some discussion.

Of course the huge disagreement between the conservatives and the skeptics concerns the reasonableness of believing in a supernatural entity. Most of those who attended the Heritage event believe in the Christian God. Probably everyone at Skepticamp, on the other hand, believes that no god exists, and that neither the evidence nor any rational argument supports a belief in God’s existence.

That is a huge debate, and one’s beliefs on the matter impact one’s entire worldview. By the time people reach adulthood, they usually settle their beliefs on the matter; we doubt that anyone who attended either event will seriously consider changing positions.

While we cannot understate the importance of the debate over God’s existence, nevertheless beyond that issue many conservatives share much in common with many skeptics. And we think the similarities are just as interesting.

We hope the skeptics would have been impressed by much of what Heritage historian Matthew Spalding had to say. Spalding sees America’s founding as rooted in the Enlightenment, a movement that recognized the power of human reason to advance science and governments. Spalding described the core principles of America—equality under the law, a recognition of the facts of human nature, and government rooted in the consent of the governed—and argued that everyone, whether pagan or Christian, can discover these truths through reason.

True, skeptics would disagree with Spalding’s view that “reason and revelation agree” about such things. Nevertheless, Spalding resisted the views of some that American principles flow only from the Christian tradition. Spalding pointed out that the Constitution is not a sectarian document, and that Jefferson and other Founders drew on the ideas of Aristotle, Cicero, and other pre-Christian thinkers.

Spalding also spoke about the profound importance of religious liberty and freedom of conscience, ideals many skeptics also support. For example, Spalding praised George Washington’s “Letter to the Jews of Newport,” written early in the great man’s term as president.

Washington wrote, “The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.”

We are proud to call ourselves liberals in this Washingtonian tradition. And both conservatives and skeptics who follow Washington in supporting freedom of conscience are to that degree liberals in the truest sense.

Many skeptics could learn a thing or two from Spalding about the profound importance of economic liberty. While skeptics claim to be critical thinkers, some unthinkingly embrace leftist political goals emanating from the disturbed mind of Karl Marx and the so-called “Progressive” movement that he inspired. To take but one example, some skeptics seemed to support censorship of political speech by individuals interacting voluntarily in groups (“corporations”).

Spalding spoke eloquently of the Founders’ respect for property rights, economic liberty, and the rule of law that protects equality under the law, not “equality” of resources that others produce. As Spalding argued, such liberties flow from natural facts about people and the use of reason to recognize those facts and their proper political implementation.

Unfortunately, sometimes skeptics and American Christians make a comparable error. Some skeptics see the cause of economic liberty as bound up with the religious right and reject both. Some Christians think that the problem with Communism was its atheism, rather than its reliance on a secularized version of religion that treats the collective as a mystical superentity. Capitalism—the system of individual rights (including economic liberty)—finds its defense in reason based on the evidence of the natural world.

But many skeptics do indeed endorse economic liberty. Last year Barry Fagin, a free-market writer for the Independence Institute, spoke at Skepticamp. This year, Robert Zubrin spoke about his new book, “Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism.” Strikingly, while some of the conservatives made disparaging remarks about Charles Darwin, the greatest biologist of human history, Zubrin explained how leftists misapplied Darwin’s ideas to promote programs involving eugenics and population control.

If every conservative would attend a Skepticamp, and every skeptic would attend a lecture by the likes of Spalding, the world would be a much more interesting place—and we think a much better one.

Linn Armstrong is a local political activist and firearms instructor with the Grand Valley Training Club. His son, Ari blogs at AriArmstrong.com in the Denver area.

Note: Heritage paid most of Ari’s expenses for the event in question (not that that made any difference to the contents of this article); see Ari Armtrong’s Disclosures Unjustly Compelled by the FTC.