Happy Digital Learning Day, Colorado!

by Eddie | 11:09 am, February 1, 2012

I’m still catching my breath from an amazingly successful National School Choice Week, including the Kids Aren’t Cars movie night put on by some of my friends right here in Denver.
And now today it’s the first-ever Digital Learning Day, centered at a site where you can participate in a live chat and watch a [...]

Foundation Gives High-Performing Poorer Denver Area Schools Cause to Celebrate

by Eddie | 12:59 pm, January 24, 2012

Today’s lead story at Ed News Colorado highlights the disparity in private parent and community giving within Denver Public Schools. Reporter Charlie Brennan notes that no school raked in more than the nearly $230,000 at Bromwell Elementary, a school with a low 8 percent study poverty rate. The general findings are no surprise, yet nonetheless [...]

Denver Post Tackles Long-Studied Problem of Tax-Funded Teachers Union Release Time

by Eddie | 2:17 pm, December 19, 2011

Update, 1/5/12: Chris Tessone at the Flypaper blog also makes note of the Denver Post story, correctly observing: “It’s difficult to make an argument that taxpayers should be directly subsidizing union leaders. Organized labor already extracts indirect subsidies by skimming dues from teachers’ paychecks, sometimes against the desires of teachers.”
Guess what! Just over a week [...]

New Colorado School Grades Website Offers Important Info to Families

by Eddie | 2:50 pm, December 12, 2011

Having more educational choices by itself is a good thing. Yet without enough accompanying information for families to make wise and effective choices, a lot of potential is lost. That’s one of the reasons why my Education Policy Center friends continue to offer the fantastic School Choice for Kids (SCFK) website, with all its helpful [...]

Please, Please, Stop the Taxpayer-Funded (Colorado Teachers) Union Madness!

by Eddie | 11:04 am, December 9, 2011

Sometimes you have to look outside the world of education to capture attention for issues affecting Colorado schools and the students and taxpayers invested in their success. Two headlines in particular popped up this week. The first comes from the Goldwater Institute in Arizona, which is litigating Cheatham v. Gordon, a troubling case of wasted [...]

Tell Hoover Institution Your Best and Worst Education Events of 2011 (Vote #1)

by Eddie | 1:16 pm, December 5, 2011

One thing December brings is the obligatory year-end lists. If you are even a casual reader of this blog, then you should be interested in taking a moment to vote on the “Best and Worst in American Education, 2011″ — brought to you by the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education.
Being of [...]

Independence Institute Report Helps Build K-12 Financial Transparency Momentum

by Eddie | 4:37 pm, November 16, 2011

Not long ago my Education Policy Center friends released a report analyzing how well Colorado’s 195 local education agencies (i.e., school districts and BOCES) are complying with the 2010 Public School Financial Transparency Act. As you might imagine, this kind of work presented the challenge of capturing a perfect static picture in a dynamic online [...]

“Audits for Thee, Not for Me,” But More Attacks on Online Ed. Option to Come

by Eddie | 12:17 pm, November 9, 2011

Despite what you may hear, legislative “gridlock” isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, it quite often can be a good thing. Case in point comes from this story yesterday in Ed News Colorado:
Colorado’s top senator says he’ll introduce legislation to “rein in” online schools after his request for an online education audit was rejected [...]

New I.I. Report Shows Colo. Local K-12 Agencies Have Lots of Room to Follow the Law and Improve Financial Transparency

by Eddie | 1:19 pm, November 7, 2011

So here we are, almost a week after the election here in Colorado that got a lot of big people’s attention. Prop 103’s “for the kids” tax hike went down in a ball of flames. A record number of local school tax and debt elections ran headlong into defeat. In at least one case, “negative [...]

Reveling in Election Results? New NAEP Scores Mixed Bag for Colorado & Nation

by Eddie | 11:08 am, November 2, 2011

With all the important results related to education in last night’s election here in Colorado — hooray, the only dominoes that toppled were the ones supporting the Prop 103 tax increase on families like mine, AND the school choice champions in Douglas County all won — it would be easy for me to overlook some [...]

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