Education News Colorado Opinion & Commentary

Bad news from the dark soul of Texas

Alan Gottlieb — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:19:40 +0000

Ready for some revisionist history? You’d better be.

Kansas City: Like a run on the banks?

Mark Sass — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:03:26 +0000

In It’s a Wonderful Life, the iconic Christmas movie, there is a scene that takes place in the Building and Loan Bank. It’s the bank run scene. Customers have heard that the bank may go under so they rush to take out their money. The catch is that there isn’t enough money to pay everyone, so only those first in line will be able to get all of their deposits. George, played by Jimmy Stewart, pleads with the customers to take only what they need. He explains how the customers are all in this together, that one person’s savings is used as a loan for another person to start a small business. In other words, don’t just think of yourselves, think of the whole community. It’s a classic individual versus collective needs dilemma.

I thought of this scene as I listened to a radio report about the drastic cuts that have taken place in the Kansas City, Mo. schools. In the 1960s, the school district had over 70,000 students. Today, it has less than 17,000. The superintendent has proposed closing over half of the existing schools and consolidating others. The drop in student population over the years is due to a well-intentioned, court-ordered busing policy enacted in the 1980s. Middle-income families, who could afford it, sent their children to suburban or private schools. Those left now deal with the remnants of this massive exodus.

I want to be careful not to only blame the families who fled the district for the situation that the district now faces. Certainly there is enough blame to go around. But the families who left, who were privileged enough to afford to remove their students, also might have had the political capital to force serious reform in the district to keep the school system healthy. I do not fault parents for tending to what they perceived as a serious situation for their children. But, by abandoning the school district for the suburbs, I believe they also abandoned their community.

Does CEA care more about school funding or political allies?

Ben DeGrow — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:01:31 +0000

Sure, the Colorado Education Association loves to increase funding for K-12 schools and retain member jobs. But sometimes, its pleas for school funding simply don’t add up. Yesterday’s CEA blog entry “Amazon: play fair, support school funding” is just such an example:

In other words, Amazon firing its affiliates does nothing to impact the fact that Amazon.com is still required to collect sales tax or, at a minimum alert their customers to this requirement under state law. The giant retailer is using its political weight to protest losing its tax-free status and having to compete on par with other Colorado retailers.

Why should you care? Because sales tax revenues fund public schools. A portion of all sales tax revenue goes into the State Education fund, the first source for nearly all K-12 public education programs, from the state’s share of Total Program to funding for full-day kindergarten.

By ensuring that all companies doing business in Colorado collect sales tax from retail sales, we are ensuring that revenue continues to flow into the State Education Fund. By creating a more level playing field for Colorado companies to compete with online retail giants, we are helping support local companies — this also raises property and income tax revenues that help fund public education.

Perhaps CEA should strive to be more honest, or at least to do its homework by reading this thorough and careful analysis from the Tax Foundation (H/T Free Colorado). Among other things, the analysis shows that Amazon taxes:

Are “unlikely to produce revenue in the near-term”
Make the playing field less (not more) level between brick-and-mortar businesses and their Internet-based counterparts “because they require Internet-based businesses to track thousands of sales tax bases and rates while brick-and-mortar businesses need to track only one”
“Undermine legal certainty, burden interstate commerce, and harm economic growth”

So maybe CEA is ignorant of tax policy and chose to accept the official fiscal note that claimed Colorado’s Amazon Tax (aka HB 1193) would raise nearly $5 million more state revenue per year. Or maybe CEA is just trying to provide cover for its allies in the legislative majority at the State Capitol. Because after all, who can provide a better It’s For the Kids propaganda moment than the teachers union?

There’s one way to tell which scenario is more likely to be the case. Find out whether CEA opposes SB 177 (PDF), an expansion of an agricultural tax credit that legislative fiscal analysts say will negatively impact local property tax collection for schools.

CEA’s choice in supporting tax policies conveniently appears less dependent on how the policies affect school funding than on how they affect the interests of its Left-leaning political coalition.

Kansas City’s second act

Alexander Ooms — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:52:58 +0000

The budget rumbles begin, but the story in KC has a lot more context. To start, from the Wall Street Journal (or try the NYT):

The Kansas City Missouri School Board voted Wednesday night to shutter nearly half of its schools in an effort to avoid going broke. The action closes 28 of 58 campuses and eliminates about 700 of the district’s 3,300 jobs, including 285 teachers. [...] The Kansas City School District, which serves 18,000 students, was twice as large a decade ago. That decrease has led to cuts in state funding. The district now runs a $12 million monthly deficit and expects to run out of money by 2011. [...] Less than one third of elementary school students are reading at or above grade level. In nearly three quarters of the schools only one quarter of the students are characterized as “proficient,” according to the district.

If you are closing 48% of the schools while eliminating only 21% of the jobs, you are either closing schools that are close to empty, or your plan is probably doomed, or more likely both. The origin of this fiscal collapse is the long steady decline in the academic quality of KC public schools, where two-thirds of all elementary school students are already behind at least one grade level. How did we get here?

Kansas City is best known among educators as the location of one of the great failures in education reform in the history of recorded time, where over $2 billion (and $2B bought a lot more 25 years ago) failed to make a dent in an underperforming system.

In 1985 a federal district judge took partial control over the troubled Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) on the grounds that it was an unconstitutionally segregated district with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly. In an effort to bring the district into compliance with his liberal interpretation of federal law, the judge ordered the state and district to spend nearly $2 billion over the next 12 years to build new schools, integrate classrooms, and bring student test scores up to national norms.

It didn’t work. When the judge, in March 1997, finally agreed to let the state stop making desegregation payments to the district after 1999, there was little to show for all the money spent. Although the students enjoyed perhaps the best school facilities in the country, the percentage of black students in the largely black district had continued to increase, black students’ achievement hadn’t improved at all, and the black-white achievement gap was unchanged. (article here)

Money can’t buy you love, and it can’t buy a District high-quality schools. As the impact of declining budgets starts to creep across Colorado, while dissident voices cry out for educational systems and regulations where quality is a secondary concern, it’s worth noting that high-quality schools do more to protect a District’s financial position than anything else. And if quality goes, it takes a whole lot down with it.

When budgets falter, most interest groups usually try to protect their pet projects or personal interests. This often hastens the decline. Quality first.

College Summit gets Nobel

Alan Gottlieb — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:07:00 +0000

College Summit's J.B. Schramm

College Summit, is a non-profit with strong Colorado ties. Its founder, JB. Schramm, is a graduate of Denver’s East High School. The 17-year-old program, which address the under-enrollment of capable low-income youth in college, works in several Colorado districts, most notably Mapleton, where college-going rates have gone up and dropout rates down since College Summit appeared on the scene.

Today, College Summit learned that it is one of 10 non-profits across the country that will receive a share — $125,000 –of President Obama’s $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize award. Susan Bross, executive director of College Summit’s Colorado chapter, says a portion of the money will go to the organization’s Colorado work.

Here is a list of all the charities getting a slice of Obama’s Nobel money.

Systemic change vs. atomization

Mark Sass — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:34:38 +0000

I have not thrown in the towel on systemic change for our schools. I continue to worry that the atomization of schools—charters, magnet schools—brings about pockets of excellence in urban school districts opposed to improvement in larger numbers.

Michael Fullan has written extensively on his education reform work with the Province of Ontario in Canada and other large districts in the United States and England. He has a new book “Motion Leadership: the Skinny on Becoming Change Savvy.” It is a quick read (78 pages) and it is a nice companion to some of his other books.

From the editor: Parents propose marriage

Alan Gottlieb — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:22:54 +0000

Let’s say a group of parents at a neighborhood school banded together and proposed to a high-performing charter school that the two schools combine efforts to create a PreK-12 school that would help send all kids from the struggling neighborhood to college.

What’s not to like, right? Parental involvement at its best. Community engagement. A tacit recognition that ideological food fights over charter versus traditional public schools are meaningless; all that matters is how to serve kids well.

Who might object, and on what grounds?

Stay tuned for some possible answers.

Last Friday, Denver’s Cole Arts and Science Academy (CASA) parents, along with Principal Julie Murgel, held a news conference to announce they had asked the Denver School of Science and Technology to open its third campus at Cole in the fall of 20l1. See video). The idea, hatched by a group of parents, had been presented to DSST leadership some weeks earlier, and DSST had responded with interest.

Every member of DSST’s first two graduating classes has been accepted into a four-year college. Forty-five percent of the school’s students qualify for federally subsidized lunches. Measured by the Denver Public Schools School Performance Framework, DSST is the top-rated high school in Denver, by a wide margin.

Much remains to be negotiated. CASA is currently PreK-8^th grade, and DSST offers grades 6-12. Presumably, DSST would take over the middle grades, but that isn’t set in stone.

Attendance boundaries would be another delicate negotiating point. How might a new, high-performing high school in the area affect Manual High School? Manual is still rebuilding, under strong leadership, after being closed down for a year in the wake of an ill-fated dalliance with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

One of DSST’s cornerstones is a socio-economically mixed student body. How would the school achieve integration in a neighborhood that, while gentrifying, remains predominantly low-income? That will be an issue requiring careful, sensitive handling.

These are real challenges, but they are surmountable with open, inclusive planning, transparency and good intent. In this regard, the potential partnership is off to a good start.

But signs have already appeared that, on the Denver school board at least, there will be opposition to this plan. Probably not enough to sink it, but enough to cause some anxious moments.

I asked board member Andrea Merida, who regards charter schools with a skeptical eye, for her initial reaction to the idea. It wasn’t warm and fuzzy.

“We need to step back and take a look at the range of needs for the entire near-northeast sector before we can jump into such an arrangement,” she said in an e-mail. She then listed some specific concerns:

It is unclear, she said, how or whether the new school would address the needs of English language learners and special education students in the area. “I want to make sure we avoid any kind of a situation that might tend to benefit more affluent kids or segregate kids that need ELL or special education support.”
Parents may not have reached out to “non-English dominant families” and didn’t appear to have plans to do so, Merida said. However, one of the speakers at the Friday press conference spoke only Spanish, and another, a parent named Miguel Oaxaca, clearly wasn’t a native English speaker. So someone has done some outreach into that group of parents.
The principal sent information about this “unauthorized initiative” home in Thursday folders, thereby using “district resources…without having first cleared it with her instructional supervisor.” Sounds like a bureaucratic objection to me – not substantive.

Merida concluded by saying that she looked forward to receiving the proposal. “I hope that it will have recommendations for addressing these issues.”

From what I’m hearing, there’s also some skepticism among dissenters on the board that this idea came from parents. It must have been driven by DSST, or Superintendent Tom Boasberg, this line of thinking goes.

DSST CEO Bill Kurtz told me last week that near-northeast Denver “wasn’t even on our radar screen” until Cole parents approached DSST leaders. (The charter network is in the early stages of an ambitious expansion plan. Four new DSST campuses will open in Denver in the next four years, the first of those this fall in Green Valley Ranch.)

And Boasberg spokesman Mike Vaughn had this to say about the origin of the idea:

“The leadership and parent teams at Cole and DSST have proposed a partnership. We look forward to discussing the proposal with the entire community and with the Board of Education as part of our process for identifying locations for new schools.”

Board members might want to be careful about opposing this idea. If the new partners answer the pending questions, as I’m confident they will, it is hard to see how this isn’t good for kids in northeast Denver.

At that point, you’d have to wonder whose interests those in opposition would be promoting.

Is this the best we can do?

Robert Reichardt — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:15:49 +0000

A February 27 Denver Post editorial and a related article on Colorado higher education funding were frustrating in an amazing number of ways. Both barely touched upon the single most important issue: Our higher education funding levels are not sustainable.

In 2008, before the current crisis, Colorado ranked 48^th in the nation in per pupil funding. Since then our funding level has dropped. As the February 24^th School of Public Affairs event (Ungovernable States: Prospects for Constitutional Reform in California and Colorado) made clear, at the present rate within 10 years the entire general fund will be spent on K-12, health care and corrections, leaving no funding whatsoever for higher education. Without that context, the rest of the conversation is, at best, misleading.

I sure hope this is the first salvo in a longer campaign by our leadership to discuss the value of higher education with Colorado taxpayers. But inaccurately characterizing the system as inefficient and suggesting that competition is bad for government seems like a foolish way to start the conversation. How about a proactive discussion about how to make competition spur improvements in our system, or how our higher education institutions serve our communities, or what we as a state need from higher education?

I wonder why this story even made the paper. Is this the best thinking we can expect to get from leaders in our state?

The chair of the Higher Education Steering Committee Dick Montfort is quoted saying, “Maybe not all the business classes are going to be at one university, I get that, but we’ve got to come up with ideas. My biggest frustration is that no one wants to change.”

The reality is we are going to get change whether we like it or not. But does he or the editorial board of the Post honestly believe increased efficiency can get us out of this funding mess? This is like focusing on a burnt-out headlight when the engine is shot.

Efficiency is important. Heck, we are already efficient, graduating more students than the U.S. average while spending less. (See www.higheredinfo.org for information on Colorado relative to other states.) But what is the use of efficiency when the ability of the system to meet the needs of all students is in peril?

As a conversation about efficiency, this one seemed particularly empty. Efficiency has two components: How much you spend and how much you get in return. This argument was mostly about numbers of programs (as a proxy for how much we spend) and had very little about what we get from those programs. One output cited was the small number of math and biology majors at Adams State College. Does that mean we should seriously consider shutting down the math or biology departments at Adams State? Do we believe that students can get an adequate college education in, say, business or teacher training without mathematics and biology?

Finally, I question the whole premise that having multiple programs compete in one geographic area is inherently inefficient. We have learned from initiatives in the K-12 arena that competition leads to innovation and makes consumers happy. We have also learned that to support improvements through competition, we need to provide good information to consumers and sophisticated tools for evaluating programs.

The debate about duplicate programs is a red herring being tossed into a pool of sharks (one of several red herrings the Post has tossed out lately on education funding). It makes for titillating headlines, but ultimately misleads Coloradans about the crisis we face.

I expect more from our state’s leadership than leading us down a dead end that cannot possibly solve the critical problems of a higher education system that has been starved for funds for nearly two decades.

“Building a better teacher”

Alan Gottlieb — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:40:58 +0000

Those of you who missed the detailed, probing article about what makes a good teacher in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine should invest the time to read it. Often lost amid all the policy and political debate is detailed examination of what goes on inside the nation’s classrooms. The author of this piece, Elizabeth Green, helps run the excellent Gotham Schools education blog.

An intriguing courtship

Alan Gottlieb — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 02:48:16 +0000

Parents at the Cole Arts and Sciences Academy, a neighborhood school in northeast Denver, have dropped to a collective knee and proposed marriage to the high-performing Denver School of Science and Technology. Parents Friday formally asked DSST to open its third campus, grades 6-12, in the imposing Cole building in the fall of 2011. This would allow students in the under-served neighborhood to enroll in pre-kindergarten and stay in the same school through high school.

Although others — most recently Montbello High School — have discussed the idea of an in-school feeder pattern, this may be the first time in Denver that such a marriage has been formally put forward. And marrying a chatter school to a neighborhood public school would be the best kind of mixed marriage.

Parents and school officials say that this move is an organic one, growing out of parental desire to see better options for their children. Bill Kurtz, the CEO of DSST public schools, told me that “near northeast Denver wasn’t on our radar” until Cole parents approached him recently.

If this is, as it appears, an authentic parent initiative, it will be interesting to see how the anti-charter forces on the Denver school board will frame their opposition. Or might they decide that this represents the community involvement they’ve been advocating for, and vote in favor of this plan?

Something tells me there will be opposition on the board — but not enough to stop this intriguing partnership.