Chalkbeat

Here’s how the local and national education communities are responding to Boasberg’s exit

2018-07-17T23:22:14+00:00

As the news of Tom Boasberg’s departure ricocheted through the local and national education community, critics and champions of the Denver schools superintendent sounded off.

Here’s a roundup of comments from teachers, parents, school board members past and present, elected officials, and some of Boasberg’s colleagues.

Alicia Ventura, teacher

“I am shocked! I understand his decision as I have one (child) grown and out of the house and one in middle school. Time with our children is short and precious! I will always remember how fun and open-minded Tom was. He would do anything for children and truly lived the students first vision! We will miss you!”

Michael Hancock, Denver mayor and Denver Public Schools graduate

“I am saddened that DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg will be stepping down but full of gratitude for his close partnership with the city on behalf of Denver’s kids and families. As a DPS graduate and a DPS parent, I know firsthand that Tom has led DPS with integrity and commitment. His focus on success for all kids has greatly improved our schools and provided better opportunities for all students to live their dreams.

“We have much work still to do in DPS, but we have an incredible foundation for moving forward and we are committed to continuing in partnership with the next DPS leader.”

Corey Kern, deputy executive director, Denver Classroom Teachers Association

“We were a little surprised by it ourselves. For us, we obviously wish Tom the best. The big focus for us is making sure the selection process for the next superintendent is something that is fair and transparent and open to the public; that it’s not a political appointment but talking to all stakeholders about who is the best person for the job for the students in Denver.”

Anne Rowe, president, Denver school board

“He has given … 10 years to this district as superintendent, and it is an enormous role, and he has given everything he has. … My reaction was, ‘I understand,’ gratitude, a little surprised but not shocked, certainly, and understand all the good reasons why he has made this decision.

“With change, there is always some uncertainty, and yet I look at the people here and their dedication to the kids in DPS and I have full confidence in these folks to continue driving forward while the board takes on the responsibility to select the next superintendent. We won’t miss a beat, and we have a lot of work to do for kids.”

Jeannie Kaplan, former school board member critical of the district’s direction

“I was very surprised. … I wish Tom well. I still do believe that working together is the way to get things done. I’m sorry we weren’t able to do that.

“My one hope would be that one of the primary criteria for the next leader of the district would be a belief in listening to the community – not just making the checkmark, but really listening to what communities want.”

John Hickenlooper, Colorado governor and former Denver mayor

“Tom Boasberg has invested a significant part of his life into transforming Denver Public Schools into one of the fastest-improving school districts in America. As a DPS parent, former mayor, and now governor, I am deeply grateful for the progress made under Tom’s leadership. I applaud Tom and Team DPS for driving the innovations that are creating a brighter future for tens of thousands of young people in every corner of the city.”

U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, who preceded Boasberg as Denver superintendent from 2005 to 2009 and has known him since childhood

“As a DPS parent, I thank him for his commitment, his compassion, and his extraordinary tenure. As Tom always says himself, we have a long way to go, but his transformational leadership has resulted in extraordinary progress over the past 10 years. Our student achievement has substantially increased, the number of teachers and other school personnel serving our children has grown tremendously, and the school choices available to children and their families have never been greater.”

Bennet also penned an op-ed in The Denver Post with this headline:

Filling Boasberg’s shoes at DPS will be no easy task https://t.co/K8BF37PUKt
— Denver Post Opinion (@denveropinion) July 17, 2018

Ariel Taylor Smith, former Denver Public Schools teacher and co-founder of Transform Education Now, a nonprofit that focuses on improving schools through parent advocacy

“I was a teacher during Tom’s first half of his tenure at DPS and was amazed at how often he would walk the halls of North High School during our turnaround. Tom has dedicated 10 years to this work and for that I am grateful. I also believe that we have a long way to go to getting where we need to be. I believe that we are ready for new leadership who operates with the sense of urgency that we need to see in our city. There are 35,000 students who are attending ‘red’ and ‘orange’ (low-rated) schools in our city right now. One out of every three third-graders is reading on grade level. We need a new leader with a clear vision for the future and an evident sense of urgency to ensure that all our kids are receiving the education that they deserve.”

Brandon Pryor, parent and member Our Voice Our Schools, a group critical of the district

“You have a number of people he works with that are reformers. They think he’s leaving an awesome legacy and he did a lot to change and meet needs of the reformist community. You ask them and I’m sure his legacy will be great. But if you come to my community and ask some black folks what Tom Boasberg’s legacy will be, they’ll tell you something totally different.

“I think he has time with this last three months in office to follow through with some of the promises he’s made us (such as upgrades to the Montbello campus) to improve his situation.”

Jules Kelty, Denver parent

“He personally responded to an email that I sent him about my school. I appreciated that.”

Van Schoales, CEO of the pro-reform advocacy group A Plus Colorado

“On the one hand, I’m not surprised. And on the other hand, I’m surprised.

“I’m not surprised because he’s had a track record of pretty remarkable service for a decade, which is amazing. Nobody else has done that. The district has improved pretty dramatically. He deserves a great deal of credit for that. …The surprise is that we’ve all become so used to him being the superintendent, it’s just a little weird (to think of him leaving).”

Lisa Escárcega, executive director, Colorado Association of School Executives

“Tom’s longstanding commitment and service to DPS have made a significant impact on the district. He is strongly focused on ensuring student equity, and the district has seen improvement in several areas over the last 10 years under his superintendency. Tom is a strong and innovative leader, and I know he will be missed by the DPS community and his colleagues.”

John King, former U.S. Secretary of Education

“Under Tom Boasberg’s leadership for the past decade, Denver Public Schools has made remarkable academic progress and has become one of the most innovative school districts in the country. Tom has brought tremendous urgency and a deep commitment to closing both opportunity and achievement gaps for students of color and those from low-income backgrounds. For many school districts throughout the country, Denver’s innovative and collaborative approaches serve as a valuable model.”

Katy Anthes, state education commissioner

“I’ve appreciated working with Tom over the years and know that his personal commitment to students is incredibly strong. I thank Tom for his service to the students of DPS and Colorado.”

Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, a national group of district and state superintendents

“Tom Boasberg is an extraordinary leader who has dedicated his life to expanding opportunities for all of Denver’s children. During his tenure, the district has made remarkable gains on virtually every measure of progress. Denver Public Schools is a national model for innovation, district-charter collaboration, and teacher and school leader support. Every decision Tom has made over the course of his career has been focused on helping students succeed. No one is more respected by their peers. As a member of the Chiefs for Change board and in countless other ways Tom has supported education leaders across the nation. He leaves not just an impressive legacy but an organization of talented people committed to equity and excellence.”

David Osborne, author of the book “Reinventing America’s Schools,” which included chapters on Denver’s efforts

Big news from Denver: Supt. Tom Boasberg is leaving Denver Public Schools. Thanks to Tom for a decade of leadership and results, and let's hope his successor also puts school quality above school type (charter vs. traditional). A summary of those results: https://t.co/JubkngFOEL
— David Osborne (@OsborneDavid) July 17, 2018

Share your thoughts on Boasberg’s exit here:

These 12 stories help define Tom Boasberg’s tenure leading Denver’s schools

2018-07-17T22:58:51+00:00

Tom Boasberg, who today announced his plans to step down as Denver’s schools superintendent, leaves behind nearly a decade of high-profile debates and decisions that reshaped the city’s public school system and made plenty of local and national headlines.

For years, Boasberg’s tenure featured sharp political divides among the city’s school board. His school improvement efforts, notably in the city’s Far Northeast neighborhood, garnered mixed results for students. And his embrace of nontraditional school management, the so-called “portfolio model,” has earned him national praise.

Here’s a chronological look back at a dozen stories that defined his nearly decade of leading Denver Public Schools.

Denver Public Schools “therapy” forges progress

In 2009, at a daylong meeting attended by Denver school board members, Boasberg, and a therapist, the superintendent and the board appeared to forge closer ties after a divisive school board election. The session at the tony Broadmoor Hotel included coaching board members and Boasberg through some difficult conversations about their respective roles – and Boasberg’s job security.

More shared campuses, still controversial

One of the first waves of school reform policies the district embraced was locating multiple schools on one campus. While Boasberg didn’t start the district’s practice of placing charter and district-run schools on shared sites, his administration did continue it — much to the dismay of some schools’ staff and community members.

Boasberg’s school improvement efforts in Far Northeast Denver take off

One of the superintendent’s earliest — and most ambitious — school turnaround strategies was to overhaul schools in the city’s Far Northeast neighborhood. The neighborhood, which serves a majority of black and Latino students, had the highest concentration of the city’s lowest-performing schools.

Boasberg: Manual’s shortcomings are my responsibility

No school in Denver has been subject to more improvement efforts — by multiple superintendents — than storied Manual High School. After some minor improvements, the school took a turn for the worse and by 2014 was once again the city’s lowest-performing school. After dismissing the school’s principal, Boasberg took ownership of the school’s downfall.

Denver Public Schools ‘ahead of the curve’ with proposed facilities policy

After years of opening and closing numerous schools, DPS began to formalize the process. One of its first stabs at systematizing its “portfolio model” was a facilities policy. The policy, which applies to both charter and district schools, would tie placement decisions to schools’ academic performance, student enrollment patterns, and other district priorities.

Why Denver Superintendent Tom Boasberg landed an unprecedented six-month break

In January of 2016, Boasberg took off for six months with his family for a trip to Latin America. The uncommon stability of Denver Public Schools made his respite possible, observers said.

Denver Superintendent Tom Boasberg’s vision for giving more power to schools, annotated

Denver Public Schools has long strived to be more decentralized and less top-down. More than a year after the school board granted school leaders more autonomy, Boasberg penned a document detailing how he envisions the district should function under that philosophy. Here we explain and provide context for Boasberg’s memo.

Efforts to better integrate Denver middle schools proving tough, analysis finds

One way Boasberg and Denver Public Schools attempted to fight school segregation was the creation of “enrollment zones.” The idea was that extending boundaries and asking students to choose from several schools within them would increase integration in a gentrifying city where many neighborhoods are segregated. But there was little evidence of success six years in.

Inside the rocky rollout of Denver Public Schools’ new school closure policy

Another policy Boasberg and the Denver school board created to guide its portfolio strategy was the “School Performance Compact.” Boasberg insisted the school closure policy was not the leading strategy to try to achieve the district’s improvement goals. The policy, he said, took a back seat to initiatives such as better coaching for teachers and improved reading instruction for young students. Instead, Boasberg described the policy as “a little bit of a safety mechanism” to be used when “these strategies don’t work and where over a period of time, kids are showing such low growth that we need to have a more significant intervention.”

Denver Public Schools retooling equity measure, presses forward on scoring schools

Denver’s well-established – and sometimes controversial – school rating system got an update in 2017 when the district added a new “equity measure.” Despite some pushback from school leaders, Boasberg and the district pushed forward with scoring schools based on how well they closed the gap between students who performed well on state tests (usually white and middle-class) and those who didn’t (usually black and Latino from low-income homes.)

Denver schools chief: Removing DACA protections for undocumented immigrants would be ‘catastrophic’

Boasberg took on a new role in the Trump era. The typically reserved superintendent regularly sought to reassure students, parents, and his own employees that he would protect them from any apparent overreach by the new administration. He also regularly spoke out in favor of Congress protecting the so-called Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. “Our schools and our community are strengthened by our city’s rich diversity and open arms,” Boasberg said. “The DACA program has helped bring wonderfully talented and critically needed teachers to our classrooms and has provided peace of mind and legal status to thousands of immigrant children and families who make our city and our schools great.”

Large achievement gaps in Denver highlighted by new national test data

Despite years of change, Denver’s achievement gap has barely budged. That fact was reinforced earlier this year after DPS received its scores from the tests known as “the nation’s report card.” At the time Boasberg said the latest scores confirmed the district needed to continue to focus on closing its gaps. He repeated his concern about the gaps when he discussed his exit with Chalkbeat.

In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, 8 essays from educators who raised their voices this year

2018-05-08T19:45:31+00:00

Teachers are often on the front lines of national conversations, kickstarting discussions that their students or communities need to have.

They also add their own voices to debates that would be less meaningful without them.

This year, as we mark Teacher Appreciation Week, we’re sharing some of the educator perspectives that we’ve published in our First Person section over the last year. Many thanks to the teachers who raised their voices in these essays. Want to help us elevate the voices of even more educators? Make a donation in support of our nonprofit journalism and you’ll have the option to honor an important educator in your life.

If you’d like to contribute your own personal essay to Chalkbeat, please email us at firstperson@chalkbeat.org.

A Queens teacher on Charlottesville: ‘It can’t just be teachers of color’ offering lessons on race

After racial violence erupted in Virginia last year, New York City teacher Vivett Dukes called on teachers to engage students in honest conversations about racism.

“We do our children and ourselves a disservice when we don’t have these difficult conversations as a part of our collective curriculums. However, many teachers from various walks of life are neither well-versed nor fully comfortable discussing race on any level with their students. Not talking about racism won’t make it go away.”

Why the phrase ‘with fidelity’ is an affront to good teaching

Too often teachers are blamed for bad curriculum, writes Tom Rademacher, Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year in 2014. And that needs to stop.

“It keeps happening because admitting that schools are messy and students are human, and teaching is both creative and artistic, would also mean you have to trust teachers and let them have some power.”

I’m a Bronx teacher, and I see up close what we all lose when undocumented students live with uncertainty

Two of Ilona Nanay’s best students started high school as English learners and were diagnosed with learning disabilities. But their educational careers came to an end after graduation because both were undocumented and couldn’t afford out-of-state tuition.

“By not passing the DREAM Act, it feels like lawmakers have decided that some of the young people that graduate from my school do not deserve the opportunity to achieve their dreams.”

I’m a Florida teacher in the era of school shootings. This is the terrifying reality of my classroom during a lockdown drill.

K.T. Katzmann is a teacher in Broward County, Florida. In this essay she shares what it’s like knowing that you could be the only thing between a mass shooter and a group of students.

“The experience of being isolated, uninformed, and responsible for the lives of dozens of children is now universal to our profession, whether because of actual emergencies or planned drills.”

I’m a Houston geography teacher. This is my plan for our first day back — as soon as it arrives.

Alex McNaughton teaches a human geography course in Houston. After Hurricane Harvey, he decided to move up a lesson about how urbanization can exacerbate flooding.

“Teachers have a unique power — the power to shape the minds of future generations to solve the problems that we face. Houston’s location means that it will always be susceptible to flooding. But by teaching about the flood I hope I can play a small role in helping our city avoid repeating some of the tragic scenes I witnessed this week.”

How one Harlem teacher gave his student — the ‘Chris Rock of third grade’ — a chance to shine

Ruben Brosbe, a New York City teacher, has a soft spot for troublemakers. In this story, he shares how he got one of his favorite pranksters, Chris, to go through a day without interrupting class.

“Dealing with him taught me a valuable lesson, a lesson I’ve had to learn again and again: At the end of the day, everything that we want to accomplish as teachers is built on our relationships. It’s built on me saying to you, ‘I see you,’ ‘I care about you,’ ‘I care about what you care about and I’m going to make that a part of our class.’”

Cut from the same cloth: Why it matters that black male teachers like me aren’t alone in our schools

Being a black educator can be isolating, writes William Anderson, a Denver teacher. He argues that a more supportive environment for black educators could help cities like Denver improve the lives of black students.

“Without colleagues of the same gender and cultural and ethnic background, having supportive and fulfilling professional relationships is much harder.”

I went viral for walking my students home from school in Memphis. Here’s what got lost in the shuffle.

For years, Memphis teacher Carl Schneider walked his students home to a nearby apartment complex. Then a photograph of him performing this daily ritual caught the attention of the national media. In this essay, Schneider reminds readers that he shouldn’t be the focus — the challenges his students face should. His call to action:

“Educate yourself about the ways systemic racism creates vastly different Americas.”

Thanks to our partners at Yoobi for supporting our Teacher Appreciation campaign.

About our First Person series:

First Person is where Chalkbeat features personal essays by educators, students, parents, and others trying to improve public education. Read our submission guidelines here.

Why these Colorado educators are prepared to strike: ‘Teachers are walking into classrooms that are not funded’

2018-04-23T22:47:58+00:00

Teachers in Pueblo are prepared to join a national movement of educator activism and walk out of their classrooms later this year if their demand for a 2 percent raise isn’t met.

Members of the Pueblo Education Association, the southern Colorado town’s teachers union, voted last week to authorize a strike after the local school board rejected a third party recommendation that the district provide the cost-of-living pay increase the teachers were seeking during this year’s contract negotiations.

As part of its rationale for rejecting teacher raises, the board cited other budget priorities, a desire to protect funding reserves, and raises given to most teachers in the past two years. The average teacher salary this year in Pueblo is $47,617, according to state data.

The board’s vote came after the district recently decided to go to a four-day week, in part as a cost-saving measure.

The extraordinary vote — the last teacher strike in Colorado occurred in 1994 — took place as teachers across the country have left their classrooms over demands for better salaries and more school funding. So far, teachers in West Virginia and Oklahoma have staged weeklong strikes. Arizona teachers are also preparing to leave their lesson plans behind.

“I think both movements, both nationally and locally, show that teachers have had enough,” Suzanne Etheridge, the Pueblo teachers union president said. “Teachers are walking into classrooms that are not funded.”

For the moment, Pueblo teachers are still in their classrooms. A strike can’t take place until after the state decides in early May whether it will step in to broker a deal.

Etheridge, in an interview with Chalkbeat, discussed the circumstances that led teachers in the 16,000-student school district to take such “drastic” action, how the national climate is fueling their effort, and how the looming strike could be resolved.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. (Click here to read the district’s statement on the union’s vote to strike.)

Negotiations between the union and the district have been tense before. What’s different this time? Why did you go all the way to taking a vote for a strike?
I think what’s different this time is the true lack of openness during this round of bargaining. Although the district has accused us of never coming off our demand for 2.8 percent, which was our initial request, they also stuck to zero the whole entire time. There were also some issues, some discussions we should have had but never happened. We were invited to one budget summit that consisted of a sit-and-listen to somebody lecture the school board. So, it was just the real lack of openness and transparency through this process.

What finally tipped the balance was when the school board took its vote. Some of the comments made really angered our teachers. It felt like we were being publicly lectured asking for a cost-of-living increase. One of our board members went on about the value of younger teachers versus more experienced teachers, when we’re all valuable. There should be none of those lines drawn. We felt like some of the comments were very caustic in nature. I watched teachers’ faces at that board meeting. I watched the disappointment. I watched the hurt. I watched the anger. Our members after that were very, very upset.

You said in another interview that this wasn’t just about money, but about respect. How have Pueblo teachers been disrespected?
Educator voices are not part of the decision-making in our schools right now. At one of our schools, which is in turnaround status, they just had their lesson plan format changed for the sixth time this year. It’s the middle of April! We have very little input at the district level. We have made three open records request for the district’s staffing model for next year. And still, we’re just told no, that it’s still fluid. When they ask questions, they’re very often met with not only resistance, but are sometimes punished. It’s those sorts of things that have just added up for teachers.

There’s a five-member board. Two of the members were endorsed by the union. How did your relationship with the board break down?
The board members who voted against the fact finder report aren’t hearing teachers. What we’re trying to tell them is that a budget is about choices. And we don’t agree with some of the choices they’re making right now. One of the choices was that the instructional budget was cut, but business services had their budget increased, so did human resources. That’s a choice. The district is spending a lot of money on a law firm out of Boulder. That’s a choice. Administrators received a cost-of-living increase this year, teachers are not. More importantly our paraprofessionals have not. It’s those kind of choices we’re looking at in our budget analysis and saying, “Wait a minute.” We’ve also found money where we believe the district is over-budgeting and has some money available.

The school board president, Barb Clementi, a former teacher whom you did endorse, wrote in The Pueblo Chieftain about her vote against giving teachers a raise: “There is no question that our employees deserve more, and yet we are in a grim financial situation. Since three educators were elected to the board, teachers, paraprofessionals and other educators have seen two raises and three step increases in pay. We are struggling to continue to fund those increases in the coming budget and will undoubtedly see cuts to staff and programs in order to do so. It is fiscally irresponsible to dig an even deeper financial hole by raiding our reserves, which are meant to cover one-time emergency expenses, or by further cutting staff and programs.” I know you’re suggesting that the district doesn’t need to use reserves to pay for these raises, but more broadly, why is she wrong? Is it just possible that it’s just not the teachers’ turn for a raise? Was a guarantee of a raise next year never part of the conversation?
No, it was not. At least not until now, after all this has got rolling. We still have next year’s contract hanging out there. It’s been mentioned in some informal conversations, “Well, there’s next year.” The problem is, those raises, the past two years only came after this same process — long, drawn-out negotiations. Steps (or years of tenure) are not a raise for all of our employees. There are some places people are frozen. What the district also fails to recognize, is that in all of its years, it’s never once been on the state’s watchlist for fiscal risk. They’ve always been very healthy financially. They’ve maintained stable ground. We’ve tracked reserves through the years, and this is the first year you can see a little bit of a decrease. But that’s because the district made a choice to move some money to address facility issues, which we also understand. The other thing they neglect to mention is that the district continues to get more money from the state despite declining enrollment. They are getting additional money, and they’re set to get more money. School finance is looking a little better in Colorado for next year.

Should teachers expect to get raises every year?
I think there are ways that we need to start looking at our traditional salary scales. That should be something on the table at a future point. Do I think some of the structures of our salary schedules are a little outdated? Yes. I think there are ways we can change that to make the money a little bit better. What people also need to understand is that schools are funded by the state based on cost of living. So, I think it’s reasonable for there to be something. Does it need to be a 10 percent raise? Not necessarily, because we are dependant on state funding.

Teachers, in a lot of cases, have the same level of education as attorneys, physicians assistants, nurses. And those people can expect raises. They have a high level of education and so do our teachers. Teachers have been deprofessionalized by the lack of funding, by the lack of raises. Do I think teachers deserve to come into a profession and take care of their own families, to pay off their own students loans? Absolutely.

We’re at a moment of national unrest and action by teachers. Do you think your members are feeling embolden by that? Would your members have voted to strike if it there wasn’t this national conversation?
I think we’d still be heading here, even without the momentum. But do I think the national momentum has helped? Absolutely. I think both movements, both nationally and locally, show that teachers have had enough. Teachers are walking into classrooms that are not funded. We have teachers who (can only make) 100 copies a month from the building copier. And yet, they see 125 to 150 students a day. That’s the kind of thing teachers are tired of. My daughter-in-law, she’s a teacher, the decorations in her classroom are bought with her own money. Teachers for the last five to seven years have been put in the situation of having to buy basic supplies such as paper and pencils because schools have been so underfunded. It’s all part of the same issue. It’s about respect. No other professional would be asked to buy their supplies like teachers do.

Pueblo is the only urban school district in the state to not have voter approval for additional local funding for its schools. What do voters in Pueblo and Colorado need to know about how the financial situation is contributing to this moment?
Colorado has fallen further and further behind in school funding. Current estimates suggest we’re either 46th or 48th in funding schools. Which is really tragic considering our economy — at least in the northern part of the state — has been healthier than it’s ever been.

The other piece of this, for districts like ours that have not passed a tax increase: We’ve hurt ourselves. School districts have had to pass local tax increases to keep the cash flow coming in to do things like keep up facilities, supplies, and technology.

We desperately need one. We need a long-term, well-thought-out plan for a mill levy override and perhaps a bond issue to be able to get our schools up to date. There was supposed to be a committee to get this started. And we were supposed to be part of that committee. But it hasn’t happened.

Getting back to the potential strike, teachers at a local middle school recently staged a “sickout.” One parent responded: “If the teachers want to strike, fine: strike like the steelworkers strike where they don’t get paid a damn dime. But for them to use sick time and screw over all these kids, who’re aren’t in school today because of that? That’s wrong. And they expect the community to take them seriously?” What do you say to that parent? Are you at all concerned that this could backfire, are you worried that the district could just drop the collective bargaining all together?
That’s always a concern. That’s something we hope doesn’t happen. The association did not plan what happened at Corwin International Magnet School. I didn’t even know about it. I read it on Facebook and in the news like everyone else.

What I would say to that parent is that we’re not walking out to harm our students. In reality, we’re planning a strike to help our students. One of things that this district struggles with is high teacher turnover. It’s one of the highest rates in the state. We have positions filled this year by teachers who have come out of retirement for limited contracts. We have teachers in classrooms on alternative licenses. Finding a special education teacher in the city of Pueblo is like finding a needle in a haystack. We believe that if we can get back to work openly, honestly, and collaboratively with the school district, where we can compete salarywise with districts surrounding us, then we can keep highly qualified teachers in our classroom. That’s what we’re after. Our goal is not to harm students. But we feel like to benefit our students, we have to take drastic opinions right now.

What is the long-term solution, so a strike can be avoided and you’re not here next year?
We have made a conscious decision: We feel a 2 percent raise is fair. It’s off of our initial proposal by almost a full percent. We’d like to be able to come back to the table with some sort of real labor-management partnership collaboration agreement so we’re not here again. It’s going to take some real work. It might even take some outside help to repair our relationship. However, when we do come to the table again, I’d like to see come forward a real partnership agreement. Not one that is just written on paper.

What’s the nationwide or state solution to this moment of educator unrest?
Funding formulas across states need to be changed. States need to take a long hard look at how they fund schools. I believe Colorado’s is archaic. Will money solve everything? No. But it’s a big piece of it. We also have to get teachers to the table when education decisions have been made.

How a Colorado school district turned things around at 10,000 feet above sea level

2018-03-30T17:30:37+00:00

LEADVILLE — When Ben Cairns took over as principal at Lake County High School in 2016, he made a deal with his students.

Those who showed more growth on the state’s English and math tests than 90 percent of their peers across the state would earn steak dinners with the principal for themselves and their parents.

Cairns, a former Denver charter school principal hired to turn around a school that had been struggling academically for years, figured only two or three students would accomplish such an extraordinary feat.

Then last summer, Cairns received a phone call from a district administrator: “You’re in trouble.”

Sixteen students had made more than enough academic growth — a key data point that measures how much students learn during a year compared to peers with similar test results — to earn dinner with the principal at the local steakhouse, Quincy’s.

School improvement efforts look a little different at 10,000 feet above sea level. While many of the strategies used by the Lake County school district are familiar to urban settings, they’ve been retrofitted to meet the needs of the 1,000-student school district that’s 100 miles west of Denver. A new curriculum coupled with intense training for teachers is showing progress. And the district has had plenty of help from outside consultants paid for in large part by state and federal grants.

For the first time in seven years, the district’s students showed enough progress on the state’s English and math tests to stave off state intervention for continued poor performance. At the same time, the district, and its intermediate and high schools have earned one of the state’s highest quality rating. Now state education leaders and other observers of Colorado’s efforts to improve schools are heralding the work in Lake County as a model others — especially those far from the state’s urban center — can replicate.

“There is no magic solution for every community seeking to improve student achievement,” Katy Anthes, Colorado’s education commissioner, said in a statement. “It’s hard, complex work, and the solutions differ based on the local context. Lake County School District has shown dramatic improvement, and we think there’s a lot we can learn from them.”

Despite sitting high in the Rocky Mountains, Lake County looks like many of the struggling urban school districts in Colorado and across the country. Most students are non-white; 70 percent are Hispanic. That’s a big swing since 1990 when the mountain school district was predominately white. Now, forty percent are learning English as a second language. And 67 percent of students in 2016 qualified for free or reduced-price lunches, a measure of poverty.

Source: Colorado Department of Education; Graphic by Sam Park/Chalkbeat

What makes the turnaround in Lake County so appealing to observers is that the district bucked the conventional wisdom of the day. Unlike most places working to improve schools, there were no mass layoffs of teachers or principals. No schools were closed. And handing over management of the schools to charter operators wasn’t considered an option given the distance from the state’s urban Front Range, where most successful charter schools operate.

Instead, district officials adopted a new way of teaching — one they hoped would better engage students. Teachers were given more training on how to teach core subjects with a unified curriculum, in some instances from groups known for their work in urban school improvement. The district added more services for students and families, including a health center. The district applied for and was awarded millions of grant dollars. And the district’s staff and governing board received coaching to focus on the difficult work of school improvement.

“The belief that the people are the problem is wrong,” said Wendy Wyman, the district’s superintendent. “Our teachers are professionals, and we believe in them. We’re proving that there is a framework or a pathway for rural schools to improve that’s about building capacity within your own community.”

Some education activists and researchers have long been critical of the kind of school reform efforts that call for total disruption.

“The notion that you just have to blow it up and start fresh has just proven to be a failure time and time again,” said Michelle Renée Valladares, the associate director at the National Education Policy Center based at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Creating more instability in an already unstable situation does not help.”

* * *

Since 2010, Colorado has rated the quality of its schools largely based on results from standardized English and math tests. Schools that perform the worst are flagged and put on a watchlist. If they don’t improve quickly enough, the state is required to step in and direct drastic action.

Wendy Wyman, the Lake County School District’s superintendent, watches students as they line up after recess. (Photo by Nic Garcia/Chalkbeat)

At the same time, the Obama administration created a school improvement grant program that came with millions of dollars in an effort to get schools in Colorado and around the nation to improve at a quicker clip. In creating the program, the administration touted controversial methods of school reform that often pushed for the firing of school principals and required teachers to reapply for their jobs. (The program was eventually deemed unsuccessful.)

The Lake County district, which sits at the foot of the highest peaks in the Rocky Mountains, was among the first to receive a failing grade from the state’s new school quality rating system.

School leaders felt that the sort of disruption that was typically used to turn around schools in urban settings wouldn’t work for their isolated mountain community.

“We could have fired everyone,” said Amy Frykholm, the school board’s president. “But then we’d have to hire them right back. And that’d be devastating for morale.”

Instead, Wyman and her team embraced a total instructional and cultural shift.

In 2013, the district adopted the EL Education model, which shifts focus away from lectures and tests toward research and long-term projects that tackle big problems. (EL Education was formerly known as Expeditionary Learning.) Often, after a project is completed, students spend time outdoors connecting their learning to real life problems and nature.

Third-graders end their lesson on the history of the 10th Mountain Division, a mountain warfare unit of the United States Army that trained near Leadville during World War II, with a ski trip. More recent military veterans from the unit join them.

“It bridges the community with the learning,” said Kim Kortkamp, the district’s academic dean for literacy.

Along with a new curriculum and teaching techniques, the expeditionary philosophy asks students and teachers to behave differently. There are regular “crew” meetings, where students meet with teachers to discuss their academic goals and receive emotional support. And the district adopted a list of shared expectations – what they call the “habits of a learner.”

The habits, which are posted in classrooms through the district, include responsibility, curiosity, and collaboration.

* * *

Last fall, first-grade students at Lake County’s elementary school were practicing how to use capital letters and periods to form a basic sentence.

Teacher Ally Duncan zig-zagged her way through the room, crouching down to meet students at eye level to check their work.

Ally Duncan, an elementary school teacher in Lake County, works with students on sentence structure. (Photo by Nic Garcia/Chalkbeat)

Duncan was practicing “aggressive monitoring,” an effort to catch students making mistakes in real time and correct them immediately.

The strategy is one of dozens that teachers in Lake County have learned from the district’s classroom consultants.

The Achievement Network, or A-Net, a nonprofit that works to improve teaching in struggling schools, is just one of several consultants and organizations the Lake County school district has invested in since it began its turnaround work. The outside help is in part a recognition that school improvement is difficult work that few educators are prepared to do.

“My teacher college didn’t teach me how to turn around a school,” said Wyman, the superintendent, who spent most of her career in Colorado schools that serve students from low-income homes.

Source: Colorado Department of Education; Graphic by Sam Park/Chalkbeat

Along with A-Net, principals and their assistants at each school have a coach to help them focus their time on coaching teachers on instruction. District leaders, including the school board, have received training from a variety of state-run school improvement programs, as well as the New York-based Relay Graduate School of Education. And the district is investing in some online tutoring programs to help students catch up.

“Wendy has done a nice job of strategically partnering with other organizations to draw in expertise the district needed to change,” said Peter Sherman, who recently left his post as the executive director of school performance at the Colorado Department of Education. His office at the state education department helped manage some of the training and grants Lake County received. “They’ve strategically taken advantage of the resources and expertise out there to their advantage.”

While some Colorado school districts have been let down by consultants helping with their turnaround work, Lake County says it’s been important for them to tailor all of their training and support to real needs. And if something isn’t working, they jettison it.

“We learned to say to our partners,‘This is who we are. This is what we need,’” Wyman said. “If something isn’t working, we try to fail quickly and try something different.”

Source: Colorado Department of Education; Graphic by Sam Park

The new curriculum and training has not come free. In fact, school improvement work is very expensive.

Each of the district’s consultants or programs — EL Education, the Achievement Network, the Relay Graduate School of Education, and the National SAM Innovation Project — cost annually between $10,000 and $40,000, Wyman said.

To help pay for the work and other needs — including infrastructure and buildings — the district has applied for and won more than $24 million dollars in grants. The lion’s share was a $16 million grant for a new school. The next largest block, $3.2 million, was specifically for its turnaround work.

It paid for principal and teacher training, travel, and consultants.

“The figures may be surprising for their sheer size, particularly given the size of our district,” Wyman said. “However, the magnitude of the funding validates another core belief we have come to hold: It does take resources – and even significant ones – to do the work of reforming an entire system.”

* * *

Lake County school leaders focused most of their early school improvement work on younger grades. The elementary and middle school were the first to adopt the expeditionary model.

Then in 2016, Wyman made one of her most important hires: former charter school principal Ben Cairns.

Roxi Aldaz, a 24-year veteran of the Lake County School District, leads a class at the high school in Leadville. (Photo by Nic Garcia/Chalkbeat)

Cairns would seem an unlikely fit for a small rural school district that had a strong teachers union. Cairns got his start in Denver Public Schools and cut his teeth leading schools at DSST, Denver’s high-achieving charter school network. He would go on to open DSST Cole High in one of Denver’s historically black neighborhoods that had long lacked a quality school.

But Lake County teachers, including the leaders of the county’s teachers union, welcomed Cairns.

“We needed a really strong leader to step in,” said Roxi Aldaz, a 24-year veteran of the district and co-president of the Lake County Education Association. “That’s Ben.”

According to Aldaz and other teachers, the high school lacked order and discipline. Cairns, who had been looking to relocate his family to the mountains, would be able to provide that. Before Cairns was hired, though, Lake County sent teachers to see him in action at DSST. They were amazed.

Now, Lake County High is a place where students put away their cell phones and are never late for class. (If they are late, there is lunch detention, no questions.) Instruction begins as soon as students take their seats. And teachers are attempting to establish common expectations in every classroom.

“We put a lot of time and energy and thought into school culture and working with teachers around what their perceived needs were,” Cairns said. “There’s been a big emphasis on building relationships and holding kids accountable. The mix I always try to bring is restorative justice along with a little bit of the no-nonsense approach.”

* * *

Wyman and her team of educators are well aware that dozens of Colorado schools that have jumped off the state’s academic probation list, like they did last year, have slid back.

“It’s going to be a little back and forth until we steady out,” said Cheryl Talbot, the district’s math dean.

A Lake County elementary school student works on an assignment away from his desk. (Photo by Nic Garcia/Chalkbeat)

And there are still plenty of obstacles for the district to work through.

The district’s average attendance rate is 88 percent — far lower than anyone would want. The graduation rate is well below the state average. Getting parents involved is difficult. Most parents work outside of the county limits at nearby ski resorts. To schedule a parent meeting could include two hours of travel time over snowy passes. And despite some improvement, teacher turnover remains high.

Source: Colorado Department of Education; Graphic by Sam Park/Chalkbeat

And while students are making large leaps on state tests, the district’s average proficiency rates still remain lower than the state average.

“(This) for us is by no means the end point,” said Dan Leonhard, Lake County’s Intermediate School’s culture and operations manager, referring to the color associated with the state’s highest quality rating. “This doesn’t mean we’re there. It means we’ve made success in what we’ve been doing now and we have to keep the foot on the pedal.”

But all the work is paying off and has been noticed — perhaps most importantly — by students.

Leo Littlepage, a fourth-grader, said school was more difficult two years ago because teachers weren’t helpful. Teachers would hand him and his classmates worksheets with little instruction, he said.

“‘Here’s your math, you’re on your own,’” Littlepage recalled.

He and other students said they often felt lost. But now, there’s more explanation from teachers and fewer worksheets.

“The teachers thought because it was easy for them, that it’d be easy for us — but it wasn’t,” Ever Leon, a fourth-grader said. “Now they’re explaining the steps.”

Some fourth-graders, who spent the first part of the school year learning about poets such as Robert Frost, Walire Worth, and Walter D. Myers, said classrooms aren’t perfect yet. There’s a lot of repeating material in math, and their spelling words aren’t tough enough.

“I want our teachers to challenge us more,” said Giselle Sarabia. “I want to think hard.”

Students at Lake County Intermediate School line up after recess. Behind them is one of the state’s highest mountain peaks. (Photo by Nic Garcia/Chalkbeat)

Watch Chalkbeat’s first-ever Great American Teach-Off here

2018-03-20T21:46:24+00:00

On March 7, two teams of educators met in Austin to teach a math lesson — and make history.

The teachers, Eleanor Vierling and Kaitlin Ruggiero, and Tim Livingston and Terrance O’Neil, taught a 20-minute lesson called “contemplate then calculate.” The teachers were participating in Chalkbeat’s first-ever Great American Teach-Off, an event at the SXSW EDU conference.

The goal of the Teach-Off, inspired by some of our favorite TV shows that celebrate the hidden craftsmanship in other professions, was to elevate the craft of teaching.

After both teams of teachers presented their lessons, there was a robust conversation on stage and on Twitter about the best moments.

Watch the entire Teach-Off here and then tell us your favorite moment using the hashtag #teachoff.

These Teach-Off finalists unlock math for students with real-world context

2018-03-01T23:31:50+00:00

For Houston educators Terrance O’Neil and Tim Livingston, math is all about context.

Too often, they say, students give up on math because word problems feature information or elements students can’t relate with. One recent example that stumped students, Livingston said, was a math problem featuring a person purchasing an $85 thermal to go camping.

“Some of these kids have never been camping,” he said. “And they were confused. One girl asked what a thermal was and why would a person buy one for $85.”

So they say students, especially those from low-income families, often need context — or information they can relate too — to help them better connect equations to real-world problems.

“A student should be able to relate to the problem,” said Livingston, a math coach in the Spring Independent School District. “The context grants them access.”

Together O’Neil and Livingston represent one of the two teacher teams Chalkbeat readers chose to participate in the first-ever Great American Teach-Off. The live event, which debuts at the SXSW EDU conference March 7, is designed to elevate the craft of teaching and showcase the many decisions that go into just one lesson.

Each team of teachers will demonstrate a mini-lesson on stage in front of a panel of judges and a cheering audience. A lively discussion among judges, coaches, and the teacher teams following the lessons will help attendees “see” teaching with new, clearer eyes.

Before O’Neil and Livingston head to Austin, we caught up with them to discuss the Teach-Off and their teaching philosophy. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What inspired you to go into teaching?

TIM: I guess I always had a knack for teaching. When I was in the military, I spoke to my wife and said, “I think this is something I want to do.” I love children. They were always drawn to me. And I could always communicate with them in a way they understood. Once I finished up my second enlistment, I went forward. And once I got into it, I saw what I wanted to be true, came true.

TERRANCE: The initial push came from my parents. I grew up in one of the roughest communities in Houston. They continually pushed us to get a good education. It was a nonnegotiable. They believed it was key to escape the community we grew up in. Once I left the community — because of education — I knew I needed to go back to that same community to help. I went back to my former community as a teacher. I fell in love with the kids. I learned quickly how one teacher can change the perspective of a student who might not get any sort of positive reinforcement when he leaves the school.

How would you describe your teaching style or method?

TIM: When I first began teaching, I would give out all the energy. My students would point out how my armpits would sweat. It was high energy, 24/7. But as I matured as an educator, I’ve learned to let it not all come from me, but put it in the mathematical task.

TERRANCE: I try to demonstrate that I’m passionate about the content — math or science. I always try to start with some sort of real-world connections. And I feed into that. I want to see the students excited about what they’re learning. Depending on the demographics of your class, you learn to use different real-world connections. I want them to do the work. To get them do that, I have to demonstrate some passion first.

Why did you want to be part of the Teach-Off?

TERRANCE: Probably because we think we’re better than any everyone else. [Laughs]

TIM: Next question! Honestly, I was intrigued by the vision of what Chalkbeat was trying to do. It got me hook, line, and sinker. Teaching is an art. And to hear that someone understands it’s an art and craft, I said, “This is it.” And my heart is for mathematics.

How were your schools affected by Hurricane Harvey?

TERRANCE: We had well over 100 students that lost everything. Everything. The devastation affected us severely. It was dramatic for a while. But our kids are resilient. Some are still displaced. But the district has done an excellent job of serving these students. They’ve done things that I wouldn’t have expected them to do. Some students had to move to outside the district, into other suburbs. And our district sent buses to get them so they wouldn’t have to switch schools. Not to mention, the district and many campuses have developed grant programs to serve those families. Here at McNabb, we’re still helping families with food and clothes. It’s been something amazing to watch.

What do you expect the audience to see at the Teach-Off?

TIM: Everything! All of it! They should expect laughter, energy. I love impromptu. That’s one of my strengths. So the whole notion of the event that something is going to change, that doesn’t make me nervous. That brings me in.

TERRANCE: That genuine love for teaching. Sincerity. That passion. And of course that content. You have to be passionate, and you have to be teaching something.

TIM: They can expect a demonstration of the depths of what it takes to teach mathematics correctly. It’s more than just adding and subtracting. It takes effort to plan to teach and reflect, and that’s what I love about this.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received regarding teaching?

TIM: The issue is never mechanical, it’s adaptive. Meaning, there is no fix that someone can prescribe to me that does not consider my students, the school we’re in, the story that is our classroom. Every problem is adaptive. I can’t go find an answer. I have to collaborate with teachers and students. All those things have to be considered.

TERRANCE: My first superintendent would tell us all the time, “If you are really teaching how you’re supposed to teach and what you’re supposed to teach, it will be seen in the learning in students.” Your success is not what you do as a teacher, but what your students can do after they’ve been with you for a year. That difference there, that determines how effective I am as a teacher.

This Great American Teach-Off team thrives in a classroom of chatty students

2018-02-26T15:29:55+00:00

Eleanor Vierling and Kaitlin Ruggiero relish a boisterous classroom. And with more than 30 students in most of their classes, they usually get just that.

The two math teachers at Brooklyn’s High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology believe students learn best when they’re bouncing ideas, equations, and questions off each other.

“It’s important that the students recognize that everyone in the room is someone who has knowledge,” Ruggiero said.

Together Vierling and Ruggiero represent one of the two teacher teams Chalkbeat readers chose to participate in the first-ever Great American Teach-Off. The live event, which debuts at the SXSW EDU conference March 7, is designed to elevate the craft of teaching and showcase the many decisions that go into just one lesson.

Before Vierling and Ruggiero head to Austin, we caught up with them to discuss the Teach-Off and their teaching philosophy. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What inspired you to apply for the Teach-Off?

ELEANOR: I follow Chalkbeat on Twitter. And right after I saw the Teach-Off on Twitter, I texted Kaitlin and asked her if she wanted to do it with me. We both look for ways to make our jobs fun and challenging. You teach for 180 days — that can be isolating. It’s good to find ways to shake it up a bit. And we thought the Teach-Off would be a way for us to show other people all the decision-making that goes behind the scenes of teaching.

Plus, this is going to become a long-running reality TV show, right?

KAITLIN: You’d make such a great character.

How do you describe your teaching style?

KAITLIN: I think it’s really important for students to figure out strategies that work for them. That’s something I didn’t get to do a lot as a student. Back then, there was a lecture and just one way to solve the problem. I didn’t appreciate that as a student. So, something I’m conscious about as a teacher is to make sure my students have the confidence to try to solve a problem different ways.

ELEANOR: In a similar way, we have student-centered philosophies. If students aren’t understanding, I won’t plow through the lesson. I never say, “Just listen.” I won’t impose something that isn’t working. I’m always trying to be creative and come up with different ways to come at the same subject.

The Great American Teach-Off semi-finalists: Eleanor and Kaitlin
Like this video? Check out other submissions for the Great American Teach-Off here http://ckbe.at/2DDYzDb. And stay in the loop with all the education news that matters by liking Chalkbeat on Facebook http://ckbe.at/2DBd0Vy and signing up for newsletters here http://ckbe.at/2Dpe12N.
Posted by Chalkbeat on Wednesday, January 24, 2018

How do you two currently work together?

ELEANOR: We’ve pushed for our math department to meet on a daily basis. We’ve never co-taught, but we’ve gravitated toward each other because neither of us uses the exact same stuff from the year before.

KAITLIN: We also are conscious of what we’re doing in the courses that line up. This year, Ellie is teaching pre-calculus. So many of the students she’s teaching will move to my calc class next year. Being aware of what’s going on in her classroom is helpful.

ELEANOR: We’re both interested not just in what we’re teaching but how we’re teaching.

Describe your classroom?

ELEANOR: They’re packed full of students. I have one class with 34 students and one with 37.

KAITLIN: I have classes with more than 32.

ELEANOR: Both of our classrooms have lots of opportunities for students to talk. We’re the facilitators, not the deliverers of information. It’s not one-directional.

How do you manage that many students?

KAITLIN: It’s important that the students recognize that everyone in the room is someone who has knowledge. Just because I’m the teacher in the room doesn’t mean I have to be the expert. What my students bring into the room is just as valuable as what I bring into the room. We’re hanging on each others’ words.

What do you expect the audience to see at the Teach-Off?

ELEANOR: We don’t really know what’s going to happen. I can see moments where we’ll have to talk to each other and figure out which ideas we’re going to share out. There will be teacher-to-teacher talk, happening live.

KAITLIN: We’ll give students something to do and then circulate. Part of the instructional goal is to highlight misconception and highlight structure. It’s OK for there to be a misconception that’s shared with the whole room. That’s an opportunity for learning. Someone might say that’s wrong and it shouldn’t be shared. But it should.

What’s the best advice you’ve received about teaching?

KAITLIN: I remember my first year teaching: I was teaching two different classes. It was really isolating and overwhelming. My mentor, she basically said, “Every day isn’t going to be your best day at work.” She saw how much time I was spending planning every lesson. She said, “Set an alarm. Give yourself some time, and stop making changes and edits all night. Commit to something and try it. If it doesn’t go good in the morning, you change by the afternoon.”

ELEANOR: All assessments are formative. Any assessment is an opportunity to learn.

What else would you like to share?

ELEANOR: I’m 6’2”.

KAITLIN: I’m not.

How to keep Chalkbeat in your Facebook feed and other ways to stay informed about your schools

2018-01-25T21:26:32+00:00

In the coming weeks, you could be seeing less of us on Facebook. That’s because the social network is changing the formula that populates what you see in your News Feed.

Facebook’s algorithm is devaluing updates from news organizations like Chalkbeat, prioritizing status updates and links from family and friends instead.

We don’t want Facebook to come between us, so we’re making sure you know all the different ways you can connect with us and our education coverage.

First, become a Chalkbeat subscriber and let us come to you.

The easiest way to stay on top of all the education news from Chalkbeat is to sign up for one of our newsletters.

Every location we cover — Colorado, Detroit, Indiana, New York, and Tennessee — offers at least one local newsletter. And our national team rounds up the latest in education trends across the United States — plus additional features such as the Chalkbeat research corner and our Betsy DeVos tracker — every Wednesday.

Second, tell Facebook you like us and want to see more of us.

Facebook doesn’t have to keep us apart. But you’re going to have to make that clear.

If you’re on a desktop go to your favorite Chalkbeat Facebook pages. Here’s a link to our main Facebook page, and here are links to Colorado, Detroit, Indiana, New York, and Tennessee. Click the “Following” button, which should appear on the center left of the page, just underneath our cover photo. Then select “See First.”

If you’re on an iPhone:

Select the three-line menu in the bottom right-hand corner of the app.
Scroll to the bottom of the menu and select “Settings.”
Select “News Feed Preferences.”
Select “Prioritize who to see first.”
Select your favorite Chalkbeat pages you want to see first in your news feed. A blue star will appear once you’ve correctly selected your choices.
Hit “Done.”

If you’re on an Android:

Select the three-line menu in the top right-hand corner of the app.
Scroll to the bottom of the menu and select “News Feed Preferences.”
Select “Prioritize who to see first.
Select your favorite Chalkbeat pages you want to see first in your news feed. A blue star will appear once you’ve correctly selected your choices.
Hit “Done.”

That’s it. Now, our posts on Facebook should regularly appear in your feed.

Third, follow us on other networks.

Find us on Twitter on our main Chalkbeat account or any of our bureau accounts: Colorado, Detroit, Indiana, New York, and Tennessee. You can also follow Chalkbeat on LinkedIn and read our stories on Flipboard.

Got an idea of other platforms where Chalkbeat should share its news and engage with readers? Send an email to social@chalkbeat.org.

Don’t forget, we always want to hear from you. So you can send feedback or news tips — we love scoops! — to tips@chalkbeat.org.

Thanks for taking the time to stay connected with Chalkbeat!

Pam Mazanec, champion of parent rights, to resign from Colorado State Board of Education

2018-01-08T23:39:02+00:00

Pam Mazanec, a Larkspur Republican and adamant supporter of school choice and parental rights, is resigning her seat on the State Board of Education effective Jan. 31.

Mazanec provided a copy of her letter of resignation to Chalkbeat. In a separate statement, Mazanec said she is leaving her post to focus on her family’s small business. Her term would have ended in 2019.

“Serving in this role has truly been an honor and a privilege,” she said in a statement. “I thank the people of Colorado, all my colleagues on the board, past and present, Commissioner Anthes, all the staff at CDE, and everyone committed to excellent education for Colorado’s students. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve.”

First elected in 2012, Mazanec represents the state’s heavily Republican 4th Congressional District, which includes most of the Eastern Plains.

She has been a reliable conservative voice in some of the state’s thorniest education debates, including the role of standards and testing, data privacy, and school choice.

Hardly a board meeting went by in which Mazanec didn’t correct someone — usually fellow board member Val Flores, a Denver Democrat — on facts about charter schools.

“Charter schools are public schools,” she would say regularly.

Board chair Angelika Schroeder, a Boulder Democrat, said despite competing obligations, Mazanec was always ready to focus on the work of the board.

“I know that Pam has been challenged these past five years to balance State Board work with her professional work and family, but she has always been well prepared and totally engaged in our work together,” Schroeder said in an email. “I will miss her.”

Colorado Education Commissioner Katy Anthes, in a statement, called Mazanec “a champion for rural districts and innovative school practices.”

“She always pushed our thinking, and we are grateful for her unwavering service to CDE and the students of Colorado,” Anthes said. “She will be missed.”

Luke Ragland, president of Ready Colorado, a nonprofit that supports conservative education reform policies, echoed Anthes.

“Pam Mazanec provided thoughtful, conservative leadership on the Colorado State Board of Education,” he said in a statement. “It was always clear she had a steadfast commitment to students and families.”

A Republican vacancy committee will be responsible for choosing a replacement to serve out the rest of Mazanec’s term. This will be the third time since 2014 that a vacancy committee will be used to appoint a member of the state board. Members Steve Durham, a Colorado Springs Republican, and Joyce Rankin, a Carbondale Republican, were appointed in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

“We hope that the vacancy committee selects another school choice champion to represent the 4th Congressional District,” Ragland said.

Coloradans seeking more school funding inch closer to 2018 ballot

2018-01-05T00:04:22+00:00

Proponents of increasing funding for Colorado’s public schools cleared a major hurdle this week in their attempt to ask voters to bump up taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents.

A state panel made up of representatives from the legislature, attorney general’s and secretary of state’s offices on Wednesday approved language for eight different ballot initiatives that, if any one is approved by voters in November, would raise between $1.4 billion and $1.7 billion more for Colorado schools.

While each proposal varies slightly, each would create a new graduated income tax on individuals making more than $150,000. Some proposals would also create a new corporate tax, while others would make modifications to how personal and commercial property is taxed for schools. Some do all three.

The backers of the measures — Martha Olson of Boulder and Donald Anderson of Fort Collins — expect to file another 10 initiatives with the Secretary of State by the end of the month. Altogether, they will ask the state to approve nearly 20 different versions of the same concept. Individuals and groups seeking to put questions on the ballot sometimes float a few different versions of the same question to test political viability.

Ultimately, though, voters will vote on just one of the various proposals — if Olson and Anderson and their network of supporters can gather enough signatures to place one on the ballot.

The state’s approval of the ballot language comes on the eve of the 2018 legislative session where lawmakers are at the midpoint of studying and — if an agreement can be reached — updating the way the state funds its schools.

Taken together, 2018 could be a watershed year for the school finance debate that has bedeviled lawmakers and school leaders alike for decades.

It could also be the year everything falls apart: There’s no guarantee that lawmakers will reach consensus on how to update the funding system. And any ballot initiative faces a steep upward battle — especially after voters made it more difficult to pass such measures.

This election also will also feature a deeply partisan gubernatorial race — the likes of which the state hasn’t seen in decades. And the specter of President Trump’s Washington will loom large in congressional races.

Olson and Anderson, who are working with some of the state’s most ardent supporters of increasing school funding, acknowledged the long road ahead, but said it was imperative for the voters to act.

“It’s an enormous effort,” Olson, a former New York educator, said. “But there’s a growing recognition that something has to be done. … Our kids can’t wait.”

Colorado’s state constitution requires voters to approve all new tax increases. Voters have so far rejected every proposed tax increase for schools put before them. The last time voters considered a tax increase in 2013, it was defeated two-to-one.

And now after the 2017 election, there’s an even higher threshold to pass such constitutional amendments — 55 percent of voters. Voters approved the higher threshold at the last election.

Anderson, who is a father of two students in the Poudre School District in Fort Collins, said he hopes a greater grassroots push and clear messaging about how much additional revenue each school district stands to receive will help them succeed where others have failed.

“The biggest part is building a good base,” Anderson said.

He added that one of the reasons he got involved is because of the growing inequities among school districts that have passed local tax increases for schools and those that haven’t.

“We’ve been lucky, out voters have stepped up,” Anderson said. “But from corner to corner, that isn’t the case. And the challenges we face as a whole really irritates me.”

Not everyone in the education community is anxious to ask voters again for more money.

“Colorado voters have been really clear that they want schools to be prioritized but aren’t willing to invest more,” said Luke Ragland, president of Ready Colorado, a nonprofit that advocates for conservative education reform policies including charter schools and school quality ratings.

Ragland said he hopes that lawmakers can come up with better ways to spend the more than $6.5 billion in tax dollars the state already sends to schools.

“I’m getting really frustrated with the conversation that nothing can change until we have more money,” Ragland said. “There are things we can do to improve the way we fund schools that can help kids immediately.”

Supporters of increased school funding point to numerous different reports that put Colorado at or near the bottom in spending per pupil. This year the state is spending about $6,546 per student. Conservatives argue, however, that a more accurate number is closer to $10,000 when you factor in local tax increases, grants and federal dollars.

Supporters, likely opponents and political observers all say it is unclear whether the political climate of 2018 will help or hinder their cause.

On one hand, a billion dollar tax increase could hinder the chances of Democrats winning seats. While on the other, progressives and Democrats dissatisfied with the Trump administration are expected to turn out in far greater numbers for a midterm election.

“I have to believe it’s going to be a big Democratic turnout,” said Paul Teske, dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. “I actually think it’s a good time for a progressive ballot initiative. An income tax might not be popular, but given the climate in Washington and the 1 percent doing so well — it may not be a losing position.”

Teske previously sat on the board of Great Education Colorado, a nonprofit that advocates for greater school funding and that is consulting with Olson and Anderson on the ballot initiatives.

Ragland, the conservative, echoed Teske’s sentiment that Democrats are likely to have a banner year but cautioned that much can change between now and November.

“If you look at who has the wind at heir back, it’s definitely the folks on the left,” Ragland said. “But it’s a long way until Election Day.”

Will Colorado lawmakers rekindle the bipartisan spirit to take on these education issues?

2018-01-04T01:18:38+00:00

When state lawmakers ended their regular business in May, leaders under the gold dome congratulated themselves for finding a long list of bipartisan compromises — including deals on some of the most prickly education issues.

Education debates over charter school funding, a diploma credential for students who speak two languages and high school testing that had befuddled lawmakers for years were settled with bipartisan support.

But after Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, called legislators back to work to fix a glitch in one of those hard-fought compromises, talk of bipartisanship went straight out the window.

Now, on the eve of Hickenlooper’s last regular session as governor — he’s term-limited — it’s uncertain whether leaders in the Republican-controlled Senate and Democratic-controlled House can rekindle the bipartisan spirit during an election year and accomplish anything on a number of policy fronts.

While education lobbyists and other Capitol observers are wary major victories can be achieved, some of education’s most influential lawmakers are sounding a bipartisan tone.

“I’ve loved working with Brittany,” said state Sen. Owen Hill, a Colorado Springs Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee, referring to state Rep. Brittany Pettersen, a Lakewood Democrat who chairs the House Education Committee. “It’s an honor to work with someone who challenges my thinking. And yet we always come together to make sure kids have the very best possible education.”

Pettersen echoed Hill’s bipartisan sentiment.

“I know things get complicated during an election year,” she said. “But I’m really proud of the work we’ve done and I hope to do it again.”

Here’s a rundown of what should loom large on the education front this legislative session, which opens Wednesday:

Pension reform is going to take up a lot time and headspace, but a resolution is far from certain.

The state’s pension system, known as PERA, is in a precarious situation. While it’s nowhere near the crisis level it was seven years ago, the system’s funding levels have declined. PERA oversees retirement benefits to 566,000 current and former public employees — and many are school district employees.

There are a number of different proposals floating around the legislature. One is from the PERA governing board, another from the governor, one from state treasurer and Republican gubernatorial candidate Walker Stapleton, and another from legislative staff.

If lawmakers do act this session — and that’s a big “if” — they’re likely to want to put their own mark any reforms.

“I can’t imagine anything gets done this session,” said Hill, who is also the vice chair of the Senate Finance Committee, which would likely play a large role in shaping any reform package.

Hill suggested that more time is needed to study the issue and craft the best reform package possible — not the quickest.

Some Senate Democrats are hopeful a compromise can be reached, but are also inclined to take time on overhauling PERA.

“I do think a compromise can be had, but it’s going to take us all session to get it,” said state Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, an Arvada Democrat. “I’m worried if we try to rush something through, it could get too political and it won’t be a good bipartisan solution like we did a few years ago.”

School funding is likely to see a boon — barring any unforeseen surprises.

Unlike last year when school budget writers were bracing for another round of cuts, things are looking pretty rosy on the school funding front. In November, the governor requested an additional $343 per student. That number is likely to go up given that the state has even more revenue than was expected in November and lawmakers love bragging about how much more money they send to schools than the governor requests.

However, state Rep. Millie Hamner, a Dillon Democrat and chair of the legislature’s budget committee, sounded a cautious note.

“Clearly we’re in a much better place,” she said. “But we still have a lot of unknowns.”

Those unknowns include how state lawmakers plan to improve the state’s roads and highways — a huge piece of unfinished business from the 2017 session — and whether Congress will continue to fund the children’s health care program.

“There is going to be a lot of pressure on the state budget to deal with the shortcomings of Congress in regards to that program,” she said.

Don’t expect a massive rewrite of the state’s school funding formula — yet.

One of last year’s bipartisan accomplishments was the formation of a legislative committee to study — and ultimately change — the way Colorado funds its schools. The committee is scheduled to end its first round of meetings Tuesday — with little to show for it.

But that’s by design, several committee members said.

“The common understanding of the challenge is becoming more well-defined,” said state Rep. Paul Lundeen, a Monument Republican who co-sponsored the bill that created the committee. “I’m pleased we’re making headway. And for the chance to drag our finance model into the 21st Century, I’m willing to be patient.”

One possible bill that could emerge from the committee’s work is a change to how the state counts its students. Right now, schools receive funding based on how many students are present for school on a specific day in October. Lawmakers could come up with a new system that better tracks student attendance and mobility to send a more precise amount of money to schools.

While some lawmakers are content with taking their time to develop a new formula to fund schools, a group of superintendents is preparing to charge ahead with its proposal.

The group, led in part by Walt Cooper, superintendent of the Cheyenne Mountain School District in Colorado Springs, has been working with state Rep. Dave Young, a Democrat from Greeley, to put the proposal into a bill.

Among the changes the superintendents seek: fully fund kindergarten students and increase funding for students who qualify for federally subsidized lunches.

However, Cooper said the superintendents and Young have not decided whether to introduce the bill.

“We’ll know by January if it sees the light of day,” Cooper said.

A major update to the state’s school accountability law is unlikely. But one lawmaker wants to give struggling schools another option.

Last year Lundeen and state Rep. Alec Garnett, a Denver Democrat, were working behind the scenes to update the state’s school accountability system. The state education department and leaders of struggling schools had identified where the 2009 law was ambiguous and needed clarification. But the two lawmakers could not get the bill into fighting shape.

“We continue to talk about this,” Lundeen said. “But I don’t know if we’ll have a bill.”

Meanwhile, Zenzinger, the Arvada Democrat, said she will introduce a bill that will give the State Board of Education an additional option for schools that don’t improve test scores within five years.

Currently, the board can order a school to be closed, converted to a charter school, develop an “innovation plan” that would free the school from some local and state policies, or hand over all or some managerial duties to a private third party. Zenzinger wants to include a “community schools model” to the mix.

The model, which is growing in popularity thanks in part to an endorsement by national teachers unions, transforms schools into hubs for community organizations to provide so-called “wraparound services” — such as English language classes for parents, medical care, and additional resources for families.

The idea behind the model is that learning can improve by first tackling poverty and other challenges facing students and their families.

“It’s going to offer more resources and a different approach,” Zenzinger said.

Here are a few other storylines and bills to watch for:

Taking on the teacher shortage is a top priority for House Democrats on the education committee. And they could have up to $10 million if the budget committee approves Hickenlooper’s request. But they don’t have any specific bills yet. Expect Republicans to push back on any policy that doesn’t alter the status quo — especially on teacher licensing.
This could be the year lawmakers send more money to the state’s kindergarten classrooms. State Sen. Kevin Priola, a Henderson Republican and vice chair of the Senate Education Committee, is carrying a bill that would nearly fully fund kindergarten without spending any more tax dollars. That’s because his bill would reduce some funding for upperclassmen in high school.
Look for a big push to expand concurrent enrollment, which allows high school students to earn college credit at state universities and colleges, from Lundeen and Garnett. If the bill passes, it would be the third year in a row the bipartisan duo score major education legislation. (See data privacy, the committee studying school funding.) However, there’s also concern coming from the budget committee staff that some schools are abusing the “early colleges” model to score extra funding for students and not delivering on the promise of an associate’s degree within six years.
Just when you thought the debate over early childhood literacy was over, it’s back. Hamner, the Dillon Democrat, was one of the original sponsors of the READ Act, a bill that reformed how the state catches reading disabilities in its youngest students. She wants to double down on parts of the policy that are working and scrap what isn’t. Steve Durham, a Colorado Springs Republican and member of the State Board of Education, also has expressed interest in pushing legislation that aims to boost early literacy. Durham and Hamner have been on opposing sides on a similar issue before. Can the two work together? Hamner says she hopes so.
One of last session’s biggest surprises was the death of a bipartisan bill that would have prohibited the state’s public schools from suspending its youngest students in most cases. The bill would have put Colorado on the forefront of school discipline reform, but it was killed over objections by some of the state’s rural schools. Look for the bill to come back but perhaps with different sponsors in the Senate.

In 2017, Colorado’s public schools were a major theme for Colorado gubernatorial hopefuls

2017-12-20T22:09:50+00:00

Colorado’s 2018 gubernatorial contest got off to a red-hot start this year, and the state’s public schools have been a major part of the debate so far.

One reason why could be that many of the Democratic candidates have deep roots in education.

Before becoming a state senator and one of Colorado’s leading education reform advocates, Michael Johnston was a high school principal in the Mapleton School District, just north of Denver.

Former state Treasurer Cary Kennedy wrote the state constitutional amendment that requires funding for schools to increase each year. She also created a grant program to help build new schools across the state.

U.S. Rep. Jared Polis is the former chair of the State Board of Education and helped launch and lead the New America charter school network, which has schools in Colorado and New Mexico.

Businessman Noel Ginsburg helped start a new apprenticeship program for Colorado students called CareerWise. And Lt. Gov. Donna Lynne has served on a number of boards for education advocacy groups, including Democrats for Education Reform’s Colorado chapter.

Ties to the state’s education community are thinner among Republican candidates. But that doesn’t mean they’re sitting on the sidelines of the education policy debate. Ready Colorado, a nonprofit that advocates for conservative education reform policies, has hosted a series of conversations about education with leading GOP candidates.

So far, a handful of candidates have released full education plans for the state. Polis is calling for universal access to preschool, Kennedy wants to give teachers raises, and Republican Doug Robinson wants the governor and state education department to have more authority over low-performing schools — a rare position for a conservative in a local control state.

While Johnston has not released a full education plan, his central campaign promise is to provide two years of tuition-free college to all Colorado residents.

The race is only expected to intensify in the new year. The primaries — the first-ever in which unaffiliated voters can participate — are scheduled for June.

Colorado stepped in to save its lowest-performing schools in 2017. Whether it will work may not be answered in 2018.

2017-12-20T21:31:15+00:00

This year marked a turning point for Colorado education officials and the state’s lowest performing schools.

Seven years after the state’s current school accountability system went into effect, the State Board of Education fulfilled its duty by stepping in to direct improvement plans for districts and schools that have not improved test scores since 2010.

This spring was the first time since 2004 — when the state board stepped in to save Denver’s Cole Middle School (and failed) — that Colorado has taken such drastic steps to improve schools.

In an effort to take some of the sting out of the state board’s action, officials from the state education department worked first with school districts to draw up plans that tried to strike a balance between drastic action and manageable change to keep chaos to a minimum.

Throughout the spring, a pattern emerged: Most schools turned to outside consultants to take on varying roles in helping improve schools.

The state board agreed to allow Aurora Central to keep putting its existing improvement plan in place, while asking a consultant to take a slightly larger role. But the board demanded that Pueblo City Schools turnover much more decision making authority to its consultants.

Similar agreements to work with consultants were put in place in the Adams 14 and Westminster school districts.

Critics of the process — including some state board members — wondered whether the intervention plans would be enough. But supporters of the process and some national observers suggested the state’s approach could be a model to create better and longer lasting results.

The state board is expected to get a status update on how the schools are performing early next year.

How Colorado’s school funding changed in 2017

2017-12-19T22:34:32+00:00

Close observers of school funding in Colorado rode a roller coaster in 2017.

At the dawn of the year — and legislative session — school budget writers were preparing for the worst: By some estimates the state’s school funding shortfall could have surpassed $1 billion. Such a development would have forced school boards around the state to slash budgets.

A growing state economy was on a collision course with state constitutional amendments aimed at limiting property taxes and state spending, and no one could say for certain what the end result for schools would be.

In an effort to find a long-term budgetary solution, a high-profile pair of lawmakers, Democrat Millie Hamner and Republican Bob Rankin, began floating the idea of asking voters to reset a statewide personal property tax to better fund schools. Despite several behind-closed-doors meetings with fellow lawmakers, the proposal was drowned out by a conversation about a possible tax increase for roads. (Look for this proposal to get a second wind in the 2018 legislative session.)

While state budget writers were working overtime to keep any cuts away from schools, lawmakers were wrestling with another funding question: Should the state compel local school districts to equitably share locally approved tax increases with charter schools?

It wasn’t the first time lawmakers were debating the issue. A similar bill died just a year before. But with new support from the Democratic Speaker of the House, lawmakers reached a down-to-the-wire compromise that goes into full effect in 2020.

Another bipartisan compromise put to rest an even more hotly debated issue — and at the same time sent $30 million to rural schools. After years of debate, enough Republican lawmakers agreed to sign off on a deal that would allow the state to capture more tax revenue by changing the way it collects a hospital fee.

Ultimately, lawmakers were able to stave off deep cuts to education funding and sent about $242 more per student to schools statewide.

There were two other notable moves on the school funding front in 2017 that are sure to play out in 2018 and beyond. First, lawmakers created an interim legislative committee to study how the state funds its schools and recommend changes.

Second, lawmakers made the old new again when they formally changed the name of the state’s education funding shortfall from the “negative factor” back to the “budget stabilization factor.”

You can call it the “B.S. factor” for short.

Retracted: A Plus Colorado takes down report on which high schools send graduates to top colleges

2017-12-19T19:55:05+00:00

Editor’s Note: A Plus Colorado has withdrawn the report on which this story was based due to flaws in the data. The report looked at which Colorado high schools send students to top-ranked colleges, and the results were disappointing. However, the Colorado Department of Higher Education accidentally excluded the University of Colorado Boulder and Colorado State University from the data it provided to A Plus Colorado. That’s significant enough that the premise of the report – and therefore the premise of this story – may not be correct. A Plus Colorado expects to reissue the report with more accurate information later in 2018. You can read more about this here.

More than 140 Colorado public schools identified for low performance in 2017 state quality ratings

2017-12-14T00:51:54+00:00

More than 140 Colorado public schools received one of the state’s two lowest quality ratings Wednesday, putting them at risk of state intervention if they do not improve student learning fast enough.

There are more than 1,700 schools in Colorado, so the vast majority of the state’s students attend schools that received one of the state’s two highest ratings, the state education department said after the State Board of Education approved the ratings.

All public schools annually receive a rating, known as the School Performance Framework report, based largely on results from student scores on the state’s English and math tests. The factor that carries the most weight is student growth, or data that tracks how much students learn year-to-year compared to peers with similar results on state tests. Other factors include high school graduation and dropout rates.

There are four ratings: performance (the highest), improvement, priority improvement and turnaround (the lowest). Schools also may receive one of two designations if they did not have enough students take a test to generate a quality rating.

Schools that receive the state’s lowest ratings are put on the so-called “accountability clock.” Schools that do not improve within five years receive a state-ordered school improvement plan — which could include turning schools over to independent operators or granting schools increased autonomy — aimed at boosting student performance.

Seven schools that received one of the two lowest ratings this year already are on such improvement plans. Earlier this year was the first time under Colorado’s current accountability system that state officials mandated changes to raise student performance.

“I know how much hard work it takes by school leaders, teachers, parents and students to lift performance enough to come off the state’s accountability clock,” Education Commissioner Katy Anthes said in a statement. “But this work is absolutely critical for students, so I’m very pleased to see that 98 schools came off the (accountability) clock this year. As a department, we will increase our focus on supporting schools needing improvements, so more of them raise and maintain their students’ performance.”

Two schools will face state intervention next year: Manaugh Elementary in the Montezuma-Cortez school district and Martinez Elementary in the Greeley school district.

Four schools have just one more year to improve test scores or face the state board in 2019: Minnequa Elementary in Pueblo, Central Elementary in Commerce City, Paris Elementary in Aurora and Kepner Middle in Denver.

Here are some other details about this year’s quality ratings, according to the state education department:

About 87 percent of charter schools earned the two highest ratings.
Forty-five percent of the of the state’s 40 online schools received the state’s highest ratings, compared to 88 percent of non-online schools.
The majority of all schools, 66.6 percent or 1,131 schools, received the same rating they did in 2016.
Fourteen percent of schools improved by at one or more ratings levels.
The same percentage of schools dropped one or more levels.

In response to a large number of students skipping state tests, which adds uncertainty to the quality ratings, the education department last year begun flagging schools that had fewer than 95 percent of students take the state’s tests.

More than 500 schools received their plan ratings with a “low participation” description due to participation rates lower than 95 percent on two or more subject areas, including students with parental excusals.

This year, the department added the descriptor “meets participation” to ratings for those schools and districts that had above 95 percent participation rates on assessments in two or more content areas.

Thirty-two schools had their final ratings decreased because too few students took the state’s tests. Those students did not receive formal excusals by their parents.

Twenty-three schools received a rating of “insufficient state data” because the number of students was too small to complete the necessary accountability requirements or the data included did not necessarily represent all students in the school.

Some board members used Wednesday’s meeting to reiterate calls for shorter and different tests in the hopes to win over families who have skipped the state’s tests in recent years.

“I believe in accountability. I believe in assessments that allow us to compare,” said board member Pam Mazanec, a Larkspur Republican. “I’d like to see an assessment that parents can get behind and feel good about.”

The education department is working with multinational textbook publisher and test maker Pearson to design such tests that should be rolled out in 2019.

Find your school’s rating here

Note: If the final column is blank, the school is not on the accountability clock.

Find your 2017 Colorado school quality rating here

2017-12-14T00:51:36+00:00

The Colorado State Board of Education on Wednesday approved the latest round of school quality ratings. The ratings, based largely on test scores, help the education department identify schools that need help boosting student learning.

You can read our story here.

Here’s a breakdown on this year’s ratings from highest rating to lowest rating:

Performance, 1,205 schools (69.7 percent)
Improvement, 318 schools (18.3 percent)
Priority Improvement, 120 schools (7 percent)
Turnaround, 39 schools (2.3 percent)

Another 46 schools received no rating because of insufficient testing data either because their student population is too small or because too many students opted-out of the state’s English and math tests.

Note: If the final column is blank, the school is not on the accountability clock.

To end child care deserts, it’s time to rethink care provided by family and friends, activists and experts say

2017-12-13T01:07:03+00:00

Weighty regulations, high operating costs and rapidly changing neighborhoods are compounding child care shortages in many of Colorado’s low-income communities.

But state and local policymakers can help by providing informal child care providers — family, friends and neighbors providers — with streamlined policies, low-cost training and a network to connect families with care, a panel of providers and advocates said Tuesday.

Recognizing how widespread that type of care is and putting a renewed value on those providers could help close stubborn academic achievement gaps that begin to appear as early as kindergarten, the panel said.

“I wish that it was an option for everyone,” said Liliana Flores Amaro, an Elyria-Swansea resident and community activist who was raised by her grandmother and teared up recalling her early years. “I know there are lots of families who don’t have those networks around them to give those special experiences to the young children around them.”

Those comments were made at Chalkbeat’s “Lessons From a Child Care Desert” event. The panel featured Liliana Flores Amaro, an Elyria-Swansea resident and community activist; Richard Garcia, former executive director of the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition; Rebecca Kantor, dean of the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Colorado Denver; and Patricia Martiñon, a child care provider in Elyria-Swansea.

The event at the Mile High United Way followed Chalkbeat’s close look at how one north Denver neighborhood, Elyria-Swansea, is grappling with few child care options. The problem is so pronounced, the neighborhood is designated as a child care desert.

But the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood isn’t alone.

Nine of Denver’s 78 neighborhoods, including Elyria-Swansea, are classified as child care deserts, according to data from a recent Center for American Progress report. Parts of more than a dozen other neighborhoods also earn that designation.

The report found that half of the people in the 22 states it examined live in a child care desert, which it defines as neighborhoods or small towns with either no child care options or so few that there are more than three children for every licensed child care slot.

One effort to reverse that statistic in Elyria-Swansea is an intensive course for family, friend and neighbor providers called Providers Advancing Student Outcomes, or PASO.

PASO is helping 22 informal child care providers obtain a common entry level child care credential, Garcia said. But his organization’s efforts need to be replicated on a greater scale, he said.

Knowing that most Colorado children are not being cared for by licensed providers, Garcia said policymakers need to turn their attention to supporting informal providers.

“I’d put more value on what (family, friend and neighbor providers) are doing,” he said. “How do we support this type of work?”

Martiñon, who looks after her nephews, has participated in the PASO training.

“I’m realizing the challenges are many,” she said through an interpreter. “Taking care of children goes beyond keeping an eye on them. … I learned there are so many ways that I can express love to the children — and teach them, not just have them in front of the TV or computer.”

While there are several “universal” factors — including a lack of funding for low-income families to cover tuition at licensed centers — contributing to the lack of child care in Denver, rapid gentrification is adding another wrinkle, said Kantor, of CU Denver.

“The tensions that are always inside a community that is changing are very real,” she said. “You can’t take child care alone. It’s in a context.”

Flores Amaro, the community activist, agreed that an influx of new people and businesses can improve her neighborhood, but said that long-standing residents shouldn’t be displaced.

“We want everything else Denver has,” she said. “Just not at the expense of us.”

Watch the panel’s discussion here:

Lessons from a child care desert
Posted by Chalkbeat Colorado on Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Can Colorado do a better job of sharing school report cards with parents? Data advocates say yes.

2017-12-11T21:09:56+00:00

Just as the Colorado State Board of Education is expected to approve the latest round of school quality ratings, a national organization is calling on all states to do a better job of providing this kind of information to parents and taxpayers.

The Data Quality Campaign last week released a report highlighting states that are providing more and clearer data on its schools. Colorado, once known as a leader in collecting and sharing school data, was not among the all-star list.

The Washington-based nonprofit, which advocates for school data transparency across the nation, is suggesting states use plain language, disaggregate more data and communicate specific education priorities to parents and the public.

The campaign and other supporters of making school data more public believe the information can empower school leaders, teachers and parents to make better decisions for students.

“Colorado has long been a leader in making sure there is robust data,” said Brennan Parton, the Data Quality Campaign’s director of policy and advocacy. “But if you want the normal mom, community member, or policy maker to understand the data, maybe the goal shouldn’t be comprehensive and complex but meaningful and useful.”

State education department officials acknowledged they could do a better job of making data more accessible to parents, but said in a statement this week that they do not consider its annual “school performance framework” to be a report card for schools.

“We look at the SPF as more of a technical report for schools and districts to understand where the school plan types and district accreditation ratings come from,” Alyssa Pearson, the education department’s associate commissioner for school accountability and performance, said in an email.

The ratings, which are largely based off of student performance on state English and math tests, are used in part to help the state education department target financial resources to schools that aren’t making the grade. All schools are also required to submit improvement plans based on the department’s rating.

The department posts the ratings online, as do schools. But the reports are not sent directly to parents.

Instead, the department suggests that its school dashboard tool is a better resource to understand the status of a nearby public school, although Pearson acknowledged that it is not the most parent-friendly website.

“This tool is very useful for improvement planning purposes and deeper understanding of individual schools and districts — both in terms of demographics, as well as academic performance,” Pearson said. “We are also working on refreshing and possibly redesigning other tools that we have had on the website for reporting, including creating a more user-friendly parent-reporting template.”

Losing Douglas County school board candidates spent more than winners, records show

2017-12-08T21:46:57+00:00

The losing candidates in this fall’s politically charged Douglas County school board election spent about $57,000 more collectively on their individual campaigns than their opponents, new records show.

The Elevate Douglas County Slate — which included Debora Scheffel, Randy Mills, Grant Nelson and Ryan Abresch — spent $139,911 on advertising, bank fees and other operations during the campaign.

The CommUnity Slate — made up of Krista Holtzmann, Chris Schor, Anthony Graziano and Kevin Leung — spent $83,419. The candidates, who won handily, also recorded more than $35,000 in in-kind donations, items such as food and office supplies that were purchased for their campaigns by other individuals or groups.

Leung raised the most of any candidate during the waning days of the campaign, $1,817, according to records. Most candidates raised only a few hundred dollars during the last reporting period, Oct. 30 through Dec. 2.

The final finance records from the individual candidates, which were due at midnight Thursday, provide only part of the story. Outside groups including the nation’s second largest teachers union and high-profile Colorado Republican donors spent heavily to influence the election. The committee backed by the teachers union, Douglas Schools for Douglas Kids, in a report also due Thursday reported spending more than $147,ooo in the last days of the election. The Republican committee’s final spending report is due in January.

Americans for Prosperity, a free-market “social welfare” nonprofit that is not required to disclose how much it raises or spends so long as it does not advocate expressly for individual candidates, has said it spent “six-figures” to help influence the election. AFP, which is associated with the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, advocates for more school choice options, including vouchers.

The suburban Denver school district’s controversial private-school voucher program drove much of the debate in the election. The Elevate slate supported keeping the prolonged legal battle around the program alive. The CommUnity slate promised to do away with the program and the legal defense — a promise they kept earlier this week.

Telluride’s Paul Reich taking over as Colorado Association of School Boards board president

2017-12-07T22:32:20+00:00

The association representing Colorado school boards is about to have a new board president.

Paul Reich, a member of the Telluride school board since 2011, on Jan. 1 will take over as board president of the Colorado Association of School Boards, a powerful voice in state education policy.

“Paul is a steady hand but leads with his heart,” Carrie Warren-Gully, the outgoing board president, said at the organization’s annual convention earlier this month. “Paul is thoughtful, but speaks with passion. Paul is organized but is flexible, and Paul has a vision and will work to involve us all.”

The school board association represents and advocates for more than 1,000 Colorado school board members and superintendents at the statehouse and other policy arenas. It also provides services, information and training programs to support school board members as they govern.

Reich and his wife, Christine, own two retail stores in Telluride. Their five children attend or have graduated from Telluride Public Schools. Reich also works as the behavioral health program manager for Tri-County Health Network, focusing on reducing the stigma of mental illness, expanding access to care in the region, and advocating on behalf of mental health services in his community and in the state, according to a statement from the association.

Reich also serves as secretary of the board for the Center for Mental Health, the mental health provider for a six-county region; and on the Telluride Commission for Community Assistance, Arts and Special Events. He has a bachelor’s in history from Grinnell College in Iowa.

Reich gave a stirring speech at a meeting of school board association members earlier this year, calling for an end to the “attack” on public schools. He told Chalkbeat that he hopes the state’s next governor will help change the conversation about the state’s schools.

Douglas County school board ends controversial voucher program

2017-12-05T02:34:02+00:00

CASTLE ROCK — The Douglas County school board voted Monday to end a controversial private-school voucher program and directed the school district to end a long-running legal battle that reached the nation’s highest court.

The board voted 6-0 at a standing-room-only meeting to rescind the program, which was put on a hold in 2011 by a Denver District Court judge before families could use it.

The program was a prime fault line in an election this fall that saw voucher opponents take full control of the board.

“Public funds should not be diverted to private schools, which are not accountable to the public,” said board member Krista Holtzmann.

The Colorado Supreme Court, which earlier this summer was directed by the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit the case, will have the ultimate say in whether the legal challenge will end.

However, the court usually does not consider moot cases, said Mark Silverstein, legal director for the ACLU of Colorado, a plaintiff in the case.

The board’s action is a blow to conservative education reform advocates and voucher supporters in Colorado and across the country. Proponents of vouchers had hoped a victory at the U.S. Supreme Court would set a national precedent.

The legal question at the center of the voucher debate is whether a local school district can send tax dollars to private-religious institutions. A majority of the schools that enrolled in the Douglas County voucher system, known as the Choice Scholarship Program, were religious.

The Colorado Supreme Court in 2015 ruled that the district could not because the state’s constitution forbid it. The U.S. Supreme Court gave voucher supporters renewed hope earlier this year when in a similar case it issued a narrow ruling for a preschool run by a church.

A network of voucher supporters have argued that such constitutional prohibitions, known as Blaine Amendments, are rooted in Catholic bigotry and are outdated.

Americans for Prosperity, a political nonprofit that advocates for free-market policies including private school vouchers, announced Friday it was spending “five-figures” to warn Douglas County parents about the board’s decision to end the program and monitor the board’s action going forward.

“The new school board must put the needs of school children before any political belief,” Jesse Mallory, the group’s Colorado state director, said in a statement. “Ending this program before it even has a chance to succeed and provide real change in our communities would be extremely shortsighted. If the board believes they should deny children more educational opportunities, AFP-Colorado will hold them accountable.”

Opponents of vouchers, who showed up in force Monday night, presented a lengthy lists of claims against private schools and vouchers. Some argued that private schools discriminate against students. Others suggested vouchers were part of a scheme to privatize education.

“What happens to the educational quality of children in the community school where there is less money to work with because of the voucher outflow?” said one speaker, Barbara Gomes Barlow, who has grandchildren in Douglas County schools. “It is diminished. It’s a fiction to believe that vouchers open up choice for all students. They do not.”

Monday’s meeting comes nearly one month after four anti-voucher candidates — Holtzmann, Anthony Graziano, Chris Schor and Kevin Leung — resoundingly won seats on the board. Their opponents campaigned to keep the legal fight alive.

“This is what you were elected to do — serve the taxpayers in a public school district,” said Stephanie Van Zante, another county resident who spoke during public comment. “Ending this policy shows that this board has returned its focus to local educational practices and not national politics.”

Leung, who is a plaintiff in the legal case against the voucher program, recused himself from voting on ending the program.

For Cindy Barnard, the original plaintiff in the legal fight, Monday’s decision was six years in the making.

“I’ve been working on this for a long time and I’m very, very happy to hear the district rescind the program,” Barnard said. “Knowing that public school funds will stay in our public schools — it’s a good day.”

Correction: This article has been updated to better reflect how Americans For Prosperity is spending “five-figures” to monitor the Douglas County school board in general.

After another Colorado child commits suicide, the search for solutions intensifies at schools and the statehouse

2017-12-01T23:58:31+00:00

As the tragic circumstances of a Colorado fifth-grader’s suicide draws widespread attention, two state lawmakers said Friday they plan to introduce legislation next year aimed at helping schools try to prevent such cases.

“I want to have a conversation that 10-year-olds die by suicide,” state Rep. Dafna Michaelson Jenet told Chalkbeat. “And we need to be doing more to help them.”

The Commerce City Democrat’s comments follow the death of 10-year-old Ashawnty Davis, who hung herself in her closet, according to multiple reports. Ashawnty’s parents say she was “devastated” after a video of her confronting a bully after school was posted to a social media app, Musical.ly.

Anthony Davis and Latoshia Harris, Ashawnty’s mother and father, are raising questions about whether Sunrise Elementary in Aurora, part of the Cherry Creek School District, did enough to prevent the incidents before their daughter’s death.

Officials from the Cherry Creek School District say they took the appropriate steps. And suicide experts caution about attributing a suicide to a single event. Usually there are multiple factors, and clear answers are often elusive.

Still, Ashawnty’s death, along with a growing rate of suicides among Coloradans between the ages of 10 and 17, have parents, educators, activists and lawmakers wrestling with complex questions about bullying and suicide prevention in a digital age.

“We’re in a situation where students can no longer escape the bullying that happens at school, because of technology,” said Daniel Ramos, the executive director of One Colorado, which as the state’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy organization has taken a strong stance against bullying. “That’s something we need to better understand.”

It’s unclear how widespread bullying is in Colorado schools. Under Colorado law, schools aren’t required to exclusively report instances of bullying. They are, however, required to report events “detrimental to the welfare or safety of other students or of school personnel.” But that includes a wide range of issues, state officials said.

The Healthy Kids Colorado Survey, a biennial questionnaire that a sample of Colorado students fill out on a volunteer basis, found in 2016 that by the eighth grade, half of all students reported being victims of bullying. And about 20 percent of high school students reported being a victim of bullying within the previous year.

Some Colorado schools — including some in the Cherry Creek School District — are attempting to make their schools safer places. More than 70 school are participating in a three-year, $2 million grant program to curb bullying.

“There’s no magic solution to reduce bullying,” said Adam Collins, the state Department of Education’s bullying prevention and education grant coordinator. However, the program is attempting to build teams of teachers, parents and students at participating schools to change the conversation around bullying.

“A lot of times, people feel like they want to help but they don’t know what to say or do,” Collins said, adding that some schools in the program are helping teachers come up with one or two different sentences they can use to defuse situations around bullying.

While some lawmakers are considering additional steps to prevent bullying at school, Michaelson Jenet and state Sen. Nancy Todd, an Aurora Democrat, want to equip educators and mental health providers with more tools to curb the state’s high child suicide rate.

Since the beginning of the year, there have been reported cases of children committing suicide in Colorado Springs, Littleton, Thornton and Grand Junction. The deaths have cut across racial and socioeconomic lines.

The rate of Colorado children taking their own lives has more than doubled in the last decade, data show. In 2016, nearly 10 out of every 100,000 Colorado kids took their own lives — 57 in total. Colorado’s suicide rate among children is one of the nation’s highest.

Todd’s bill would provide grants to schools for training teachers and staff in teaching life skills and preventing suicide.

“Our students need to be surrounded by highly qualified teachers, staff, and peers that have a greater level of focus on positive life skills and know when to seek higher levels of intervention to assist students indicating a need for help,” Todd said in a statement.

Michaelson Jenet’s bill would allow kids as young as 12 to meet with a licensed therapist to talk about their feelings without parental consent. Under current law, parents must be notified if a child under 15 seeks help.

The Commerce City lawmaker’s bill also would create a campaign to advertise the state’s suicide prevention text hotline and create a program to train adults in “mental health first aid.”

Michaelson Jenet, whose own son attempted suicide when he was 9, ran a similar bill seeking to lower the age of consent this year. It died in the Republican-controlled state Senate.

“This is the No. 1 question for our society in Colorado,” she said. “We have to answer the question —- How do we stop our kids from dying?”

Fate of Douglas County’s high-profile voucher program to be weighed at special meeting

2017-11-29T23:59:43+00:00

The newly configured Douglas County school board is expected next week to discuss — and possibly end — the district’s controversial private-school voucher program.

David Ray, who was named board president by his peers Tuesday, announced the Dec. 4 meeting to consider the future of the voucher program, and provided little in detail beyond that. The board is also expected to weigh a potential superintendent search at the same meeting.

Tuesday was the first meeting of the suburban Denver school board since the election, which saw four candidates who oppose vouchers trounce their opponents. The district’s voucher program, which never was put into practice and has been tied up in courts since 2011, was one of the election’s most contentious issues.

The four winning candidates — Krista Holtzmann, Chris Schor, Anthony Graziano and Kevin Leung — were sworn in Tuesday. They joined three existing members — Ray, Anne-Marie Lemieux and Wendy Vogel. All seven are ideologically aligned and generally oppose the direction of the former board majority’s policies.

That puts the voucher program in striking distance.

While the Douglas County school board can terminate the program unilaterally, ending the protracted legal battle isn’t up to them. The school district’s general counsel, William E. Trachman, said he Colorado Supreme Court will have the final say as to whether the legal challenge can end.

The program, known as the Douglas County Choice Scholarship program, was created in 2010 by the county’s school board, which was controlled by seven conservative members. It was meant to provide as many as 500 Douglas County families a chance to use tax dollars for private school tuition.

After a lawsuit was filed by some Dougals County residences, a Denver District Court judge blocked the program from taking off.

In 2015, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled the program unconstitutional. However, the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year ordered the state court to reconsider its opinion.

Some conservative education reform advocates and other private-school voucher supporters had hoped a U.S. Supreme Court victory would help set a national precedent for vouchers — especially in states such as Colorado which have provisions against sending state tax dollars to religious institutions.

Katy Anthes’s inner circle: Meet the eight people helping Colorado’s education commissioner in her first year on the job

2017-11-28T23:54:56+00:00

When a new person assumes the top spot at any organization, there’s often turnover in the layers of leadership below.

That’s not been the case with the Colorado Department of Education under Katy Anthes, who is about to mark her first year as Colorado’s education commissioner.

It should not come as a surprise. One reason the State Board of Education appointed Anthes last December was to quell a rush of exits from well-respected department officials and bring stability to the department that had seen massive turnover since 2015.

Part of Anthes’s work in shaping the department’s executive leadership team has been tweaking and standardizing job titles and dropping the “interim” designation from a few cabinet members’ titles. The cabinet did lose one member earlier this year: Leanne Emm, the deputy commissioner of school finance.

You can find out below who is filling Emm’s shoes and get more information about who is helping Anthes run the department. But first, here’s a little more about the commissioner herself …

Anthes joined the department in 2011 to help put Colorado’s landmark teacher evaluation system in place. She went on to serve as the interim commissioner for achievement and strategy, and chief of staff before being named interim commissioner.

Before joining the department, she was a partner at Third Mile Group, an education leadership consulting group. She led and researched major education initiatives for state, district and national organizations, and was an evaluator for several district education programs across the state.

Anthes previously worked at the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit organization that tracks state-level education policy.

Anthes earned a Ph.D. in public policy and a master’s degree in public affairs from the University of Colorado Denver. She did her undergraduate work at the University of Oregon.

She makes $255,000 a year.

Here are the eight department officials who report directly to Anthes, their duties, salaries and a bit about their backgrounds.

Alyssa Pearson, Associate Commissioner of Accountability, Performance and Support
Annual Salary: $152,625

A former fifth-grade teacher in Denver Public Schools, Pearson oversees the state’s school accountability and improvement office, which produces the state’s annual school and district quality ratings. Her office also tracks what schools are doing to improve student learning. Recently, Pearson played a substantial role in shepherding the state’s federally required education plan to comply with the nation’s new education laws.

During her time at the department, Pearson also has worked with schools that receive federal Title I money, and coordinated and led school accountability and data reporting requirements. She wrote the successful proposal asking the U.S. Department of Education for approval for use of the Colorado Growth Model, which tracks how much students learn year-to-year compared to students who have similar tests scores, for federal accountability purposes.

Pearson holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and an elementary education certification from the University of Colorado Boulder, as well as a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Melissa Colsman, Associate Commissioner of Student Learning
Annual Salary: $152,625

Colsman was appointed associate commissioner in January. Her department is currently leading the state’s mandatory review of academic content standards and helping school districts put in place new graduation requirements. The offices of Early Learning and School Readiness, Literacy, and Learning Supports are also in her purview.

Colsman joined the department eight years ago and has served as the state’s mathematics content specialist, and as the executive director of teaching and learning.

Before joining to the department, Colsman was the Cherry Creek School District’s mathematics coordinator. She taught middle school mathematics for 15 years. During that time she received National Board Certification and the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching, the highest award a math or science teacher can receive.

Colsman has a Ph. D. in educational leadership and innovation from the University of Colorado Denver. Her master’s degree is in interdisciplinary studies in mathematics, science, and technology from the University of Northern Colorado.

Dana Smith, Chief Communications Officer
Annual salary: $122,880

Smith oversees the department’s media relations, publications, web management and legislative liaison functions.

She started her career as a journalist in Washington state. Later she shifted to managing public relations for school districts and businesses in the energy, sports, technology and telecommunications industries. Smith came to Colorado in 2000 to serve as the spokesperson and communications director for US West, now CenturyLink.

Before joining the department in 2014, Smith was the deputy director for communications and marketing for the Denver Scholarship Foundation.

Jennifer Okes, Interim Chief Operating Officer
Annual Salary: $135,564

Okes is the latest addition to Anthes’ cabinet, replacing Leann Emm. She oversees the Division of School Finance and Operations, which includes the Offices of Budget, Accounting, and Purchasing; Capital Construction; Grants Fiscal Management; Human Resources; School Finance, School Nutrition, and School Transportation.

Prior to joining the department four years ago, Okes was the deputy executive director for the Department of Personnel and Administration. She also has worked for the governor’s Office of State Planning and Budgeting, where she was in charge of statewide budgeting. Okes also worked at the Colorado Department of Human Services-Information Technology Services, and at the Office of the State Auditor.

Okes was born and raised in Denver and graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder with a degree in finance.

Marcia Bohannon, Chief Information Officer
Annual Salary: $135,394

Bohannon manages the department’s internal technology, data privacy and information security programs, and the department’s data service unit that provides direct support to districts.

She has more than 30 years of experience in providing technology services to organizations both domestically and abroad. She began her career in aerospace engineering providing engineering and technology services to NASA and Lockheed Martin. Since moving to the public sector, she has worked in city, county and state government.

Before joining the department in 2011, Bohannon spent six years as the chief information officer at Jeffco Public Schools. She was appointed to her current position in 2015.

Joyce Zurkowski, Executive Director of Assessment
Annual salary: $142,214

Zurkowski has been responsible for Colorado’s assessment program since 2010, which included the state’s transition to online assessment. The state’s battery of tests includes the PARCC English and math exams, a state-produced science and science test. Her department also oversees the state’s administration of the SAT college-entrance exam.

Before joining the department, Zurkowski held a similar position in Illinois. She also taught education and assessment related master’s-level courses at the University of Missouri, while doing advanced study in special education, and research and measurement at the University of Kansas.

Zurkowski holds degrees in philosophy and special education from St. Norbert College and University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh. She has also completed doctoral-level coursework in special education and measurement at the University of Kansas.

Colleen O’Neil, Executive Director of Educator Talent
Annual Salary: $135,564

As executive director of the educator talent office, O’Neil manages educator preparation and development, licensing and enforcement, and educator effectiveness.

Prior to her current work at the department, O’Neil was the director of curriculum, career and technical education for the South Dakota Department of Education. O’Neil also worked at the Greeley-Evans School District as the chief human resource officer, an elementary school administrator and the director of strategic planning. She also has served as project manager and assessment specialist for the state education department, chief learning officer for an e-Learning company and a middle and high school English teacher and coach.

O’Neil earned a bachelor of arts from Colorado State University at Pueblo, a master’s from the University of Northern Colorado, an educational specialist degree from the University of Colorado Denver and her doctoral degree from Bethel University in Saint Paul, Minn. She holds her teacher, principal and superintendent license in the state of Colorado.

Jhon Penn, Executive Director of Field Services
Annual Salary: $128,242

Penn’s department provides general support to all school districts in the state, and organizes more intensive help when needed. He also runs the commissioner’s Rural Education Council.

Penn was hired in 2001. Before joining the department, Penn served in several educational roles in rural Colorado, including district director of student achievement, principal, middle school science teacher, and as an adjunct faculty member with the Colorado Mountain College. Before entering the education field, he was a senior geological engineer with the Tenneco Oil Company.

Penn has a master’s degree in counseling from Liberty University and graduated Summa Cum Laude with his bachelor’s degree in geology from Ohio University.

A minimum salary for Colorado teachers? State officials may ask lawmakers to consider it.

2017-11-22T00:38:44+00:00

As part of a broad plan to increase the volume of high-quality teachers in Colorado, state officials are considering asking lawmakers to take the bold step of establishing a minimum teacher salary requirement tied to the cost of living.

Officials from the state departments of education and higher education are finalizing a list of recommendations to address challenges to Colorado’s teacher workforce. Pressing for the legislation on teacher salaries is one of dozens of recommendations included in a draft report.

The report, assembled at the request of the legislature, also proposes a marketing campaign and scholarships to attract new teachers to rural areas.

Representatives from the Colorado Department of Education said they would not discuss the recommendations until they’re final. However, the department earlier this month briefed the State Board of Education on their proposed recommendations in advance of the Dec. 1 deadline for it to be finalized.

The impending report — based on thousands of responses from educators, students and other Colorado residents in online surveys and town halls across the state — is a sort of first step for the state legislature to tackle a problem years in the making. Since 2010, Colorado has seen a 24 percent drop in the number of college students graduating from the state’s traditional teacher colleges. There’s also been a 23 percent drop in enrollment in those programs.

Residency programs, which place graduate students in a classroom for a full year with an experienced teacher, and other alternative licensure programs have seen a 40 percent increase in enrollment. But those programs produce far fewer teachers and can’t keep up with demand.

Colorado faces a shortage of teachers in certain subjects, regions and schools, and circumstances vary. Math and science teachers are in short supply: Only 192 college students in 2016 graduated with credentials to teach those subjects. The same year, 751 students left with a degree to teach elementary school.

And rural schools have had an especially hard time finding and keeping teachers.

Here’s a look at what the state departments are considering recommending, based on the presentation from education department officials to the state board:

Provide more and better training to new — and veteran — teachers.

Colorado schools are already required to offer some sort of induction program for new teachers. This training, which lasts between two and three years, is supposed to supplement what they learned during college.

For the last two years, the state education department has been pushing school districts to update their programs. The recommendations in the report could kick things up a notch.

The education departments are asking for updated induction requirements to be written into statute and more money to be provided to districts to pay for the training.

The draft report also calls for more more sustained training for veteran teachers, including competitive grant programs.

An additional suggestion is to create a program to train teachers expressly to teach in rural classrooms.

Increase teacher compensation and benefits.

This will be a hard pill to swallow. According to the presentation to the state board, the education departments want to call on lawmakers to set a minimum salary for teachers based on the school district’s cost of living.

The presentation to the board lacked specifics on how lawmakers and school districts could accomplish this. One board member, Colorado Springs Republican Steve Durham, called it a “mistake” to include such a recommendation.

Keeping up with the rising cost of living is a challenge. A new report shows new teachers in the state’s three largest school districts couldn’t afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment.

“We hope the report itself is going to talk a lot the cost of living — that’s what we heard from our stakeholders across the field,” Colleen O’Neil, the education department’s executive director of educator talent told the state board. “They literally were not able to meet the cost of living because their salaries did not compensate them fairly enough to find housing.”

Other suggestions the report might highlight to improve teacher compensation include loan forgiveness, housing incentives and creating a differentiated pay scale for teachers — something teachers unions staunchly oppose.

Help schools better plan for hiring and send teachers where they’re needed.

One short-term solution the state is considering recommending is allocating more resources to help schools plan for teacher turnover. This includes providing incentives for teachers to notify school leaders about their plans to leave the classroom earlier.

The education departments are also suggesting the state increase the number of programs that can help teachers get licensed in more than one subject at a time. Other ideas include offering scholarships to potential teachers to complete licensing requirements for content areas that are lacking viable candidates — likely math and science — and providing transportation and technology stipends for rural teachers.

Make the teaching profession more attractive.

Teachers “feel they’re not treated like professionals,” O’Neil told the board. So the education departments want the legislature to allow them to partner with private entities to launch a marketing campaign to lift the profile of teaching as a career in the state.

The education departments also hope the legislature considers creating more opportunities for middle and high school students to consider teaching as a viable career path. This could include reinvigorating the state’s Educators Rising program, a program for high school students interested in teaching.

Why Gov. Hickenlooper wants to give some Colorado charter schools $5.5 million

2017-11-16T22:46:31+00:00

If Mike Epke, principal of the New America School in Thornton, had a larger budget, he would like to spend it on technical training and intervention programs for his students.

He would buy more grade-level and age appropriate books for the empty shelves in his school’s library, and provide his teachers with a modest raise. If he could really make the dollars stretch, he’d hire additional teacher aides to help students learning with disabilities.

“These are students who have not had all the opportunities other students have had,” the charter school principal said, describing his 400 high school students who are mostly Hispanic and come from low-income homes.

A $5.5 million budget request from Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, could help Epke make some of those dreams a reality.

The seven-figure ask is part of Hickenlooper’s proposed budget that he sent to lawmakers earlier this month. The money would go to state-approved charter schools in an effort to close a funding gap lawmakers tried to eliminate in a landmark funding bill passed in the waning days of the 2017 state legislative session.

Funding charter schools, which receive tax dollars but operate independently of the traditional school district system, is a contentious issue in many states. Charter schools in Colorado have enjoyed bipartisan support, but the 2017 debate over how to fund them hit on thorny issues, especially the state’s constitutional guarantee of local control of schools.

The legislation that ultimately passed, which had broad bipartisan support but faced fierce opposition from some Democrats, requires school districts by 2020 to equitably share voter-approved local tax increases — known as mill levy overrides — with the charter schools they approved.

The bill also created a system for lawmakers to send more money to charter schools, like New America in Thornton, that are governed by the state, rather than a local school district.

Unlike district-approved charter schools, which were always eligible to receive a portion of local tax increases, state-approved charter schools haven’t had access to that revenue.

Terry Croy Lewis, executive director of the Charter School Institute, or CSI, the state organization that approves charter schools, said it is critical lawmakers complete the work they started in 2017 by boosting funding to her schools.

“It’s a significant amount of money,” she said. “To not have that equity for our schools, it’s extremely concerning.”

CSI authorizes 41 different charters schools that enrolled nearly 17,000 students last school year. That’s comparable to both the Brighton and Thompson school districts, according to state data.

Hickenlooper’s request would be a small step toward closing the $18 million gap between state-approved charter schools and what district-run charter schools are projected to receive starting in 2020, CSI officials said.

“Gov. Hickenlooper believes that working to make school funding as fair as possible is important,” Jacque Montgomery, Hickenlooper’s spokeswoman, said in a statement. “This is the next step in making sure that is true for more children.”

If lawmakers approve Hickenlooper’s request, the New Legacy charter school in Aurora would receive about $580 more per student in the 2018-19 school year.

Jennifer Douglas, the school’s principal, said she would put that money toward teacher salaries and training — especially in the school’s early education center.

“As a small school, serving students with complex needs, it is challenging and we need to tap into every dollar we can,” she said.

The three-year old school in Aurora serves both teen mothers and their toddlers. Before the school opened, Douglas sent in her charter application to both the Aurora school board and CSI. Both approved her charter application, but because at the time her school would receive greater access to federal dollars through CSI, Douglas asked to be governed by the state.

Douglas said that her preferred solution to close the funding gap would be to see local tax increases follow students, regardless of school type or governance model. Until that day, she said, lawmakers must “ensure that schools have the resources they need to take care of the students in our state and give them the education they deserve.”

For Hickenlooper’s request to become a reality, it must first be approved by the legislature’s budget committee and then by both chambers. In a hyper-partisan election year, nothing is a guarantee, but it appears Hickenlooper’s proposal won’t face the same fight that the 2017 charter school funding bill encountered.

State Rep. Jovan Melton, an Aurora Democrat who helped lead the charge against the charter school funding bill, said he was likely going to support Hickenlooper’s proposal.

“You almost have to do it to be in alignment with the law,” Melton said. “I don’t think with a good conscience I could vote against it. I’m probably going to hold my nose and vote yes.”

Polis campaign releases education plan, including new promise about teacher raises

2017-11-15T23:29:02+00:00

Congressman Jared Polis, one of several Democrats running for governor, released an education plan for the state Wednesday that includes new details on tackling teacher shortages and better preparing high school students for work.

The Boulder Democrat wants to help school districts build affordable housing for teachers, increase teacher pay and make sure that “100 percent of Colorado’s school districts are able to offer dual and concurrent enrollment programs through an associate’s degree or professional certification, and work to boost enrollment in them.”

The education plan includes the congressman’s initial campaign promise to deliver free and universal preschool and kindergarten.

“Part of my frustration is that politicians have been talking about preschool and kindergarten for decades,” Polis said in an interview with Chalkbeat. “It’s time to stop talking … and actually do it.”

Big questions remain, however, about how Colorado would pay for Polis’s plans.

Free universal preschool and kindergarten would cost hundreds of millions of tax dollars the state does not have. Polis has acknowledged that voters will need to approve a tax increase to secure the funding necessary — and voters rejected Colorado’s last big statewide ask to fund education initiatives.

His additional promises, especially providing schools with more money to pay teachers, only adds to the price tag for his education plan. The campaign did not release any projections of how much his teacher pay raise proposal would cost.

“If a teacher can’t afford to live in the community they work in, that is not going to be an attractive profession,” he said. “We need to do a better job in Colorado making sure teachers are rewarded for their hard work.”

Other components to Polis’s plan includes providing student loan relief for teachers who commit to serving in high-need and rural areas, increasing teacher training and building and renovating more.

Polis is the latest Democrat to roll out an education platform.

Former state Sen. Michael Johnston released more details earlier this week about his campaign promise for tuition-free community college and job training.

Johnston’s campaign estimates that the initiative would cost about $47 million annually. The campaign provided specifics on how the state would pay for it: by combining existing federal grants and state scholarships, revenue from online sales tax, and state workforce development funding. Savings from volunteer hours put in by tuition recipients also are factored in.

Former state Treasurer Cary Kennedy released her education plan last month.

Like Polis, Kennedy is calling for teacher raises. She wants the state’s average salary to be closer to the national average. The former state treasurer also wants to expand preschool and job training for high school students. A key piece of Kennedy’s proposal to pay for her initiatives: reforming the state’s tax laws to generate more revenue.

Other Democrats running to replace Gov. John Hickenlooper, who is term-limited, include Lt. Gov. Donna Lynne and businessman Noel Ginsburg.

The Republican field to replace Hickenlooper, a Democrat, is also crowded. Attorney General Cynthia Coffman announced earlier this month that she’s running. Other leading Republican candidates include former Congressman Tom Tancredo, state Treasurer Walker Stapleton, and businessmen Doug Robinson and Victor Mitchell. George Brauchler, district attorney for the 18th Judicial District, dropped out of the race to instead run for attorney general.

How Colorado’s teachers unions claimed school board victories Tuesday

2017-11-10T23:57:53+00:00

Building on recent successes, Colorado’s teachers unions sharpened their political operation and took advantage of an unsettled national electoral climate to score victories this week in some of the state’s largest school districts.

Slates of school board candidates backed by teachers unions won majorities in Aurora, Douglas and Jefferson counties. And in Denver — where the union has been unable to stop or slow the school district’s reform strategies — two candidates supported by the union won seats on the city’s seven-member board.

The political and education policy circumstances differ in each of the four school districts — the dynamics look much different in Denver, for example, than in Douglas County.

But with some differences, teachers unions have during the past two local school board election cycles adopted and refined a playbook to counter the money and influence of their policy foes.

National, state and local unions spent more time engaging their members and other labor organizations, recruited and groomed better candidates most places, and devoted considerable financial resources to ensure wins. Unions also loosely aligned themselves with vocal parent groups in some districts, and pushed a variety of messages — both local and national, positive and negative — on doorsteps and in voters’ social media streams and mailboxes.

The time was ripe for such strategies to pay off. Civil rights groups and factions of the Democratic Party have ramped-up their criticisms of charter schools. And then there is the controversy over Donald Trump’s presidency and his tapping of billionaire Betsy DeVos as education secretary.

Kerrie Dallman, president of the Colorado Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, emphasized the unions’ attempts to join forces with like-minded groups.

“I think we’ve gotten better, chiefly at talking to the community,” she said. “It’s not teachers alone. It’s parents and other community organizations working together. It’s been particularly grassroots in that regard. It has to be.”

Van Schoales, CEO of A+ Colorado, which monitors and critiques reform efforts in Denver and Aurora, said the election should be a wake-up call for reformers who favor strategies such as giving schools more autonomy and holding schools accountable for performance.

“The union did a much better job than they’ve done in the past,” he said. “This should be a message to folks that there is a lot of work to be done to engage the community” before Election Day about how the reforms are improving schools.

Perfecting their game

Months before the November election, the Douglas County Federation of Teachers rented classrooms to hear the frustrations of their members and to encourage them to participate in this year’s election.

The message to teachers from their leaders was clear: Talk to your parents, talk to your family, talk to your neighbors about the candidates you support. In an off-year election, consistent and sustained outreach — not attack mailers — is key, union leaders said.

And with no statewide ballot issue to compete with, teachers could more easily capture voters’ attention.

But during the run-up to Nov. 7, those teachers fanned out across the district and walked with members of the Douglas County Parents political committee, in addition to making more than 30,000 phone calls to voters — far more than they’ve ever made.

Particular emphasis was put on turning out the 19,000 union members living in Douglas County.

Similar mobilization efforts played out in Aurora and Denver. While union leaders there are still tallying up totals, anecdotally they believe they made more contact with voters than in recent years.

“We extend our greatest thanks and appreciation to the hundreds of educators who gave their time and talent to participate in neighborhood walks, phone banks and all other forms of support,” said Henry Roman, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association. “We have seen a great deal of participation, so that has been exciting.”

Teachers were trained to discuss in person and on the phone hyper-local and poll-tested messages, union officials said. In Aurora, the school district with the largest concentration of black and refugee students, teachers discussed career and vocational training. In Douglas County, one of the nation’s wealthiest counties, they discussed how higher teacher turnover driven by the school board’s policies was leading to lower academic achievement.

Opponents of the teachers unions were busy contacting voters in the lead up to the election as well. Americans for Prosperity, a free-market advocacy organization, spent six-figures in September to promote charter schools and the Douglas County private-school voucher program.

Multiple messages

While teachers and parent volunteers were knocking on doors, independent political committees fueled by donations from the teachers unions were hitting mailboxes across the Denver-metro area with advertisements — sometimes delivering a more divisive message.

Some of those mailers and other voter outreach attempts came under fire.

One piece of mail in Denver attempted to connect candidate Angela Cobián, a daughter of Mexican immigrants who ran in support of many of the changes Denver schools were making, to Trump and DeVos.

“The union capitalized on legitimate fears of Colorado families that Trump and DeVos are causing incredible harm to our communities,” said Jen Walmer, state director for the political action committee Democrats for Education Reform, which through an affiliate spent more than $345,000 to influence the Denver elections. “What I find deplorable is that in Denver the union used the Trump playbook to slander progressive Democrats, including immigrants and women of color, who are running to continue the education legacy of Barack Obama.”

Union officials declined interview requests before the election to discuss campaign mailers and the overall tone of the campaign. This week after the returns were in, union leader Dallman told Chalkbeat that she had not seen the southwest Denver mailer before it was sent out, and she questioned whether it focused on the right issues.

“I think it’s important for school board races to focus on the issues, and I think that the issue here was the support of unfettered charter school growth without adequate accountability and transparency,” she said this week. “I don’t know that issue was clear in the mailers.”

In Douglas County, some voters received text messages sending them to a website created by a committee backed by the teachers union that depicted the union’s opposition as swamp creatures with green skin and glowing red eyes. The committee, which received $300,000 from the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union, used the Trumpian slogan to encourage voters to “Drain the Swamp.”

A spokeswoman for the “Elevate Douglas County” slate, the target of the website, called the attacks “mind-blowingly ironic,” and an attempt “to confuse and suppress Republican voters who have not yet turned in their ballots.”

Lessons for reformers

The school reform movement is far from monolithic. In liberal Denver, Democratic-inspired strategies target the district’s large population of disadvantaged students. One of the tenets is universal school choice, and a “portfolio” of district-run, charter and other types of schools.

In wealthy Douglas County, Republican-backed candidates who won control of the board in 2009 brought market-based philosophies including a private school voucher program. That drew national attention in part because most voucher programs target low-income students.

Aurora Public Schools, meanwhile, is trying to forge its own distinctive reform path, including recruiting high-performing charter schools and revamping its principal hiring process.

Union officials and their policy allies sought to blur those lines during the 2017 election, labeling the different reform factions as cut from the same “corporate reformer” cloth.

Max Eden, a senior fellow at the free-market think tank Manhattan Institute who has spent time studying the Douglas County school district, said policymakers who want to improve the system must gauge the willingness of their community.

“The former (Douglas County school) board never stopped to think about what the parents wanted,” he said. “The reforms in Douglas County ran into the ground because teachers and principals felt it was something being done to them.”

Some reform advocates are rethinking the value of attempting to sway school races.

Tyler Sandberg, a co-founder and senior policy advisor for Ready Colorado, a conservative education reform nonprofit, said his group did not invest heavily in school board elections this year because he said they are shifting their focus to the state.

“When we helped pass the bill that got charter equity funding, we didn’t have to go and fight 178 school boards,” Sandberg said. “School boards, they have become a place where unions have a stacked deck. At the state legislature, you have a much more level playing field.”

Local school districts that are ahead of the state in implementing reforms, can still serve as “labs” Sandberg said, for demonstrating how something would work.

“But ultimately, it’s gotta be a Colorado-wide solution,” Sandberg said. “ We can’t have a patchwork of unequal policy.”

Marty West, associate professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said supporters of reform efforts — especially Democrats — need to do a better job of explaining why they back certain policies, especially now that Obama has left office.

“There are signs in the national election results this week that Democrats may make significant headway at the state and local level next year when many more seats are in play,” he said. “And that typically makes it harder to pursue the traditional reform agenda. That really places a sense of urgency for reformers to reach out to Democrats to convince them of the merits of their ideas.”

Both CEA’s Dallman and DFER’s Walmer said after the election that they saw potential for common ground on some issues of relevance before the 2018 elections.

“A common interest is funding,” Dallman said. “Our communities are continually forced to make up a shortfall in state funding and in doing so, we perpetuate the system of choosing winners and losers. Organizations that believe in public education have to work together to solve the school funding problem.”

Walmer echoed Dallman’s conciliatory tone looking ahead to the 2018 midterm elections.

“There is someone to fight here,” she said, “and it isn’t each other.”

— Chalkbeat reporters Melanie Asmar and Yesenia Robles contributed

Colorado’s education commissioner signed off on 2017 school district quality ratings. Find yours here

2017-11-08T23:29:31+00:00

Five small Colorado school districts, most of them rural, will have five years to improve test scores or face state intervention as a result of the latest round of district quality ratings released Wednesday by the state education department.

The ratings, based largely on results from the state’s English and math tests, are used to help the state target federal dollars to school districts that need the most help in boosting student learning.

Districts that earn one of the state’s two lowest ratings are put on Colorado’s “accountability clock.” Earlier this year four school districts — including Aurora Public Schools — improved enough to jump off that list and no district earned the lowest ranking.

The ratings from highest to lowest are: distinction, accredited, improvement, priority improvement and turnaround.

“We are pleased with the success around the state, which is the result of hard work by students, teachers and administrators,” Education Commissioner Katy Anthes said in a statement. “These ratings allow us to identify districts that need more state support and intervention, but also districts where we can learn from their success. While we are proud of the progress we are making, we know we still have a long way to go to meet the academic needs of many of our students.”

Thirty districts received the highest rating of distinction and 90 received the second-highest rating, accredited.

The state is expected to release ratings for individual schools in December after the State Board of Education approves those.

Anti-voucher slate in Douglas County cruises to victory

2017-11-08T06:00:00+00:00

An aligned group of Douglas County school board candidates seeking to reverse many of the district’s most controversial policies — including a private-school voucher program — cruised to victory early Wednesday.

As of 12:30 a.m., with all ballots counted, members of the “CommUnity Matters” slate were ahead of their opponents by about 16 percentage points in unofficial results.

“We’re feeling really thankful,” said Krista Holtzmann, one of the members of the slate. “We heard our community speak loud and clear tonight that they believe in and support our public schools.”

The victory by members of the CommUnity slate comes eight years after a group of candidates backed by the local Republican Party took control of the Douglas County school board. The CommUnity slate opposed many of the board’s recent initiatives — including a private-school voucher program.

Four seats on the seven-member board were up for grabs this year, putting the controversial voucher program, which has been stalled for years in the court system, and the philosophical direction of Colorado’s third largest district on the line. Members of the CommUnity slate oppose vouchers and will likely end the district’s defense of the program.

That move would be a blow for national conservative education reform advocates who wanted to see the district’s voucher program prevail in court. A court victory could have set a national precedent for private-school vouchers by eliminating so-called “Blaine Amendments,” which forbid tax dollars going to religious institutions, from dozens of state constitutions. If the district withdraws its defense, the legal fight will end without resolution — one reason why the Douglas County race drew national interest.

The CommUnity Matters slate includes Holtzmann, Chris Schor, Anthony Graziano, and Kevin Leung. Their opponents, the “Elevate Douglas County” slate, were Debora Scheffel, Randy Mills, Ryan Abresch, and Grant Nelson. As of 10 p.m., the Elevate slate had not conceded the race.

“There’s nothing to do but keep fighting for educational opportunity,” Ross Izard, policy director for ACE Scholarships and a voucher proponent who supported the Elevate slate, said in a statement Tuesday evening. “There are still thousands of kids whose needs are not being met by the current system. I don’t think parental choice advocates have any plans to stop pushing for policies that would expand options for those students.”

The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union, poured $300,000 into the race to help the CommUnity slate, the most recent records show. The union is one of the loudest national critics of charter schools, which receive public tax dollars but are run independently of school districts, and of private school vouchers. The union lost its collective bargaining agreement with the district in 2011 after the conservative board decided to stop negotiations.

“Douglas County voters have chosen a school board that places students at the center of every decision and believes in the value of an accountable, transparent public education system, not an ideology that fails our students and educators,” said Kallie Leyba, president of the Douglas County Federation of Teachers, the local AFT affiliate. “We are eager for teachers to have the opportunity to work with the board on issues that will restore and propel our public schools forward in preparing our students for school, college and career.”

Kerrie Dallman, president of the Colorado Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, also celebrated the slate’s win in Douglas County.

“Voters spoke out against misguided and ineffective reforms that aren’t helping our children, and have rejected attempts to divert public dollars to private schools,” Dallman said in a statement. “This is a great election result for all students in Colorado, preventing the spread of harmful voucher schemes.”

The differences between the two groups of candidates were stark.

The CommUnity slate promised to end the district’s defense of the 2011 voucher program. The slate, which was backed by the Douglas County Parents political committee and the teachers union, also pledged to seek more local tax dollars to repair school buildings and pay educators more.

The Elevate slate candidates wanted to continue to defend the voucher program, but stopped short of saying they’d restart the program if given the OK by the courts. The slate, which was endorsed by the Douglas County Republican Party and received hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial support from deep-pocketed school choice advocates, said it wanted to rebuild trust in the district before asking voters for more money.

However, there was some agreement among all candidates. Both slates promised to revisit the district’s unique “market-based” pay structure for teachers.

After the results are certified, the CommUnity slate will join three board members who also had the backing of the Douglas County Parents group. Some worry they could create a 7-0 board where dissenting views do not get heard.

This charter parent will be watching for sure.
— Angie (@sapphireangie) November 8, 2017

Leung said late Tuesday that the premise doesn’t hold up.

“To assume we’ll have one voice is inaccurate,” he said.

Leung added that the board will work with the district’s charter school community, which was uneasy during the election.

“We have all the kids’ interests at heart,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if they go to a charter school. We will try to bring everyone together.”

Earlier on Tuesday, candidates, supporters, and observers said they hoped that regardless of the outcome they hoped the district, which has been roiled by controversy since 2009, could heal and move forward.

“Tomorrow, winners or losers, we have a really big effort to work toward asking voters for more money,” said Kerrie Riker-Keller, a Douglas County parent who sits on a number of district committees. “Everyone’s going to need to put aside their differences to work toward that.”

Schor, a member of the CommUnity slate who ran to represent Castle Rock, said she hopes everyone who has been engaged in the election continues to work to improve the district’s schools.

“I think if everyone who is involved in this election continues to use this energy to focus on children, we’ll be all right,” she said.

Randy Mills, a member of the Elevate slate who opposed Schor, said earlier in the evening that he and his teammates expected a close race.

“We feel confident that we left everything in the arena,” he said in a statement before the polls closed. “I, my slate-mates, and our volunteers have canvassed the district with our conservative vision for transparency, accountability, stability, education excellence, and broadened vocational education. We are hopeful we will be entrusted to carry out that vision.”

According to the Secretary of State’s office, 79,841 Douglas County ballots were counted by 9 p.m. More than 92,000 votes were cast in 2015, the last time seats on the school board were up for grabs.

Oil man, voucher proponent Alex Cranberg donates $20,000 to Douglas County school board candidates

2017-11-04T17:28:41+00:00

Four Douglas County school board candidates who want to continue the legal defense of the district’s stalled private-school voucher program continued to bring in more money than their opponents, new records show.

Members of the “Elevate Douglas County” slate raised more that $47,000 collectively between Oct. 13 and Oct. 29, according to campaign finance reports filed Friday.

Nearly half came from one person: Alex Cranberg, an oil magnate and staunch proponent of private school vouchers. Cranberg donated $5,000 to each of the four candidates on the team — Debora Scheffel, Randy Mills, Grant Nelson and Ryan Abresch.

Members of the “CommUnity Matters” slate, which seeks to end the court case and voucher program, raised about $12,000 during the same period.

However, the group — Krista Holtzmann, Anthony Graziano, Kevin Leung and Chris Schor — was buoyed by thousands of dollars of non-monetary contributions. Most of it came from the political committee Douglas County Parents, which can coordinate with campaigns.

Since the start of the race, members of the CommUnity slate have received more than $45,000 in non-monetary contributions. The Elevate slate has record about $3,300 in non-monetary contributions.

Such contributions cover a wide range of gifts including ads in local newspapers, postage for campaign postcards and markers to write endorsements messages on car windows.

The tens of thousands of dollars raised by candidates in the waning days of the campaign pale in comparison to the hundreds of thousands being spent by outside groups to influence the race. Independent expenditure committees are prohibited from coordinating with candidates.

The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union, has poured $300,000 into the race to support the CommUnity slate. And a committee backed by the state’s Republican donor class has spent more than $200,000 on mailers and consultants to help the Elevate Slate.

As of Friday, 54,636 ballots had been returned in Douglas County, according to the Secretary of State’s office. That’s more than half of all votes cast in 2015, the last election seats on the school board were in play.

Click here to read more about how the fight over private school vouchers in playing out in this year’s election and about other issues the state’s third largest district faces.

A one stop guide to the 2017 Jefferson County school board race

2017-11-04T14:10:55+00:00

It’s the final weekend before Election Day in Colorado and thousands of voters in the Denver-metro area have big choices to make about their local school boards.

For months, Chalkbeat has been covering key races that carry implications for traditionally underserved students and for education policy in Colorado.

Interest groups are on pace to spend more than $2 million to influence your vote. So yeah, a lot is riding on your vote.

Many people wait to vote, so we thought it’d be helpful to put our most essential coverage of races in Denver all in one place. That includes surveys candidates answered in response to questions from Chalkbeat. There are similar roundups of coverage in Denver, Aurora and Douglas County.

Already voted? Take a moment to share this post on social media or email it to five of your neighbors who haven’t, and encourage them to sign up for regular updates from Chalkbeat here.

If you haven’t voted by mail, it’s probably too late to mail it. Best to drop off your ballot at an approved location. You can find a drop box or a place to vote in person here.

***

What a difference two years makes. In 2015, the race to control Jeffco Public Schools captured widespread interest.

Now, only two seats on the five-member school board are in play, with the board’s current president is running unopposed.

The current board has made some big changes (hired a new superintendent) and faced major setbacks (voters rejected a tax increase in 2016). Has the board won the trust of the community or is a huge upset possible?

Here’s a look at the race and where the candidates stand on the issues facing the state’s second largest school district.

Finally, check out Chalkbeat’s latest reporting on campaign contributions and expenditures.

Here’s what you need to help inform your vote in the 2017 Douglas County school board race

2017-11-04T14:10:45+00:00

It’s the final weekend before Election Day in Colorado and thousands of voters in the Denver-metro area have big choices to make about their local school boards.

For months, Chalkbeat has been covering key races that carry implications for traditionally underserved students and for education policy in Colorado.

Interest groups are on pace to spend more than $2 million to influence your vote. So yeah, a lot is riding on your vote.

Already voted? Take a moment to share this post on social media or email it to five of your neighbors who haven’t, and encourage them to sign up for regular updates from Chalkbeat here.

If you haven’t voted by mail, it’s probably too late to mail it. Best to drop off your ballot at an approved location. You can find a drop box or a place to vote in person here.

***

Conservative education advocates across the country are closely watching the Douglas County school board race. At stake in the state’s third largest school district — in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties — is a first-of-its-kind private school voucher program.

Back in 2011, the school board developed a program that would allow up to 500 students to use tax dollars earmarked for their education at private schools.

The district has been a political hotbed ever since. And this year, with four seats up, huge sums of money from voucher supporters and opponents have bankrolled two groups of candidates. One group wants to continue to defend the voucher program that has been caught up in the court system, the other wants to put an to it.

Here’s a closer look at why the race is drawing national attention and a look at where the candidates stand on more local issues.

Finally, check out Chalkbeat’s latest reporting on campaign contributions and expenditures.

Your one-stop guide to the 2017 Aurora school board races

2017-11-04T14:10:22+00:00

It’s the final weekend before Election Day in Colorado and thousands of voters in the Denver-metro area have big choices to make about their local school boards.

For months, Chalkbeat has been covering key races that carry implications for traditionally underserved students and for education policy in Colorado.

Interest groups are on pace to spend more than $2 million to influence your vote. So yeah, a lot is riding on your vote.

Already voted? Take a moment to share this post on social media or email it to five of your neighbors who haven’t, and encourage them to sign up for regular updates from Chalkbeat here.

If you haven’t voted by mail, it’s probably too late to mail it. Best to drop off your ballot at an approved location. You can find a drop box or a place to vote in person here.

***

There’s been a lot of change in one of Colorado’s lowest-performing school districts.

Superintendent Rico Munn has launched ambitious school improvement efforts and invited charter schools to help. More change is coming: the school board is poised to gain new members.

Both the teachers union, which has been skeptical of Munn’s agenda, and education advocacy groups that have supported changes in Denver are duking it out in this new battleground.

Here’s a look at the candidates’ positions, and here’s a closer look at the race.

Finally, check out Chalkbeat’s latest report on campaign contributions and spending.

Everything you need to help inform your vote in the 2017 Denver school board race

2017-11-04T14:10:18+00:00

It’s the final weekend before Election Day in Colorado and thousands of voters in the Denver-metro area have big choices to make about their local school boards.

For months, Chalkbeat has been covering key races that carry implications for traditionally underserved students and for education policy in Colorado.

Interest groups are on pace to spend more than $2 million to influence your vote. So yeah, a lot is riding on your vote.

Already voted? Take a moment to share this post on social media or email it to five of your neighbors who haven’t, and encourage them to sign up for regular updates from Chalkbeat here.

If you haven’t voted by mail, it’s probably too late to mail it. Best to drop off your ballot at an approved location. You can find a drop box or a place to vote in person here.

***

Denver voters have become accustomed to the storyline: Every other year, the school board election is a referendum on Superintendent Tom Boasberg and the board’s policies.

Those policies include embracing a variety of schools — including charters — giving more autonomy to school leaders and closing low-performing schools that don’t improve fast enough.

For nearly a decade, Denver voters have elected board majorities that side with those policies.

Enter U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

The election has gotten ugly in Denver, in part because of the DeVos factor, real quick. Political committees backed by the teachers union have tried to tie incumbents and candidates to DeVos’s controversial agenda (and Donald Trump, too). And the Democratic Party has been fractured over the tactics of a group linked to Democrats for Education Reform.

If you want to cut through all the noise, start by reading the candidate’s responses to our survey here. Then take a closer look at races for seats representing:

the city at-large,
northeast Denver (District 4),
southwest Denver (District 2) and
central Denver (District 3).

Spending on Colorado school board races by outside groups surpasses $1.5 million

2017-10-31T23:59:24+00:00

Outside groups seeking to influence school board races in the Denver-metro area continue to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at a steady clip, new records show.

Political committees linked to education reform advocates and teachers unions spent nearly $600,000 between Oct. 12 and Oct. 31 in Denver, Aurora and Douglas County school board races. That brings the reported total spent on races in those three school districts to $1.65 million this election cycle.

And committees still have plenty of time and money to spend before Election Day, Nov. 7. Given how much cash the groups have on hand, the total could surpass $2 million.

The investments from outside groups in Denver, Aurora and Douglas County — where education reform advocates and teachers unions are locked in heated battles for control — are a sharp contrast to dozens of school districts across the state where elections have been canceled due to a lack of interest.

In Denver, committees that support candidates who will keep the district on its current path — which includes supporting a mix of school types, more autonomy for school leaders and closing persistently low-performing schools — are outspending critics by more than 2-to-1.

The dynamics — and the type of reform efforts — differ in Douglas County. There, a political committee that supports candidates who want change has outpaced a Republican-backed committee that supports candidates who have promised to keep alive a legal fight over the district’s private school voucher program.

And in Aurora, a new education battleground, those who support that district’s policies — including turning to charter school operators to lift student performance — are about on the same financial footing as opponents in support from independent committees.

The new figures come from a Chalkbeat analysis of fresh campaign finance reports filed with the Secretary of State’s office. The reports include donations and contributions between Oct. 12 and Oct. 25. Political groups known as “independent expenditure committees” were required to report new contribution and spending totals by midnight Monday. Chalkbeat is also including additional spending after Oct. 25 and reported by committees.

The political committees are allowed to spend an unlimited amount of money but are forbidden from coordinating with candidates.

The money spent by these committees is just one piece to understanding the money behind school board races in the Centennial State. Individual candidates must also report fundraising totals, and another round of those reports are due Friday.

The public, though, will never know the true scope of spending to win school board races.

Political nonprofits such as Americans For Prosperity, which is backed by the billionaire Koch brothers and supports conservative education reform principles, pledged to spend “six figures” to push private school vouchers in Douglas County.

The use of vouchers is a central tension in the Douglas County race. Because of Americans for Prosperity’s federal tax status and because it is not supporting or opposing candidates, it’s not required to disclose how much it spends.

With seven days left until Election Day, here’s a look at how much money committees have spent on mailers, digital ads and consultants:

Denver, the state’s largest school district, continues to attract the most money.

Raising Colorado, a committee linked to the political nonprofit Democrats for Education Reform, has spent more than $345,000 to support school board incumbents and candidates who support the direction of the district and Superintendent Tom Boasberg.

Those candidates include Barbara O’Brien, Mike Johnson, Rachele Espiritu and Angela Cobian. Raising Colorado has also spent part of its war chest, $13,765, on a mailer against Espiritu’s competition Jennifer Bacon, records show.

Meanwhile, Every Student Succeeds, a committee connected to the teachers union, has spent a total of $115,000 to support Xochitl “Sochi” Gaytan, who is opposing Cobian in southwest Denver.

Our Denver Our Schools, backed by a nonprofit with the same name, launched Oct. 16 and has spent $6,080 to support Carrie Olson, Robert Speth, Tay Anderson and Gaytan. All four candidates have promised to slow down the district’s reform efforts.

Families First Colorado, a committee backed by the conservative education reform nonprofit Ready Colorado, spent more than $4,300 to back incumbent Espiritu.

In Aurora, Raising Colorado has spent $149,322 to support three candidates — Gail Pough, Miguel In Suk Lovato and Lea Stead — who support the district’s school improvement efforts, which include attracting Denver-based charter school networks such as DSST.

Every Student Succeeds put another $100,000 in the race, bringing its total support of a slate of candidates endorsed by the Aurora teachers union to $185,966.

Families First Colorado spent $19,116 on supporting Pough and Lovato.

Spending has slowed in Douglas County. The only reported spending between Oct. 12 and Oct. 31 was by a committee backed by high profile Republicans. The Republican Committee spent $54,000 to support the Elevate Douglas County slate. Those four candidates — Debora Scheffel, Randy Mills, Grant Nelson and Ryan Abresch — generally support the direction of the district and have promised to keep alive a legal battle over the district’s private school voucher program.

The GOP-backed committee this fall has also spent nearly $125,000 on consultants, but records don’t identify which candidates the consultants were working to support or oppose. The committee paid one group, Purple State Communications, $20,000 for mailers supporting the Elevate slate, and $11,000 for consulting, records show.

A committee backing a slate of candidates — Krista Holtzmann, Chris Schor, Kevin Leung and Anthony Graziano — that has promised to end the voucher court case didn’t report any spending. However, it did receive a $15,000 donation from a group linked to the Colorado Education Association, the state’s teachers union, to help the CommUnity Matters slate.

That puts the Douglas Schools for Douglas Kids committee’s war chest to use in the last week of the election at $148,577. The Republican Committee, which is used to support Republican candidates in other races as well, has $331,108 on hand.

Another group, Douglas County Parents, which has a political committee designation with the state and can coordinate with candidates, has so far raised more than $42,000 to help boost the CommUnity Matters slate.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Douglas County Parents as an independent expenditure committee. It’s a political committee, which means it can coordinate directly with candidates. This post has also been updated to include additional information about spending by the a GOP-backed committee in Douglas County. This article has also been updated to correct an error that said the said the Douglas Schools committee received an $85,000 donation from NEA. It was a $15,000 donation from CEA.

Watchdog group files complaint in Douglas County school board election

2017-10-27T22:30:02+00:00

An election watchdog group has filed a complaint against an independent political committee that is supporting a union-backed slate of Douglas County school board candidates.

Campaign Integrity Watchdog filed the complaint against Douglas Schools for Douglas Kids with the Secretary of State earlier this week. The complaint alleges that the political committee, which can spend an unlimited amount of money to advocate for candidates, failed to file timely and accurate campaign finance reports.

The complaint stems from confusion over contributions from the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union, to the political committee.

A report filed by the committee shows one contribution from the union. However, other records filed by the union make it appear like there were two contributions — both $300,000 — from the union to the same committee. One donation is from “American Federation of Teachers” the second donation is from “American Federation of Teachers Solidarity.”

The union, responding to questions from Chalkbeat, said the double reporting was a clerical error made in an attempt to amend its original report and that it only made one $300,000 donation to the committee.

“It’s possible they screwed up the reporting,” said Matt Arnold, director of Campaign Integrity Watchdog, which has lodged complaints against both Republicans and Democrats in partisan races (school board elections are nonpartisan). But, he said, “voters deserve to have information about who is trying to buy and sell their votes.”

The union said it is trying to clear up the error with the state.

The race for control of the Douglas County school board is one of the most heated contests in Colorado this fall. At stake is the district’s private school voucher program, which has been tied up in the court system since 2011.

Right now, the board is split 4-3 in favor of keeping the voucher fight going. Four seats are in play this election, so that direction of the board is at stake.

The union-backed candidates are running as the “CommUnity Matters” slate and hope to end the district’s defense of the voucher program. Their opponents, the “Elevate Douglas County” slate, are seeking to keep the legal fight alive.

The high-profile nature of the race has drawn national attention and dollars. And that’s becoming a recurring theme in Colorado school board elections. More than $1.5 million from outside groups already has flowed into the races along the Front Range.

“What’s really striking is how much money has been pouring in these school boards races in Colorado,” Arnold said.

Meet Colorado’s 2018 Teacher of the Year

2017-10-27T20:47:54+00:00

Veteran first grade teacher Christina Randle on Friday was named Colorado’s Teacher of the Year.

Randle has taught first grade at Soaring Eagles Elementary School in the Harrison School District for a decade.

Randle was selected because of her “passion for teaching, dedication and collaboration with her peers and commitment to engaging parents in their students’ learning,” the Colorado Department of Education said in a statement.

Randle focuses her students’ time on problem-solving with a focus on equity. She also helps train other teachers on the school’s curriculum and keeps in touch with families by sending text messages, the state said.

“Christina Randle embodies Colorado’s commitment to building strong foundations by supporting high-quality early learning,” Education Commissioner Katy Anthes said in a statement. “Her focus on building skills, such as problem-solving and collaboration, will benefit students through their entire lives. In this role, she will be able to share her passion for teaching across the state just like she has in her school and district.”

Randle beat out six other candidates for the honor. She was chosen by a committee of individuals from within the education community. The process includes a written application, letters of recommendation, site visits, endorsements from the teacher’s district and personal interviews.

Randle will go on to represent Colorado in the National Teacher of the Year Program, a project of the Council of Chief State School Officers in partnership with Voya Financial and People to People Ambassador Programs.

This is the second year Colorado’s Teacher of the Year hails from El Paso County. Last year’s Teacher of the Year was Sean Wybrant, a career and technical education teacher at William J. Palmer High School in Colorado Springs District 11.

Oh, and if Soaring Eagles sounds familiar, that’s probably because the school received one of the nation’s highest education honors, a Blue Ribbon from the U.S. Department of Education, in 2016.

Douglas County’s politically charged, voucher-driven school board election explained

2017-10-26T21:29:33+00:00

On a recent Thursday evening, the eight candidates running for a seat on the Douglas County school board gathered on the same stage for the last time before the suburban Denver electorate decides on Nov. 7 which path Colorado’s third largest school district will take.

On one side of the stage, seated in plush leather arm chairs, were the candidates known as the “Elevate Douglas County” slate. The group, backed by the county’s Republican Party and an independent political committee with high-profile donors such as businessmen Ed McVaney and Pete Coors, has promised to keep the philosophical vision of the current school board’s leadership alive, albeit with tweaks and a greater focus on community participation.

“We need to have a better conversation,” said Grant Nelson, a commercial real estate developer running to represent the areas of Castle Pines and Lone Tree. “We need to listen to one another.”

On the other side of the stage were their opponents, the “CommUnity Matters” slate. The four candidates, backed by a coalition of politically active parents and another independent political committee financed by the nation’s second largest teachers union, have promised to slow down or roll back many of the policy shifts the current school board has put in place during the last eight years.

“Our schools, teachers and students have faced unnecessary challenges,” said Krista Holtzmann, a lawyer running to represent northern Parker. “There are 68,000 students who need and deserve an advocate.”

Before the candidates could engage, one of the moderators explained the rules.

Passions are running high, said Jonathan Fung, one of the event’s organizers. Disruptions — applause, flash photography, anything to throw the candidates off — won’t be tolerated.

“We might ask you to leave,” he said.

So, how does a school board election in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties — the average household income is $109,292 — turn into a political melee involving soccer moms, the state’s political donor class and national interest groups?

The short answer is: private school vouchers. The long answer is more complicated.

It all started in 2009, with the election of a group of four candidates who had the unusual backing of the Douglas County Republican Party.

School board races in Colorado — and most other states — are nonpartisan. So when the county Republican Party inserted itself into the election, it raised eyebrows. At the time, the county chairman said his effort to influence the election was in direct response to the involvement of the county’s teachers union. Unlike political parties, teachers unions have a long history of participation in school board elections, as well as, at least nationally, an alignment with the Democratic Party.

Members of the CommUnity Matters slate from left, Krista Holtzmann, Anthony Graziano, Chris Schor, and Kevin Leung. (Photo by Nic Garcia/Chalkbeat)

“When you take money from unions in Douglas County, you can expect to hear from the Republican Party,” said John Ransom, then chairman of the Douglas County Republican Central Committee. Douglas County is a traditionally Republican stronghold in the Denver-metro area, with Republican voters outnumbering Democrats more than two-to-one.

The four candidates backed by the GOP, who ran on a platform of expanding the district’s charter school options and financial transparency, went on to win the election with more than 56 percent of the vote. What’s more, it was the highest off-year election turnaround in memory. The number of voters who cast a ballot in 2009 — 43,598 — was more than double that in 2007.

The board, which now had no registered Democrat, made several high profile moves within its first few years.

Its first move in 2010 was hiring Liz Fagen, an Arizona educator with little experience running a school district the size of the 67,000-student Douglas County. But the school board was won over by the then-35-year-old’s energy and attention to results.

Fagen quickly became a polarizing figure in the district, in part because she was carrying out the board’s agenda, which had stirred up a spirited resistance.

Another high-profile move by the school board in those early years included ending the collective bargaining agreement with the district’s teachers union. The board replaced the traditional salary schedule based on time served and education with a “market-based” system that paid teachers more in hard-to-staff subjects, such as high school math, than in popular subjects, such as history.

The board’s most controversial decision was creating a school voucher program, which is still tied up in courts today and is seen by many as the central tension in this year’s election.

In 2011 the board rolled out a new school choice system, which included a voucher program that would have allowed 500 Douglas County families to use tax dollars to attend participating private schools approved by the district.

Thirty-four private schools applied to participate in the voucher program. The school district approved 23 of those schools. Of the 23, 14 were located outside Douglas County and 16 taught religious doctrine.

The voucher program was modeled after other programs across the nation that have prevailed in court. But that didn’t matter. Before the program could launch, a Denver district court judge put a hold on it.

In 2015, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled the system was unconstitutional. The court said Colorado’s constitution prohibits tax dollars from being spent for religious purposes. The district and a group of parents whose children enrolled in the voucher program appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2017 asked the state court to reconsider its decision in light of a similar decision known as Trinity Lutheran v. Comer.

Randy Mills, a member of the Elevate slate, addresses a crowd of Douglas County voters at a candidate forum. (Photo by Nic Garcia)

The state Supreme Court is expected to take up the case again later this winter.

That’s what makes this election so crucial to supporters and opponents of the voucher program — both in Douglas County and across the nation. If the Elevate slate wins, the district will continue to defend the program, likely all the way back to the U.S. Supreme Court.

A win for the Douglas County voucher program at the U.S. Supreme Court would set a national precedent, and likely strike down so-called Blaine Amendments in dozens of state constitutions. The amendments prohibit states from funding religious programs, including schools. It would clear the way for voucher programs, which are rare, to spring up across the U.S.

If the Community slate wins, they’ll surely end the lawsuit — and along with it the voucher program all together. That would be a major setback for the conservative education reform movement.

The debate over voucher programs is often philosophical and personal.

Vouchers supporters generally believe a couple of things. First, that vouchers empower parents to make better educational decisions for their students. And that vouchers — which are usually provided to students from low-income homes — offer an alternative to a public school that might not be providing the best education to all students. (Household Income was not a factor in the Douglas County voucher program.)

There is sometimes also a religious component: Parents believe they have a First Amendment right to use their tax dollars to educate students into a particular doctrine.

Opponents argue that vouchers are an attack on public schools and that siphoning off tax dollars from schools hurts more children than benefits a few. They believe the schools that lose the most funding are then the schools that need more financial resources, not less. Opponents believe that public schools should meet the needs of all students and their families. And that public schools are often the heartbeat of a community and a cornerstone of American democracy.

In case you were wondering whether vouchers make an educational difference for students, the research is mixed.

Here’s a close look that Chalkbeat published earlier this year.

There are a few other big issues the Douglas County school district is facing. Here’s a quick rundown and an idea of where each slate stands on the issues.

The first major decision the new look school board will need to confront is naming a permanent superintendent. After the Republican bloc on the board lost three seats in 2015 (while still maintaining the leadership), Fagen left the district. The board named Erin Kane, who helped found the American Academy charter school, as interim superintendent.

Both slates agree that Kane has done a tremendous job in calming some of the tensions between teachers, charter school leaders and parents. The Elevate slate is ready to name her the district’s permanent leader, but the Community slate wants a national search, though they would encourage Kane to apply.

Both sides agree that the district’s pay system for teachers needs an overhaul. The Elevate slate has forcefully denounced the district’s neutered teachers union and said they would not reinstate collective bargaining. The Community slate has stopped short of saying they would invite the union back to the negotiation table, but have signalled that they would follow the lead of district teachers.

Like most Colorado school districts, Douglas County’s budget is tight while new needs are emerging. Critics of the district worry that teachers aren’t being paid enough. Its school buildings are old, and hundreds of millions of dollars in capital needs have been identified.

One possible remedy is to ask residents for a tax increase. That’s something the current conservative majority has declined to do. The Elevate slate has not ruled out the possibility of asking voters for an increase, but the group has said that it must first win the trust of the public. The Community slate is in favor of asking voters for an increase.

To learn more about the candidates’ positions read our survey here.

Update: This article has been updated to clarify that household income was not a factor in the Douglas County voucher program.

Coalition: Colorado making progress to close racial gaps in health, education but more work remains

2017-10-25T04:01:32+00:00

Black and Latino students in Colorado still lag behind their white peers in academic performance and healthiness, but the gaps separating the different groups have shrunk in the last three years, according to a new report.

The 2017 Race for Results report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation highlights state-level disparities between different racial and ethnic groups — white, black, Latino, Native American and Asian/Pacific Islander — based on a variety of factors. Those measures include the number of children with a normal birth weight, how many fourth graders are reading proficiently, graduation rates and household incomes.

A coalition of child advocacy, social justice and education groups used the report’s release to call on state lawmakers to do more to help level the playing field for all Colorado students.

“In national rankings of child well-being, Colorado often shows up as average,” Kelly Causey, president and CEO of the Colorado Children’s Campaign, said in a statement. “But our state’s average ranking hides the wide disparities we see in child well-being when we look at outcomes by race and ethnicity.”

In the study, each racial or ethnic group receives a composite score from 1 — the lowest score — to 1,000.

Here are the scores for Colorado’s students received in 2014 compared to 2017.

Because some of the data reporting has changed during the last three years, such as with graduation rates, the report cautions comparing scores year to year. However, comparing the change in the size of the gaps between groups is appropriate.

The gaps measured by the new report follow a similar pattern in the state’s annual testing data. Earlier this fall Chalkbeat looked at gap in achievement data by race, class, special education needs and whether is learning English as a second language.

Local officials said the gaps narrowed in Colorado in part because fewer black children are living in poverty, low teen birth rates, and conditions improved for young women of all racial and ethnic groups, but they improved faster for young women of color.

The report, the second of its kind, put special emphasis on children from immigrant families. Those children often face additional barriers such as separation from parents. The report’s authors are recommending comprehensive immigration reform that keeps immigrant families together, expanded early childhood programs in communities with high numbers of immigrant families and more economic opportunities for parents.

In Colorado, the Children’s Campaign and its partners will ask state lawmakers during the 2018 legislative session to renew the state’s child care contribution tax credits credit, remove barriers to school lunches and reduced-price lunch shaming, rethink how the state generates revenue and allocates tax dollars to schools.

Lawmakers will also be asked to reconsider a bill that would reform the state’s suspensions and expulsion laws for the state’s youngest students.

“While it’s promising to see those gaps are closing, Colorado has more work to do to remove barriers for children of color and kids living in immigrant families,” Causey said, “which ultimately will benefit all of Colorado’s children.”

Cary Kennedy, a Colorado gubernatorial candidate, wants to give teachers a raise. Here’s how.

2017-10-20T22:51:18+00:00

Former state treasurer Cary Kennedy wants to give Colorado teachers a sizeable bump in pay.

One of several prominent Democrats running for governor, Kennedy, who helped write a constitutional amendment to increase school funding, released her education plan Thursday. The main goal is to get every Colorado kid into college or the work force by the age of 19. To do that, she’s putting her political capital into making the state’s teachers happier.

The proposal calls for more pay, a scholarship program to attract more teachers of color, and giving teachers a larger say in the state’s testing and accountability systems. She’s also calling for school districts to adopt a school improvement policy favored by teachers unions that calls for more welfare programs in the schools to combat the effects of poverty.

In a conversation with Chalkbeat, Kennedy discussed how she plans to reform the Taxpayer Bill of Rights to send more money to school districts, how she was influenced by attending a historically integrated high school in Denver and why access to free preschool is important.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re calling for teacher raises. How can a governor in a local control state such as Colorado where salaries are set by school boards do that?

Provide the funding. I’m not proposing that I dictate to school districts what they pay their teachers. I’m proposing that the state provide adequate resources to school districts so that they can adequately pay our teachers.

We read every day about the teacher shortage in Colorado: 3,000 teaching positions right now that are not being filled. And it’s in large part because teachers can’t afford to work here. They can’t afford to live here. We pay our teachers among the lowest salaries in the country. I hear from principals that they are losing their best teachers because they’ll make $20,000 or $30,000 more for the same job if they go teach in another state.

This issue is impacting rural Colorado the most. We have 90 school districts where the average teacher salary is below $40,000. We can’t compete for the talent pipeline. And we’re not giving our great teachers who are doing amazing work in classrooms every single day the support they need and deserve, the professional pay they need and deserve.

This all goes back to what do we want to accomplish in education. And I’ve laid out the goal that every single student in Colorado, by the age of 19, is ready for higher education, has an employable skill, or both. And it takes great teachers. We know from data that the most important thing for a student’s success is the quality of the teachers that they have. We want Colorado to be the best place in the country to teach.

Have you put a price tag to this?

My goal as governor is to bring Colorado teacher salaries at least up to the national average and to eliminate what we call the teacher pay penalty, which is the difference between what a teacher gets paid and what someone with a comparable level of education earns in other professions. We want to eliminate the disincentive to teaching. Bringing Colorado up to the national average, we estimate to be around $240 million a year. To eliminate that teacher pay penalty is around $500 million.

It does not make any sense that Colorado’s economy ranks No. 1 in the country right now, according to U.S. News and World Report, and our investment in education ranks at the bottom. We’re living the consequences every day by having the teachers leave the profession and by having people who want to teach say they can’t do it in Colorado.

Where are you going to find that kind of money?

We need to recover what TABOR has taken away. TABOR (the Taxpayer Bill of Rights which limits how much money the state can collect from taxpayers) has put us in a hole. As our economy has grown over the last two decades, our schools have not benefited from that economic growth. TABOR has prevented us from doing that. We’ve been cutting school budgets for 25 years. That isn’t what anyone in the state wants. They want Colorado — we want Colorado — to have the best education system in the country.

I will lead, as governor, to build the coalitions to get back what TABOR has taken out of our schools.

Conventional wisdom would say this promise is a huge political risk.
I’ve called for permanent TABOR-reform for my entire career. I have helped lead our state to have responsible fiscal policy, a balanced budget throughout the economic crisis, low to moderate debt levels. We pay our bills; we keep our taxes in Colorado low. All of that helps us remain competitive and attract capital investment in our state.

But we can not continue the prosperity we are enjoying today if our kids growing up can’t compete for the jobs we’re bringing here. We have to give our kids the educational foundation they need to be competitive for those jobs.

And it’s also how we’ll make sure our prosperity reaches everyone. Right now we have people who are being left out, who are being left behind. And a great public education system is the only way we’ll ensure our progress reaches everyone.

What does TABOR reform look like? How do you want to change it?

It would be to allow our state to keep up with growth. TABOR has said as your economy grows, you are not able to generate taxes off that growth to invest in your infrastructure or education system or your health care system.

People in Colorado know they’re sitting in traffic. Our streets are crowded, our schools are crowded, we’re underinvested in education. That’s because we have not been able to keep up with the demands of a growing economy. We can keep low taxes, we can keep the protections for taxpayers that are in TABOR. There is bipartisan support today to modify the caps in TABOR to keep up with growth. You will see me lead on that as governor.

There are folks out there who say public schools receive the largest chunk of the state’s budget and don’t need more money. It’s a question of them spending the money in a more efficient way. What do you say to those folks?
We’ve been cutting school budgets in Colorado for three decades. Half of our school districts in Colorado today have had to cut back to a four-day school week. We pay our teachers among the lowest salaries in the country. We’ve got 90 school districts with an average salary below $40,000. We have to make the investment to compete as a state for the kind of economic progress that we all want in Colorado. People in Colorado know that education needs to be our priority and we’re not where we need to be as a state.

You want to expand the role teachers play in assessments, teacher evaluations and school quality ratings. What does would that look like in practice?

We know from (the state’s teacher) survey that teachers don’t believe the current assessment data is helpful to them in their efforts to improve student learning or improve their instructional strategies. We want this assessment data to help support our teachers in really knowing and understanding how their kids learn and what their students need. Teachers need to be much more involved in developing that process.

To do that would cause a lot of upheaval in the current system. One of the things we’ve heard is that teachers and principals are tired of change. How do you balance rethinking those systems while making sure there isn’t another upheaval and more ‘unfunded mandates?’

I think teachers and principals right now feel they’re spending a lot of time on an assessment system that isn’t giving them meaningful information and they’d welcome the opportunity to spend the time to bring their voice to the table on how we can do a better job in this state.

Your proposal is heavily focused on teachers. I can imagine there is someone out there thinking you’re just angling for the endorsement of the teachers union.

I’ve spent my career trying to improve our public schools. I graduated from Manual High School. I’ve seen the challenges in our public schools firsthand. I had great teachers. I’ve always done the work I’ve done because I really believe that public schools are where kids get opportunities to go on and lead productive lives. I grew up with three brothers and sisters who joined my family through the foster care program. I also have a sister who joined my family through her church. So, I’ve grown up with brothers and sisters who didn’t have the opportunities that I had been given. And I saw firsthand how important the opportunities are that kids received through their public schools to determine their future success.

You’re the product of an integrated school. Integration has become a hot topic in education circles again. How have you been thinking about integration?

The achievement gap in Colorado today, the difference between how white kids are performing compared to students of color, is unacceptable. We have the second-largest achievement gap in the country. There are too many students of color in Colorado who are being left behind, who aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve. That’s why this proposal is so important. We want all of our kids regardless of where they grow up, regardless of their family income, regardless of their background, to be successful in school.

We want our schools to reflect the diversity and the richness of our communities. That will happen if all schools have and provide meaningful learning opportunities with high-quality teachers.

You see in my proposal a real focus on attracting and retaining teachers who also reflect their student makeup: Latino teachers, black teachers, teachers of all socioeconomic and racial backgrounds so kids going to school have role models they can look to.

We want integrated, inclusive community schools that reflect the diversity of the state’s population.

You’re calling for universal access to preschool. So is your opponent Rep. Jared Polis. In fact, it’s his central education campaign promise. How are your proposals different?

I worked for Educare Colorado and developed the school readiness legislation that is current law that expands opportunities for low-income kids to attend high-quality preschools. I was also involved in the Colorado Preschool Program, the Denver Preschool Program. Even with these successful efforts, only half the kids in our state attend preschool and full-day kindergarten. Half the kids in our state start behind. And teachers will tell you that it’s really hard to catch them up. They stay behind and they finish behind. As a state it’s imperative that we make sure all kids have access to high-quality early education.

It’s going to be more money.

It’s an investment that’s critically important. We can look to private and public partners. But it is not acceptable that we prevent 4-year-olds from attending a high-quality early learning opportunity.

Is this another ballot question or is this something you can do with existing revenue?

You have to prioritize it. It’s building a statewide vision for what our public education system in Colorado can and should be.

You call for expanding so-called community schools. That’s an amorphous term that means something different depending on who you talk to. What does a community school mean to you?

Community schools are focused on engaging the community in supporting the school. It’s bringing in two-generational learning so that parents and students can learn together and parents can support their student’s learning. But it’s also bringing in wrap-around services. A lot of kids arrive at school with challenges. It’s social-emotional, growing up in stressful home environments, suffering from toxic stress. We have kids who are coming to school who are homeless and who need additional support in their learning. If we want all kids to be successful, we have to address the challenges kids show up every day with.

Douglas County slate that favors continuing school voucher court case is ahead in early fundraising, records show

2017-10-18T23:20:28+00:00

A group of candidates that largely supports the direction of the Douglas County School District, especially its embrace of school choice policies, has raised nearly $100,000 in campaign contributions, new financial records show.

The group, which calls itself “Elevate Douglas County,” topped its competition, the “Community Matters” slate, by more than $30,000 in monetary contributions to committees for individual candidates.

A lot is at stake in the south suburban Denver school board contest. A majority of seats on the seven-member school board are up for grabs, putting the philosophical direction of the state’s third largest school district on the line.

For eight years, the school board has pushed a conservative education reform agenda that included developing a voucher program that would allow parents to use tax dollars to send their children to private school and establishing a market-based pay system for teachers.

While the Elevate slate has promised to reconsider and tweak many of the board’s most controversial decisions, such as teacher pay, the Community Matters slate has promised to roll back many of the previous board’s decisions.

The contrast between the two groups is most stark on the issue of the school district’s voucher program. Created in 2011, the voucher program has been tied up in courts ever since. The Elevate slate supports continuing the court case and, if there is community support, reinstating the program. The Community Matters slate staunchly opposes vouchers and would end the court case.

According to records, the Elevate slate raised a total of $98,977 during the first campaign reporting period that ended Oct. 12. Grant Nelson raised the most, $34,373. The three other candidates — Ryan Abresch, Randy Mills and Debora Scheffel — each raised about $21,000.

All four candidates received $6,250 from John Saeman, a Denver businessman and the former chairman of the Daniels Fund. The foundation has financially supported the school district’s legal battle over the voucher program.

Other major contributors to the Elevate team are Ed McVaney, the founder of JD Edwards, and businesswoman Chrystalla Larson.

The Community Matters slate raised a total of $66,692 during the same period. Candidate Krista Holtzmann led the pack, raising more than $21,000. Her teammates — Anthony Graziano, Chris Schor and Kevin Leung — raised between $13,000 and $15,000 each.

Among the major donors to the Community Matters slate are Clare Leonard and Herschel Ramsey. Both Parker residents gave $1,000 each to all four candidates.

The campaign finance reports that were due Tuesday tell only part of the story. Earlier this week, special interest groups working to influence the election were required to report their spending.

The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union, has pumped $300,000 into the race in an effort to support the Community Matters slate.

Meanwhile, Americans For Prosperity, a conservative political nonprofit, is running a “social welfare” issue campaign promoting school choice. Because the nonprofit is not directly supporting candidates, it is not required to disclose how much it is spending. However, the organization said in a statement the campaign would cost six-figures.

Correction: This article has been updated to better reflect the Elevate slate’s position on reinstating the school district’s proposed voucher program.

Groups with a stake in Colorado’s school board elections raise $1.5 million to influence them

2017-10-18T02:08:40+00:00

Union committees and various political groups have raised more than $1.5 million so far to influence the outcome of school board elections across the state, according to new campaign finance reports.

The Colorado Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, and an affiliate of Democrats for Education Reform, a political nonprofit, are spending big in an effort to help elect school board members that represent their positions.

It’s become a common storyline in school board elections in Colorado and across the country: On one side, teachers unions hoping to elect members that will improve working conditions and teacher pay, among other things. On the other, education reformers who generally back candidates who support expanding school choice for families, more autonomy for schools and accountability systems that measure school quality, usually based on test scores.

The complete fundraising and spending picture, however, is often murky and incomplete.

State law lays out different rules and disclosure requirements for different types of political committees. The most prevalent this election year appears to be independent expenditure committee, which can raise and spend an unlimited amount of money but are forbidden from coordinating with candidates. (Campaign finance reports for the candidates’ campaigns are due at midnight Tuesday).

Other groups such as Americans For Prosperity work outside the reporting requirements altogether by spending money on “social welfare issues,” rather than candidates. The conservative political nonprofit, which champions charter schools and other school reforms, pledged to spend more than six-figures for “a sweeping outreach effort to parents” to promote school choice policies in Douglas County. The fight over charter schools and vouchers, which use tax dollars to send students to private schools, has been a key debate in school board races there.

Both the union and reform groups operate independent committees. Those committees must report donations and expenditures to the secretary of state. But the donations captured in campaign finance reports are often huge lump sums from parent organizations, which aren’t required to disclose their donations under federal law. (Unions often collect political voluntary political donations from teachers.)

Several groups are spending money in Denver, where four of the seven school board seats are up for election. The ten candidates vying for those four seats include incumbents who agree with the district’s direction and challengers who do not. The Denver teachers union has endorsed candidates pushing for change.

The Every Student Succeeds group, which has raised almost $300,000 in union donations, is spending the most on one Denver candidate, Xóchitl “Sochi” Gaytán, who is running for a seat in southwest Denver, and on a slate of four Aurora school board candidates endorsed by Aurora’s teachers union.

The group’s largest donations came from the Colorado Fund for Children and Public Education, a fund from the Colorado Education Association. Aurora’s teachers union contributed $35,000 to the committee. The DCTA Fund, a fund created by Denver’s teachers union, also contributed $85,000 to the committee.

Some of the group’s union money is also going to a slate of school board candidates in Mesa County and another in Brighton.

Another union-funded group, called Brighter Futures for Denver, has spent all of its money on consultant services for one Denver candidate: Jennifer Bacon, who’s running in a three-person race in northeast Denver’s District 4. The Denver teachers union, which contributed $114,000 to the committee, has endorsed Bacon. The statewide teachers union also contributed money.

The Students for Education Reform Action Committee has spent equal amounts on two Denver candidates. One, Angela Cobián, is running in Denver’s District 2 against Gaytán and has been endorsed by incumbent Rosemary Rodriguez, who isn’t running again. The other is Rachele Espiritu, the incumbent running in District 4. The funds, which were collected during a previous campaign cycle and carried over into this one, have gone toward phone banking, T-shirts and campaign literature.

The group has endorsed Cobián, Espiritu and incumbent Barbara O’Brien, who holds an at-large seat. It did not endorse a candidate in the central-east Denver District 3 race, explaining that it prioritizes “working with communities that reflect the backgrounds and experiences of our members, which are typically low-income and students of color.”

Better Schools for a Stronger Colorado, a committee affiliated with the pro-reform Stand for Children organization, has spent a sizable portion of the more than $100,000 it’s raised thus far on online advertisements and mailers for O’Brien. It has also spent money on mailers for incumbent Mike Johnson, who represents District 3.

Stand for Children has endorsed O’Brien, Johnson and Cobián. The group chose not to endorse in the three-person District 4 race, explaining that both incumbent Espiritu and challenger Bacon had surpassed its “threshold for endorsement.”

Another big spender is Raising Colorado, a group reporting $625,000 in donations from New York-based Education Reform Now Advocacy— a national affiliate of Democrats for Education Reform. The group is registered under a section of the tax code that does not require it to disclose its donors.

That group is spending money on mailers and digital media for four candidates in Denver: Espiritu, Cobián, Johnson and O’Brien, as well as two candidates for Aurora’s school board: Gail Pough and Miguel In Suk Lovato.

In Douglas County, the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers unions has pumped $300,000 into a committee backing a group of candidates known as the “Community Matters” slate that opposes the current direction of the state’s third largest school district.

The committee, Douglas Schools for Douglas Kids, has spent most of its war chest on producing TV, digital and mail advertising by firms in Washington D.C., and San Francisco.

The Douglas County arm of AFT lost its collective bargaining agreement with the district in 2012.

A group of parents that also supports the union-backed slate have formed a committee, as well. So far it has raised $42,750, records show. Unlike the union donation, most donations to this committee were small donations, averaging about $50 per person.

The parent committee has spent about $28,000 on T-shirts, bumper stickers, postage and yard signs, records show.

A group aligned with the state’s Republican party is also spending in Douglas County. The Colorado Republican Committee – Independent Expenditure Committee spent about $25,000 on a mail advertisement supporting the opposing slate, “Elevate Douglas County.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include more information about Americans for Prosperity’s Douglas County plans. It has also been updated to identify two other groups that are spending in Denver and Douglas County. This story has also been updated to correct that teachers unions use voluntary donations for political purposes, not dues.

We asked six Colorado school board members what they want from the state’s next governor. Here’s what they said.

2017-10-17T00:27:38+00:00

Late last week, nine candidates for Colorado governor came together to talk education, addressing an annual fall conference of school board members.

Now, we’re giving some of those audience members a chance to speak up.

Before the gubernatorial hopefuls took the stage, Chalkbeat recorded interviews with a half-dozen school board members who represent districts across the state. Our question to them: What are the big education questions you hope the next governor will take on?

Not surprisingly, funding challenges came up time and again.

One school board member asked for a more predictable budget. Another asked for schools to get their fair share of annual increases in new tax dollars. One went so far as to say the next governor would be a chicken if he or she didn’t take on reforming the state’s tax code.

We also heard a desire for leadership on solving teacher shortages, expanding vocational training and rethinking the state’s school accountability system.

Here are the six gubernatorial wishes we heard from Colorado’s school board members:

Reform TABOR to send more money to schools

Wendy Pottorff, Limon Public Schools

Since the Great Recession, Colorado schools have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And while the state legislature has tried to close its education funding shortfall, lawmakers haven’t been able to keep up. Getting in the way, Pottorff says, is the state’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR.

Change the conversation about public schools

Paul Reich, Telluride School District

Reich says public schools are under attack under the false premise that they’re failing — and that isn’t helping the state recruit bright young teachers. He said the next governor must change the conversation about schools to make teaching a more desirable profession.

Provide a clear budget forecast

Anne Guettler, Garfield School District

Approving a school district’s budget is one of the many responsibilities of a Colorado school board. That’s a tall challenge when the state’s budget is constantly in flux, Guettler says. She hopes the next governor can help provide a clearer economic forecast for schools.

Rethink school accountability to include students and parents

Greg Piotraschke, Brighton 27J

Colorado schools are subject to annual quality reviews by the state’s education department. And it’s time for the state to rethink what defines a high-quality school, Piotraschke said. He suggested the governor could help rethink everything from how the state uses standardized tests to how to incorporate parents and students into the review process.

Give schools more resources to train the state’s high-tech workforce

Nora Brown, Colorado Springs District 11

In light of Colorado growing tech sector, several gubernatorial candidates have come out in support of more technical training for Colorado students. But that costs money, Brown says. The Colorado Springs school board member said promising better job training for high school students without more resources is empty.

Remember there’s a difference between urban and rural schools

Mark Hillman, Burlington School District

Crafting statewide policy is an onerous task in Colorado, given the diversity of the state’s 178 school districts. Hillman said the next governor must remember that any legislation he or she signs will play out 178 different ways, so they must be careful to not put more undue pressure on the state’s smallest school districts.

Five things we learned when Colorado’s gubernatorial candidates got on the same stage to talk about education

2017-10-14T02:38:38+00:00

Nine Republicans and Democrats hoping to become Colorado’s next governor offered contrasting views Friday of the state’s public schools to an audience of more than 100 local school board members.

Most of the five Republicans told the crowd of locally elected officials — who are charged by the state’s constitution with governing Colorado’s public schools — that their programs were in need of improvement and innovation, and that they were there to help.

The four Democrats hoping to succeed fellow Democrat Gov. John Hickenlooper, who is term-limited, pledged to reform the state’s tax code to send more money to schools.

The candidates spoke at the annual fall delegation conference of the state’s association of school boards.It was the first forum of its kind to address education issues exclusively this election election cycle.

Unlike previous elections, Colorado’s public education system has been a key policy debate early in the campaign. Several candidates, especially Democrats, have worked on education issues before.

Here are our five takeaways from the forum:

The Republican candidates didn’t pull any punches when they said the state’s public schools were in need of improvement — and several said that they were the ones to do it.

From District Attorney George Brauchler to businessman Doug Robinson, every Republican candidate said one part or another of the state’s school system needed to do better.

“Education is life itself,” said former state lawmaker Victor Mitchell. “And there is no greater challenge facing our state than 50 percent of our at-risk kids who graduate can’t complete college-level course work.”

Both Mitchell and Robinson pointed to their experience as entrepreneurs as evidence that they could help set the state’s schools free of what they consider unnecessary red tape. Brauchler called for empowering teachers and parents.

Every Democrat and several Republicans agreed that the state’s schools were in a “funding crisis.” But they offered very different paths forward.

It was an easy question for Democrats. Businessman Noel Ginsburg, former state Sen. Michael Johnston, former state treasurer Cary Kennedy and Lt. Gov. Donna Lynne were in lock-step that the state’s schools are in need of more money.

“If we don’t fundamentally solve this crisis, the rest of the issues don’t matter,” Johnston said.

Former state Sen. Michael Johnston and Lt. Gov. Donna Lynne talk after a forum for gubernatorial candidates. Both are Democrats. (Photo by Nic Garcia/Chalkbeat)

Johnston and Kennedy forcefully pledged to take on the state’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which limits how much tax revenue the state can collect and requires voter approval to raise taxes.

Lynne was more tempered. While she acknowledged tax reform was needed, she said wanted a legislative committee working on school finance to complete its work before suggesting any overhauls.

Greg Lopez, the former mayor of Parker and a small business owner, was the only GOP candidate who said he would take on the state’s complicated tax laws. If elected, he promised to establish a committee to send a reform proposal to voters.

Robinson and Brauchler acknowledged that schools were in a funding crunch. But they stopped short of saying they’d send more money to schools.

Mitchell said “he wasn’t sure” if there was a funding crisis, but added, “The system should be reformed before it’s fully funded.”

PERA, the state’s employee retirement program, could play a prominent issue in the election — especially for Republicans.

Earlier at the conference, school board members received a briefing on a proposed overhaul to the state’s retirement program, which includes school district employees.

While the situation is not as dire as it was a decade ago, the program’s governing board has become so increasingly worried about unfunded liabilities that it’s asking state lawmakers to pass a reform package to provide more financial stability.

Two Republicans, Brauchler and Steve Barlock, who co-chaired President Trump’s campaign in Colorado, said PERA was in crisis. Barlock warned school board members that their budgets were in jeopardy as lawmakers fiddle with the system.

Neither went into any detail about how they hoped to see the retirement program made more fiscally stable. But watch for this issue to gain greater traction on the campaign trail, especially as Republican state Treasurer Walker Stapleton ramps up his gubernatorial campaign, and as lawmakers begin to wrestle with PERA reforms next year. (Stapleton did not attend the forum.)

Some candidates offered careful responses to a question about school choice. Others, not so much.

Every Democrat and one Republican, Brauchler, said they respected a family’s right to choose the best school for their children. But that choice, they said, should not come at the expense of traditional, district-run schools.

“I’m concerned that we’d build a system where the success of some schools is coming at the expense of other schools,” Kennedy said.

Republicans strongly supported charter schools, and in some cases, vouchers that use taxpayer dollars to pay for private schools. Robinson called on creating new ways to authorize charter schools. Mitchell said he wanted to repeal a provision in the state’s constitution that has been used to rebuff private school vouchers.

There’s no party line over rural schools.

Republicans and Democrats alike said the state needed to step up to help its rural schools, which are typically underfunded compared to schools along the Front Range. They need more teachers, better infrastructure and fewer regulations, the candidates said.

“We need to get rural areas into the modern age,” Robinson said.

Why it’s difficult to understand how well Colorado’s English learners are performing compared to their peers

2017-10-12T22:03:18+00:00

New data that is meant to help the public understand how Colorado students who are learning English as a second language are performing on state tests is in many cases baffling and inconclusive.

The state released those numbers last week as part of a large publication of results from the 2016 and 2017 PARCC tests broken down by different students groups. Chalkbeat has been publishing findings from the data since. We’ve looked at the state’s achievement gap based on race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and special needs.

Today, in our last installment, we try to understand the gaps between the state’s English language learners and their native-English speaking peers.

It’s not easy. In fact, it’s nearly impossible for some school districts based on the data that is publically available.

That’s because of the way the state classifies English language learners and non-English language learners.

The state breaks down students into four categories of English proficiency.

The first three categories are students who are enrolled in some sort of English language development program. They’re classified as either being “non-English proficient,” “limited English proficient,” or “fluent English proficient.” (Students that reach proficiency can remain in development programs for two years of monitoring.)

The fourth category is a little more confusing. It includes students who are native English speakers, students who are learning English as a second language but are not enrolled in any development courses, and students who have exited out of a program designed to help them learn English.

Grouping students this way can mask how well students who were enrolled but tested out of language development programs are performing. This makes it difficult to check against claims made by some districts, such as Denver Public Schools, about the efficacy of their language learner programs.

It also limits us in comparing how well English learners are performing compared to native English speakers, and how well English learners not in those development programs are scoring on tests compared to their peers in those programs.

Another reason why it’s difficult to draw any sound conclusions is because of the state’s data suppression rules, which were designed to protect student privacy. When the state applies those rules to results in the seventh grade, we have no idea how students with no or limited English skills in the state’s 10 largest districts fare.

Take a look at the results:

Fewer data points are missing in the fourth grade results:

This data alone makes it difficult to gauge why some districts’ more advanced English language learners are outperforming other groups of students, and why they’re not in others.

We asked the state to help us make sense of the data, using Boulder as an example. Other achievement gaps, like for race and poverty, are particularly acute in Boulder. The only way they could provide us with insight was by collapsing some different groups of English learners into larger categories to generate larger numbers.

“We continue to work to try to find the right balance between protecting student data privacy and providing meaningful data for the public,” said Joyce Zurkowski, the education department’s executive director of assessment in an email. “Moving forward, we may want to consider collapsing (different groups) to increase the number of students. We could also combine across tests, creating an elementary and middle school group.”

— Chalkbeat reporter Yesenia Robles contributed.

Colorado bows to federal pressure, adopts second school quality system that penalizes schools for testing opt-out

2017-10-12T01:37:25+00:00

In an effort to keep federal dollars flowing to Colorado classrooms, the State Board of Education voted Wednesday to create two quality systems for the state’s schools — the existing one designed in 2009 by state lawmakers, and a new one that meets federal requirements.

The unusual arrangement amounts to a compromise between the state education department and the U.S. Department of Education.

After Colorado became a national epicenter for the opt-out movement in 2015, the State Board of Education adopted a policy that forbid the state from lowering a school’s quality rating if they missed the 95 percent participation requirement.

That proved to be a sticking point when state officials submitted Colorado’s plan for complying with the nation’s new education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act. Federal officials sent the plan back, saying the opt-out provision didn’t comply with the new law.

In the compromise, the state will continue to issue state school quality ratings that don’t penalize schools for high opt-out rates.

However, the state will create a separate list of schools based on the federal requirement that students who opt out are counted as not proficient.

Some state board members worried two systems would create additional work for teachers, create confusion among the public or misidentify schools.

State officials said Wednesday, teachers, students and parents shouldn’t notice much difference. No school or district will be responsible for submitting more data. The state will be responsible for slicing and dicing results from annual tests as they have in the past.

Because Colorado students who opt out tend to be white and more affluent, this change could flag schools for financial support to boost learning that really don’t need it.

State education officials assured the board that it had discretion in identifying whether a school is truly low-performing or if its scores are deflated from low participation.

Earlier this fall, the state took a voluntary step toward the two-system approach when it published a list of schools that qualify for federal grants. The state adopted some, but not all of the federal requirements, when it created that list.

Board member Steve Durham, a Colorado Springs Republican, said he hoped the state would not publicize the results from the federal identification system.

“It should not be given equal weight with the data that we find appropriate,” he said.

Durham also asked the state education department to remind schools that it is still illegal to penalize students who opt out of state tests. (It’s also against the law to incentivize students to skip the English and math exams.)

The state must resubmit its plan to the federal government by Oct. 23.

Correction: This post has been updated to clarify how the state previously penalized schools for missing the 95 percent participation rate before the state board took action.

Colorado State Board of Education adopts new early literacy rules for native Spanish speakers, reversing earlier decision

2017-10-12T00:28:24+00:00

The State Board of Education ended a two-year debate over how to measure the reading skills of Colorado’s youngest students learning English as a second language after it unanimously adopted Wednesday new policies to comply with a legislative compromise passed last spring.

The rule change applies to English learners whose native language is Spanish. Under the board-approved policy, school districts will be able to choose whether to test students who have limited English proficiency in either English or Spanish.

The board, at the request of associations representing school executives and boards of education, backed off additional reporting requirements that were outside the scope of the legislation.

But the new guidelines do provide parents the right to request students be tested in English, and requires school districts that reject such a request to share their reasoning with parents.

“I think we need to give them that right,” said board member Val Flores, a Denver Democrat. “Districts shouldn’t fight them on this.”

The board’s action Wednesday coupled with this spring’s legislation reverses a controversial decision the state board made in 2016 that required schools to test the literacy skills of students enrolled in kindergarten through third grade in English — even if they knew no English at all.

The state board’s debate over the state’s early literacy law, the READ Act, was often framed more by the personal opinion of board members rather than education research and context provided by the state education department.

Some conservative board members repeatedly raised the specter that school districts, especially those with large populations of English learners, were attempting to sidestep their duty of teaching English — or at least trying to hide poor results.

School officials and other experts argued that testing a student’s literacy skills in a language they were more fluent in would provide better information to help teachers do their job.

Colorado lawmakers passed the READ Act in 2012. The goal of the legislation, often considered one of the state’s landmark education reform efforts, was to increase the number of students reading at grade level by the third grade.

The law, as originally passed, was silent on whether schools were required to test students in English.

Research has long held that students reading at grade level in third grade are more likely to have academic success through the rest of their educational careers. Conversely, students who aren’t reading at grade-level by the third grade are more apt to drop out.

The READ Act requires schools to monitor students for “significant” reading deficiencies. Students who are flagged are supposed to be put on a monitoring plan and are receive additional services from the school.

Putting the legislation into place in classrooms has provided mixed results. Some educators worry the policy adds an unnecessary testing burden on students and adds mountains of paperwork for teachers. Others say the READ Act has brought a renewed focus on a critical learning milestone.

The state has wrestled for years with how to best gauge the literacy skills of students learning English as a second language. The debate peaked in 2016 when the then-Republican controlled state board, over objections from education leaders in Denver and other school districts, adopted new rules requiring those young language learners to be tested at least once in English.

Susana Cordova, who was then Denver Public Schools’ acting superintendent, warned the change would lead to more testing and possibly over-identifying English learners as having reading deficiencies.

A bipartisan coalition of Colorado lawmakers went to work this year to reverse the state board’s decision. A compromise was ultimately reached that allowed school districts to choose which language to test students enrolled in dual language programs who were not yet proficient in English.

On Wednesday, board member Steve Durham, a Colorado Springs Republican, reiterated his concern that the changes would open the door for school districts to side-step an obligation to English language learners.

He said there were only two reasons to oppose testing students in English: “One is you don’t value teaching kids English, or two you don’t want to admit failure in getting kids to speak English … otherwise everyone should be proud to report their READ Act results.”

The board’s new rules could apply to other English learners if the state adopts literacy tests in other languages.

In Boulder, students with special needs are outperforming their state peers but are far behind their own classmates

2017-10-06T21:53:16+00:00

For two years in a row, Colorado education officials have raised concerns about how students with special needs are falling far behind on state English and math tests.

This week, we’re getting a better sense of which school districts are following the state trend and which ones are bucking it.

The state on Monday released data from the 2016 and 2017 PARCC exams broken down by different student groups. Chalkbeat has spent a few days looking at the data, first by race and ethnicity and then by socioeconomic status. Today we’re looking at how students with learning disabilities in the state’s 10 largest school districts performed compared to their peers.

Students with learning disabilities historically underperform the general student population on standardized tests. However, advocates say that with the right help, students with non-cognitive disabilities should be just as likely to score well.

That isn’t happening in many of the state’s largest school districts. Here’s a look at how the results break down:

Some of the widest gaps are in northern Front Range school districts such as Poudre, Boulder Valley and St. Vrain.

Boulder is a unique case. While the achievement gap there is wide, students with learning disabilities are outperforming their state peers.

Boulder officials suggested a longstanding and close partnership between their special education department and curriculum specialist could be a key factor in the higher scores.

“There’s a lot of cross training,” said Samantha Messier, Boulder’s assistant superintendent of instructional services and equity. “That’s something that is paying off for students.”

Meanwhile, school districts such as Denver and Aurora are rethinking some of their special education policies.

In Denver, the district is pushing to have students with learning disabilities spend more time in general education classrooms.

“The main focus is on providing the individualized supports that students with disabilities need,” said Superintendent Tom Boasberg. “And we’re significantly increasing our inclusion practices. Many more of our students with disabilities are included more of the time with their general education peers.”

The charter-friendly school district has also required its charter schools to take on greater responsibility in meeting the needs of students with disabilities.

The Aurora school district has hired consultants to help the district better identify students with learning disabilities, intervene earlier and provide them with the proper learning environment.

“We’ve gotten better with early interventions,” said Superintendent Rico Munn.

Why this large Colorado school district isn’t focused on its achievement gaps

2017-10-05T22:10:28+00:00

The Colorado Department of Education earlier this week published data that show how different groups of students performed on the state’s English and math tests.

We’re dissecting the data a couple different ways. Our first look Wednesday examined the racial achievement gaps in the state’s 10 largest school districts and found that Denver and Boulder had the widest.

Today, we’re looking at gaps through a socioeconomic lens. Schools measure poverty by how many students qualify for government subsidized lunches. We’ve compared test results for students who qualify for free or reduced-priced meals and for those who don’t.

Students in poverty can face a myriad of challenges that impact learning: unstable housing, chronic absenteeism due to family responsibilities and health problems such as uncontrolled asthma or tooth decay.

Not surprisingly, the poverty gaps are similar to those based on race: Denver and Boulder have the largest gaps at more than 40 percentage points. Most of the other large school districts have gaps in the low to mid-30s.

Aurora Public Schools and Colorado Springs District 11 have much smaller gaps, mostly in the teens or low 20s. That’s not necessarily because their poor students are doing better than their peers across the state. It’s because their more affluent students aren’t passing the math and English tests.

Here’s a look at the results:

Aurora Superintendent Rico Munn said his concern isn’t about closing gaps, but improving outcomes for all students.

“We need to lift all boats,” he said. “We’re not in a situation where there is some group that is way outperforming another.”

That doesn’t mean Munn and his team aren’t keeping track of the gaps. He said it’s important to understand the unique challenges each student population faces.

“What we don’t want is for someone’s demographic profile to determine their outcomes,” Munn said.

The inner-suburban Denver school district has launched a series of reform efforts to boost student learning. Teachers districtwide have been trained on how to better engage students. A group of schools in the Original Aurora neighborhood, near the Denver border, has been granted more freedom to make changes to address student needs. And the district has also rolled out a new math curriculum.

Denver, Boulder schools home to the state’s largest achievement gaps based on race, new data shows

2017-10-04T22:52:19+00:00

Since Colorado introduced new, more challenging state math and English tests in 2015, schools and families have seen a steady — and often slow — trickle of results.

Now, the Colorado Department of Education is making available two years’ worth of test scores showing achievement gaps within districts and schools.

The data show wide differences between how different student groups score — for example, gaps separating black and Hispanic students from white students, or students with special needs from other students, or students who qualify for subsidized lunches and those who don’t.

On Monday, state officials quietly posted district- and school-level scores broken by student subgroups for the 2016 and 2017 tests. What took so long? Officials say they had to follow data suppression rules meant to prevent individual students from being identified, and it took time.

During the next few days, we’ll be examining this data — starting today with race and ethnicity-based gaps:

Here’s how the state’s fourth graders performed on 2017 math and English tests:

Here’s how the state’s seventh graders performed on the 2017 math and English tests:

There are two important caveats to keep in mind looking at seventh grade data. First, the number of students who take the state’s tests begins to dip in middle school. The smaller the sample, the less reliable the data. Second, some seventh graders choose to take more advanced math tests.

The widest gaps between white and Hispanic students appear in Denver and Boulder. In both districts, the gap on the fourth-grade math test is 42 percentage points. The next widest gap, 34 percentage points, is in the Poudre School District.

The math gap is worse for Denver seventh graders: 50 percentage points.

One reason why the gap is so pronounced in Denver is because white students are scoring particularly well on the state’s tests. In fact, a larger percentage of white students in Denver met or exceeded the state’s expectations on the four tests Chalkbeat looked at than white students in the other nine large school districts.

Superintendent Tom Boasberg said he believes one reason why gaps remain so wide in the state’s largest school district is because white students are benefiting from many districtwide initiatives aimed at improving learning for students of color.

“In some ways, it’s a reflection of how privilege operates in our society,” he said. “Clearly we want to and do offer high-quality supports for all kids and we want to offer a higher level and intensity to our higher-needs schools for the simple fact that those needs are greater.”

Boasberg pointed to new initiatives meant to close gaps. First, DPS is targeting a larger proportion of its 2016 voter-approved tax increases at students who qualify for government-subsidized lunches. Schools will receive $4 for those student for every $1 they receive for students who don’t qualify for free or reduced-priced lunches.

Second, beginning this year, schools cannot earn a “green” rating on the district’s quality reports — the second highest rating on the color-coded system — if students in all subgroups don’t make academic progress.

The Boulder Valley School District is also in the early stages of putting into place updated strategies to address learning gaps, said Samantha Messier, assistant superintendent of instructional services and equity. The school district is training teachers on how to provide different resources to match the needs of different students.

“We’re deeply concerned that we have these gaps,” she said. “It’s not a pattern we’re proud of.”

She went on to echo Boasberg.

“An interesting thing to note, Denver and Boulder also have the highest rates of income inequality in the state,” she said. “So you might see that play out at the school-district level. You’re seeing the effects of institutional racism that exist at a societal level playing out. I do hope we figure it out.”

These four Colorado schools won the inaugural Succeeds Prize for their innovation and academic achievement

2017-10-04T21:21:08+00:00

Four Colorado schools won recognition Tuesday at the inaugural Succeeds Prize for their innovation and academic track records.

The schools – Valdez Elementary and DSST Green Valley Ranch High in Denver, Bristol Elementary in Colorado Springs, and Mountain Vista Community School in Hanover – were selected by a committee of experts from education, government and business communities.

The four schools, which all serve large populations of poor students, will split $60,000.

Two teachers, Deb Harding and Tara Hardman, both from the STEM Launch K-8 school in Thornton, were also awarded $15,000. The teachers were recognized for creating a science, technology, engineering and mathematics program for students and families.

The Succeeds Prize is a partnership between 9NEWS, Colorado Succeeds, a nonprofit that advocates for education reform on behalf of the business community, and mindSpark Learning, a nonprofit dedicated to improving teaching and learning.

“We know that only through the power of education can we build the community we all aspire to create,” Scott Laband, president of Colorado Succeeds, said in a statement. “The business community came together last night to honor education’s impact makers and innovators – the real changemakers creating a better Colorado for all of us. We look forward to the next step in this process: taking the energy and momentum from the event and translating it into actionable data for all educators.”

Additionally, five runners-up will split an additional $60,000. And each finalist school selected one educator to receive $1,000.

All finalists are also eligible for customized training from mindSpark. Organizers also hope to collect proven teaching and learning strategies from the award-winning schools to share with educators, schools and students statewide.

You can watch a video of the ceremony here.

Colorado wants to help these 230 schools improve learning. Here’s the state’s first step.

2017-09-29T23:39:53+00:00

More than 200 Colorado schools, most with vast and stubborn achievement gaps, could be eligible under new federal guidelines for a slice of $11 million in state and federal school improvement grants and aid.

The state education department earlier this month notified school districts — from the suburban Cherry Creek to the rural Burlington — of their eligibility to apply for the money and other state services.

This list of schools, which Chalkbeat obtained in a request, and a companion grant application that has yet to be released are part of Colorado’s yet-to-be approved plan to comply with the nation’s new education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA.

The new law requires states like Colorado, which under a waiver from the previous federal law focused most of its time and resources on schools failing most students, to also focus attention on schools that are leaving some historically disadvantaged students behind.

The state used results from its preliminary school quality ratings — which help the state spot schools that need help improving learning — and new federal guidelines to identify which schools should make the list.

Sixty-seven schools on the list are also on the state’s watchlist for persistent low performance. Another 163 schools are eligible for the funding, bringing the total to 230. That number could change because the state hasn’t finalized the school quality ratings.

Schools that appear on the new list will be eligible to apply for a variety of grants and services from the department through a single application, a first for Colorado. In previous years, schools were required to apply to each grant on a case-by-case basis.

Department officials hope the move will cut back on unnecessary paperwork and “match money and resources with the needs in the districts,” said Peter Sherman, the state education department’s executive director of school performance.

“Off our radar”
The new federal rules are shining a fresh light on a number of schools in traditionally high performing school districts such as Thompson and Poudre, both in northern Colorado.

“ESSA is having schools identify in different ways,” said Lisa Medler, the education department’s executive director of improvement planning. “We have districts that are getting identified that are not on the state’s accountability radar.”

The law requires the state to place schools into two categories.

Schools in need of the most help are identified for what ESSA calls “comprehensive support.” These schools must check a couple of boxes. They must get Title I money — supplemental funding from the federal government for schools with a large number of low-income students. They also must rank in the bottom 5 percent of the state’s school quality ratings. High schools also can get the designation if they graduate fewer than 67 percent of their students.

The second category of schools, which need help but not as much, are identified for “targeted support.” As the name suggests, achievement for specific groups of students — but not all — is lagging. These include students of color, students eligible for subsidized lunch prices, students with disabilities or students learning English as a second language. To determine which schools fit the definition, the state looks at how different groups perform on state math and English tests over three years.

Most of the schools on the list — 150 out of 231 — fall into the second category. Of those 150 schools, 118 were identified because of how poorly their students with special needs performed on state tests.

That so many schools would be identified for failing special needs students didn’t surprise state officials.

“If you look at the performance of students with disabilities it’s where we have the largest achievement gap in the state,” said Alyssa Pearson, the department’s associate commissioner for accountability, performance and support.

Tracy Dorland, the Adams 12 Five Star School District’s deputy superintendent, said the suburban school district will take a “more passionate look” at how students with special needs are being served at three schools identified by the education department.

Dorland and the Adams County school district are familiar with school improvement work. Last year, Thornton Elementary School made enough progress to jump off the state’s academic watch list after several years of hard work.

While the school still has a high enough quality rating not to be flagged for more radical reforms, it was named on the new list for low-performing groups of students.

Dorland said there could be some confusion in the state having two lists of schools that are struggling, using different measures.

But “if what comes out of this is a difference for students on IEPs, then that’s a positive outcome,” Dorland said, referring to the individualized education plans students with special needs are required to have. “We’d be happy to be pushed to be thinking really critically about this.”

New grant process
Dorland and other school leaders in a similar situation will be able to apply for help from the state using a single application process beginning this year.

There are more than a dozen different grants and free services from the state schools may apply for. The lists of options includes a $50,000 diagnostic review, $70,000 for principal training, or free community engagement training.

State officials say the new application — which they believe to be the first of its kind in the nation — is meant to help both struggling schools and the state think critically about schools’ needs.

Put another way, state officials hope to play a larger role in connecting troubled schools with the help they need, not the help schools think they want.

“It’s not about throwing a lot of money at these schools,” Sherman said. “But it’s about investing in the right actions at the right time.”

Luke Ragland, president of Ready Colorado, a conservative education reform advocacy group, applauded the state education department’s work on school improvement. But Ragland, who sat on the state’s ESSA committee, said he hoped the state would make the application process even more competitive and send larger chunks of money to fewer schools.

“My main problem is that I worry that we’re spreading the money out in a formula model and that it becomes such a small amount at each school that it’s hard to make an impact,” he said. “I just worry about spreading the money too thin.”

Wendy Wyman, the superintendent of the Lake County School District who has helped the state department design the application, said “making something easier to navigate makes it less rigorous for schools to participate in.”

Still, state officials are aware of criticisms such as Ragland’s and cognizant that some school districts that value their constitutionally protected local control don’t want the state’s help. State officials say they view the new process as part of an ongoing attempt to better understand how to improve schools.

“We’re trying to create a product to support districts in what they want,” Medler said. “We’re getting feedback from districts all the time and we’re going to continue to fine tune the process.”

The state plans to release the application in mid-October.

Correction: An earlier version of this article spelled Tracy Dorland’s name incorrectly. It also had her incorrect title. She is the deputy superintendent, not the chief academic officer.

From the Trail: Chalkbeat Colorado’s 2017 school board election diary

2017-09-28T22:09:01+00:00

Election Day is almost upon us and Chalkbeat is tracking the latest developments.

Check back here for updates on local school board races.

These five Colorado schools just got gold stars from the U.S. Department of Education

2017-09-28T20:09:36+00:00

Five Colorado schools, two of which serve large populations of at-risk students, are being singled out for stellar academic performance by the U.S. Department of Education.

The department Thursday announced its annual list of Blue Ribbon Schools. Only 324 schools throughout the U.S. made the cut, the department said in a release.

Schools win the recognition either for their overall academic performance or progress in closing achievement gaps that separate some student groups from others.

Unlike last year, no Colorado school was recognized for closing achievement gaps. All five were awarded the title for overall academic performance.

The five schools are:

Bear Creek Elementary School, Boulder Valley School District
Dennison Elementary School, Jeffco Public Schools
The Connect Charter School, Pueblo County Schools
Valdez Elementary School, Denver Public Schools
Wildflower Elementary School, Harrison School District

Both Valdez and Wildflower elementary schools stand out for the populations of students they educate.

One third of Valdez students are learning English as a second language, 47 percent qualify for free or reduced-priced lunches and 62 percent of students are Hispanic. At Wildflower, the student population is more diverse: 31 percent are white, 39 percent are Hispanic, and 15 percent are black. Seventy percent of students also qualify for government subsidized lunches.

Located in northwest Denver, Valdez is a dual-language Spanish and English school that has innovation status, meaning it is run by the district but has more freedom in choosing curriculum, managing its budget and setting the school calendar.

In 2016, Denver school leaders, including Superintendent Tom Boasberg, celebrated major gains at the school, choosing it as the setting for DPS’s annual state test score news conference.

“National Blue Ribbon Schools are active demonstrations of preparing every child for a bright future,” U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said in a statement. “You are visionaries, innovators and leaders. You have much to teach us: some of you personalize student learning, others engage parents and communities in the work and life of your local schools and still others develop strong and forward-thinking leaders from among your teaching staff.”

Here are the 25 people helping Gov. John Hickenlooper rethink the state’s public school system

2017-09-26T23:26:09+00:00

Colorado Education Commissioner Katy Anthes and state Rep. Bob Rankin, a Carbondale Republican, will lead a group of lawmakers, state and school officials and community members charged with reimagining Colorado public schools, the governor’s office announced Tuesday.

Anthes and Rankin will serve as co-chairs for the governor’s repurposed Education Leadership Council.

The council was established in 2011 but became inactive. The 25-member task force’s new mission is to develop a strategic vision for the state’s public school system to help better prepare students for the 21st century workforce.

Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, reassembled the council earlier this year after a bill sponsored by Rankin to create a similar group died during the legislative process. Rankin’s bill was killed in part because Republicans in the state Senate were worried that it was a ruse to ask voters for tax increases.

Rankin and others involved in the creation of the panel have said asking voters to approve more money for schools is a possibility, but that it was not a foregone conclusion.

The task force is supposed to spend its first year setting priorities and give recommendations for possible legislation by 2018 or 2019.

Lt. Gov. Donna Lynne was supposed to lead the task force. However, with Lynne running for governor, Anthes stepped in to take her place as co-chair. Lynne remains a member of the group.

Here is the complete list of the council’s members:

For terms expiring Aug. 4, 2019:

Katy Anthes, education commissioner
State Rep. Janet P. Buckner, an Aurora Democrat
Stephanie Copeland of Denver, executive director of the Office of Economic Development and International Trade
Ellen J. Golombek, executive director of the Department of Labor and Employment
State Rep. Millie Anne Hamner, a Dillon Democrat
Lt. Gov. Donna Lynne
Mary Anne Meacham-Snyder, Department of Human Services
State Rep. Bob Rankin, a Carbondale Republican
Kim Hunter Reed, executive director of the Department of Higher Education
Angelika Schroeder, chair of the State Board of Education
State Sen. Nancy Todd, an Aurora Democrat

For terms expiring Aug. 4, 2020:

Don Lee Anderson
Felicia A. Casto of Whitewater, teacher
Luis Alberto Colon, chair of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education
Patricia Anne Erjavec, president of Pueblo Community College
Tim Foster of Grand Junction, president of Colorado Mesa University
Richard Lorin Garcia
Brandon LaChance, executive director of the North Routt Community Charter School
Barbara O’Brien, vice president of the Denver school board
State Sen. Kevin Priola, a Henderson Republican
Sue Elizabeth Renner
Kyle Andrew Sickman, business member of the Colorado Workforce Development Council
Daniel J. Snowberger, superintendent of the Durango school district
Leroy James Williams
Rep. James Wilson, a Salida Republican

What a dearth of teachers means for a school in a one-stoplight Colorado town

2017-09-20T18:54:49+00:00

OTIS — Late last spring, after five of her two dozen teachers resigned with no replacements in sight, Superintendent Kendra Anderson reassured her school’s anxious principal that everything would be fine.

Then she walked the 25 feet between their two offices, sat down at her desk and said to herself: “Oh, crap.”

Anderson remembered a time — and not that long ago — when she could pick out a six-year veteran from a pile of resumes whenever she had an unexpected teaching vacancy.

“I don’t have that luxury anymore,” she said this summer, recalling the desperate situation she was in to replace a fourth of the teaching staff of the rural K-12 school in just a few months.

Anderson’s urgent need for teachers for her 230 students — half of them living in poverty in this one-stoplight Colorado town on the Eastern Plains — offers a window into how rural schools like hers are grappling with a dearth of teachers.

Otis’s challenges to keep and attract teachers are felt across the state. Low taxes make it nearly impossible to offer a competitive salary; one retired Otis teacher suggested she could make more money waiting tables. Increased regulations and unfunded mandates from the state have made the work nearly unbearable, educators say. And the school’s distance from the Front Range keep some urban solutions such as long-term substitutes or Teach For America corps out of their classrooms.

On the ground, the biggest challenge for superintendents like Anderson is the need to protect students from the most damaging impacts of the shortage, even as many of them would benefit from more resources, not fewer.

“The one thing that keeps me up at night is how we go years with some of our rural schools not having a math teacher,” said Robert Mitchell, the former director of educator preparation at the department of higher education. “These kids out here deserve the same opportunity as the kids in Boulder Valley. It’s not acceptable that we have vacancies and zero people apply.”

The problem is so pronounced that state education officials, at the legislature’s behest, fanned out across Colorado this summer — including a stop in Otis — to examine ways to turn around a shortage that is most severe in the state’s rural areas.

A plan informed by this statewide tour, which was recently completed, is due to state legislators by December.

Michelle Murphy, executive director of the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance, discusses the teacher shortage at the state’s town hall at the Otis school. (Photo by Nic Garcia/Chalkbeat)

No overflow

“Everything has to change” whenever a teacher leaves, Michelle Patterson, Otis’s principal said. The ripple effects, especially in areas with small staffs, are significant.

When the school’s agriculture teacher left this spring, administrators had to find a new teacher to take over his class sponsorship duties, which included helping students raise money for projects and providing them with emotional support through high school.

No one knew which conferences to register the Future Farmers of America club for, or which hotels to stay at when they went.

The district also had to hire a new bus driver, because the retired teacher, a 21-year veteran, had done that, too.

“It’s more than just that instruction for that content area that leaves us,” Superintendent Anderson said. “It’s the relationship with the students they developed over time. It’s the training we’ve given them that’s lost.”

The teacher shortage is both an old and new problem for rural schools.

“We’ve had a teacher shortage in rural Colorado since the 1970s,” said Michelle Murphy, executive director of the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance. “But we used to be able to get overflow from the metro area. Now, there’s no overflow.”

Since 2010, there’s been a 24 percent drop in graduates from the traditional teacher prep programs at the state’s colleges and universities. There’s also been a 23 percent drop in enrollment to those programs.

Alternative programs, such as residency programs, have seen a 40 percent increase in enrollment. However, those programs produce far fewer teachers than traditional programs and can’t keep up with demand. According to the state department of education, the state’s public schools employ more than 53,000 teachers.

The shortage is not evenly distributed across all classrooms. Math and science teachers are in short supply: Only 192 college students in 2016 graduated with credentials to teach those subjects. The same year, 751 students left with a degree to teach elementary school.

Officials believe a variety of factors are contributing to the shortage. The profession perceives that it is undervalued, and the pay in many communities does not cover basic costs of living. And as poverty rises, the scope of the job is expanding; students are coming to school with more trauma that educators must mitigate before they can even begin to teach phonics or subtraction.

Rural schools face additional challenges attracting new teachers away from urban centers.

Housing is in short supply — so much so that some school districts are building their own housing for teachers.

And while the cost of living might seem lower in rural areas, “gas, groceries and health insurance all are more expensive,” Anderson said. “We travel a long way to the grocery store, to work. The nearest Walmart is 50 miles away.”

It can also be lonely, especially for recent college graduates without any family nearby.

Caitlin Evans is Otis’s new high school English teacher. She sits in her barren classroom before the start of the school year. Evans was issued an emergency license so she could teach. (Photo by Nic Garcia/Chalkbeat)

A tale of two Otis teachers

Peggy Allen was one of the five Otis teachers to leave the classroom this spring.

Allen, who taught English, began her career in Otis as a secretary. After 17 years of running the school district’s office, she went to college to become a teacher.

“I loved teaching,” she said as she finished her lunch in Mama’s, Otis’s single restaurant, which also serves as its de facto town square. “You build a personal relationship with everyone at the school and in town. Everybody knows your business — and needs. We take care of each other.”

But after 12 years in the classroom, the 65-year-old decided to retire.

“I saw younger people with vigor and energy, and I thought: ‘I don’t have that anymore,’” she said.

Increased state regulations also became a burden. “I didn’t love jumping through all the hoops,” she said.

To find a replacement for Allen, Anderson reached out to a national network of principals and school officials she’s built through the years.

One woman who Anderson met at a conference several years ago had a daughter, Caitlin Evans, who had moved to a town 40 miles east of Otis. Evans, 33, had been teaching at Morgan Community College and was interested in switching to high schoolers.

Evans grew up in Brighton, a blue collar suburb of Denver. After high school, she enrolled at the University of Colorado. She remembers feeling far behind some of her fellow freshmen who attended East Coast prep schools.

Evans was excited about better preparing rural students for college to compete with their urban peers.

“If I can be a bridge for them, that’s a good thing,” she said.

But Evans had a newborn and no teaching license. So Anderson went to work helping her find childcare and working with state education officials to issue Evans an emergency license.

The state this year has issued 30 emergency licenses, which allow individuals to teach without meeting some state requirements.

State Rep. Jim Wilson, a Salida Republican, earlier this year sponsored a bill that would have allowed rural school districts like Otis to waive out of the state’s licensing practices all together. It was an idea that was backed by the Rural School Alliance but faced staunch opposition from the state’s teachers union. That opposition forced Wilson to spike his own bill.

Licensing reform, an issue that has vexed lawmakers and the governor alike, is likely to come up as the state education and higher education departments move forward with their plan to curb the shortage. But Superintendent Anderson is wary.

“I don’t want to give the perception that it’s easier to be a teacher than any other profession,” she said.

Otis school leaders were able to fill all of their vacancies, in part because Evans was issued an emergency license. However, it’s only good for one academic year. Anderson is already worrying about how to keep Evans in the classroom next year.

Farm equipment sit outside the Otis school, which is sandwiched between a Baptist church and a wheat farm. (Photo by Nic Garcia/Chalkbeat)

“We just need the resources”

More than 40 people showed up to the Otis school, which sits between a Baptist church and a corn, wheat and millet farm, for the state’s town hall on the teacher shortage.

In the audience were several members of the Otis community, including two school board members. There were executives from Denver-based education nonprofits. Educators from other Eastern Plains communities such as a principal from Julesburg and teachers from Yuma also attended.

State officials pleaded with the audience to focus on solutions — especially low-cost solutions. That doesn’t mean salary increases are off the table, the state officials said. It just means that everyone knows that teachers in the low tax state of Colorado could make a lot more money yet still trail far behind national average salaries.

This school year will be the first Otis teachers see a pay increase since the Great Recession. The starting salary will be $31,666. The average salary for an Otis teacher is $36,468, administrators said. And the highest paid teacher, a long time veteran, earns $46,258.

Part of the reason why the school district was able to afford the raises out of its $3.4 million budget was because of a rare savings in health care costs.

Anderson called it a gamble.

As the town hall began to wind down, Shea Smith, the Otis guidance counselor, snuck out and returned to her office, where she was preparing for the first day of school.

She and another teacher, Tenaly Bleak, reflected on the intersection of the teacher shortage and the changing demographics of their students.

As it becomes increasingly expensive to live along the Front Range, families are seeking low-cost housing on the plains. Since 2011, the school’s free or reduced-price lunch rate, a measure of poverty, has nearly doubled to 56 percent. Last year, the school enrolled its first homeless student. And there’s a good chance the school will need to hire a second special education teacher because a few new students with special needs enrolled this summer.

Smith, who has been in the Otis school for nine years, remembers the last time the school tried to hire a special education teacher. The job remained vacant for three years until the school’s leadership decided to take the job posting down and just do without.

As poverty has risen in Otis, teachers have taken on another role: caretaker.

“Somedays, the most you can do is love them and feed them and make them feel safe, and hope you can get a little reading in, and a little math in,” Smith said.

It’s unclear how student performance has shifted as poverty has increased in Otis. Poor students historically do not score as highly as their more affluent peers. Not enough Otis students are taking the state’s test for the state education department to report the results and provide a quality rating.

The role poverty is playing in the classroom and the stress it has put on educators has been highlighted by Education Commissioner Katy Anthes.

Teachers are reporting to the department that “they’re spending more time on management and organization and meeting the basic needs of students than they ever have before,” Anthes told the State Board of Education at its August meeting.

So what can the state do to keep teachers from fleeing Otis and other rural school districts?

Bleak said more support would go a long way. For instance, she suggested, establishing a special fund for school supplies and candy that teachers can hand out would save her $100 a month, she guessed.

“We care,” she said. “We want to do the best job possible. We just need the resources.”

An intersection in Otis, Colorado. (Photo by Nic Garcia/Chalkbeat)

Berrick Abramson to lead education work at Colorado think tank, Keystone

2017-09-19T22:46:33+00:00

Berrick Abramson, a national expert on school accountability and the teacher workforce, is joining the Colorado-based Keystone Policy Center to lead its education work, the organization announced Tuesday.

Abramson, who lives in Jefferson County, joins Keystone after a long stint at TNTP, an education nonprofit formerly known as The New Teacher Project. There, he managed state and federal policy research, among other responsibilities.

“Keystone has worked with teachers, students, and policymakers — from classrooms to state Capitols — to improve public education,” Keystone’s President and CEO Christine Scanlan said in a statement. “We’re excited to bring Berrick’s expertise to Keystone to accelerate this work and help us continue to inspire leaders to reach common higher ground addressing the challenges students, teachers, and families face today.”

Abramson has advised state policymakers on a variety of education hot topics such as educator licensure, evaluation and school turnaround work. Most recently, he’s been studying and writing about the nation’s new education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA.

“With ESSA granting states greater autonomy, and the pitched debates over education in recent years, now more than ever we need leaders to do the hard work of building bridges and consensus,” Abramson said in a statement. “Those leaders, in my experience, need partners to help them navigate the challenges and effectively engage stakeholders. Keystone has a clear history doing just that and I’m excited to build on their 40-plus years of leadership as we grow the education practice.”

Earlier this summer, Keystone released a statewide plan for Colorado for blended learning, which combines online and traditional classroom instruction. It also has helped Colorado, Louisiana and Massachusetts find better ways to prepare teachers for success in the classroom.

Boasberg to DeVos: ‘Use all the efforts of your office’ to protect DACA

2017-09-14T00:55:59+00:00

U.S. Education Betsy DeVos may have skipped Denver Public Schools during her spin through Colorado on Wednesday, but that didn’t stop Superintendent Tom Boasberg from getting his point across.

In a letter hand-delivered to the secretary by a DPS employee, Boasberg called on DeVos to protect a program that defers the deportation of immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.

“As Secretary of Education, we respectfully ask that you convey the importance of this issue and the catastrophic consequences it will have to the President and the Congress,” Boasberg wrote. “We implore you to use all the efforts of your office to ask the President to reverse his decision and work with Congress to find a humane solution that builds on our country’s history and the American Dream.”

DPS provided a copy of the letter late Wednesday at Chalkbeat’s request.

Boasberg, who leads the state’s largest school district, has frequently spoken out against Trump administration.

DeVos last week said her “heart is with them,” referring to the thousands of students and young adults with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, status.

During a press conference Wednesday, DeVos said she believed Congress would act in creating a more permanent program for individuals enrolled in DACA.

Read the letter from Boasberg here:

Here’s what Betsy DeVos had to say in Denver about DACA, student loans and opting out of state tests

2017-09-13T20:13:53+00:00

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s first multi-state school tour of her tenure took her Wednesday to a private Denver autism center, where she encouraged schools and parents to work together to better educate students with special needs.

After delivering remarks, DeVos took questions from reporters on issues ranging from President Donald Trump’s decision to end protections for young undocumented immigrants to her decision to reconsider guidance to colleges on sexual assault.

Chalkbeat also asked about the U.S. education department’s pushback on the state’s testing opt-out policy.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of the question-and-answer session:

Fox 31: Denver Public Schools has invited you to visit its schools after you criticized them for a lack of choice options in a speech several months ago. Why not visit Denver Public Schools while you’re here? And what would you like to see them do to meet your full approval?

It’s a privilege to be here in Denver. And I expect I will be returning to Denver in the not-too-distant future.

We have started a tour, the “Rethink Schools” tour, in Casper, Wyo., yesterday, where I did visit the Woods Learning Center — a public school in Casper. It was a great visit. It was really meant to highlight innovative ways schools are meeting their students’ needs. It was a school that has been teacher-led for 25 years with personalized learning programs for each of their students. We’re going on from here to Omaha, to Missouri, to Kansas City — both Kansas City, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo., Gary, Ind., and ending in Indianapolis.

We have a whole variety of schools we’re visiting over these four days. The purpose of our tour is really meant to highlight all the many different innovative ways schools are approaching meeting the needs of their kids.

Chalkbeat: You’re an adamant supporter of school choice, of parent choice. So is our State Board of Education. They have championed a policy of not holding schools accountable when parents opt out their students from state tests. But your department has pushed back on that policy, saying it does not comply with federal law. How would you like to see this disagreement resolved?

I’m looking forward to reading all the plans from 30-some states that are due next week, and I’m looking forward to seeing all the innovative ways states are going to address the needs of students in their states.

(Editor’s note: Colorado previously submitted its plan and is rewriting some sections based on the federal education department’s feedback.)

And everywhere I go, I encourage states and local communities — I think decisions are made best at the local source, and local location. And that comes right down to school buildings. I refer back to the one I visited yesterday where the teachers initiated, 25 years ago, a very different approach. And they are empowered to meet the needs of their students there directly. I think a lot more schools can take a lesson from what they’re doing in addressing the needs of their students in really unique ways.

Chalkbeat: In your speech yesterday, you called for far more individualization in education. Is there a place for the traditional school in the United States, or are you thinking they should be completely abolished?

Personalizing a child’s education is a direction many schools are looking to go. There have been lots of pilot programs and efforts around personalized learning. I think schools really need to take a close look at this: to keep students engaged, to make them look forward to their learning. And instead of continuing in a model that was started a century and a half ago, where it was based on time in seats, let’s reverse that and base it on what students are learning and allow them to move at their pace and as quickly as they can.

AP: Is your department issuing any guidance to colleges or universities on what to do with DACA students?

That issue is very much in the forefront. It’s really on Congress’s plate right now. I’ve said this on several occasions before: We’re a nation of laws. We’re also a very compassionate people. And as President Obama said when this was initially implemented, it was a temporary solution. Congress really needs to address this issue. And I believe they will do so. These students are here pursuing their learning and we owe it to them to make sure they know their future is clarified and defined.

AP: Your department is rewriting student loan forgiveness rules. Has the White House contacted you, or weighed in at all on that process?

This is an ongoing process. We have a new federal student aid director who is getting after a lot of issues that really are important to students — not only current students, but past students, as well. Our goal is to simplify both the application process and also the payment process. Repayment plans have been multiple, confusing — and we need to make sure that we put the students first. And students then become the customers in satisfying the repayment of student loans, that we are putting the customer first, and making sure we’re taking care of them from a customer service perspective that hasn’t been done in a really coherent way.

AP: Has there been any consultation with the White House on this? Have they reached out?

We work closely with the White House on every issue with which we’re involved.

Chalkbeat: Coming back to the Endrew F. court case, the Supreme Court stopped short of dictating what a higher standard looked like. Where is your department on issuing any sort of new guidance around that to public schools?

The department wants to be a resource to parents who are looking for further information and clarification. Obviously, the Supreme Court decision is very complicated. And there are a lot of issues in there, and a lot of terminology parents might have questions on. We set up an email address, endrewf@ed.gov, for any parent to contact us directly with questions. We want to be there to not provide guidance but support for and technical support for any of the issues they’re dealing with.

Chalkbeat: What do you want teachers across the country who work day in and day out with students with special needs in public schools to know about your position on the court case and what your department is doing to support them as well?

Teachers are critical in this whole subject and this whole area. Equally important are the parents. And the parents really know their child best. And they know what’s best for their child. And so it’s my encouragement that schools and parents work together to really address the needs of their kids. I think that we have a very clear mandate under federal law to do right by all students that are served, and particularly those who are navigating with disabilities. We can help flourish and help them be everything they are meant to be.

CPR: I’ve been looking into innovation a lot this past month. The truly innovative teachers tell me they need an administration that encourages risk-taking and failure. Principals often are consumed with test scores, and so it’s not happening on that level. For teachers who aren’t innovating, they say it’s the evaluation system. What are your thoughts on that?

I think there are a lot of ways over the last number of decades that we have stifled change and innovation in education. You couldn’t be more right in that the risk-adverse nature (exists).

I’d argue because of a top down approach, both at the federal level and at the state level as well. I think teachers need to be empowered much more. They are most close to their students. And good teachers are going to be able to get the best out of their students.

But if they’re not empowered to do that, it really does put a wet blanket over everything. So I think that change needs to come systemically. And it does need to be oriented around trying new things and engaging students in ways they haven’t been before. There are way too many students who by grades four, five or six are mentally checked out because their curiosity has died because they’ve been in a system that is much more regimented than it is creative and innovative.

We need to be helping them learn critical thinking skills, communication skills, to foster their creativity and to learn how to collaborate. That’s how we work in adult life and that’s how children need to be able to learn through their formative years.

Fox 31: On Title IX, what would you say to survivors who are worried that you want to dismantle everything that has happened during the last few years?

We are focused on doing what’s right for all students: survivors and everyone involved in the horrible case of sexual assaults. And we’re committed to doing what is right for all students.

Minimum progress for students with disabilities “preposterous,” Betsy DeVos says in Denver

2017-09-13T18:10:00+00:00

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, flanked by school officials at a private autism center in Denver, called on the nation’s public schools to work with parents to better serve students with special needs.

Minimum progress for students with disabilities, she said, “is preposterous. Our students deserve better.”

DeVos’s statement comes nearly six months after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling that set a new — and higher — standard for how schools educate students with special needs.

DeVos spoke Wednesday after touring the Firefly Autism center as part of her first multi-state tour as education secretary.

The location was in keeping with the theme of what the federal education department is billing the “Rethink Schools” tour. DeVos is promoting a vision of school choice that includes a roster of schools that fill niches serving students with particular needs. The premise, for DeVos, is that schools haven’t changed significantly in a century and are in need of a reboot.

“We must rethink what education means for every student,” she said in Denver. “Different students living in different places demand different solutions.”

The Denver-based autism center was chosen not just because of its specialization but because of its role in the landmark Supreme Court case that involved a south suburban Denver family.

The family decided to pull their son, known in court filings as Endrew F., from the Douglas County School District after his learning stalled. They subsequently enrolled Endrew at Firefly, where tuition can run up to $78,000 per year.

The family sued the school district seeking reimbursement. The family claimed the district failed to provide Endrew with a “free appropriate public education,” as required under federal law.

Lawyers for the school district argued that educators were meeting the minimum standard required by the law.

The U.S. Supreme Court sided with Endrew’s family. In doing so, the court raised the standard schools must meet to educate students with disabilities. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his opinion, a higher standard “requires an educational program reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances.”

The high court also referred the question of whether the district should reimburse the family back to lower courts.

DeVos on Wednesday did not issue any new department directives or give any indication of what the standard for serving students with special needs should be.

During her comments, DeVos did criticize “artificial barriers” schools create to meet the needs of students. She did not identify those barriers.

“When it comes to educating students with special needs,” she said, “failure is not an option.”

DeVos said parents should have the freedom to choose whichever school best meet their students’ needs.

“They shouldn’t have to sue their way to the Supreme Court,” she said.

Firefly’s expensive programs are paid for by a variety of sources. In most cases, school districts unable to serve students cover the cost of tuition, Firefly officials said. Private insurance and Medicaid also contribute. Only about 1 percent of the center’s budget comes directly from families.

Nineteen students from eight school districts are enrolled at Firefly. One student from Limon, on Colorado’s Eastern Plains, travels nearly four hours a day round trip to attend the center.

Firefly Executive Director Jesse Ogas said he told DeVos that the state’s public schools — and their tax dollars — were critical to Firefly.

“I never want to discount how important our school districts are,” he said. “It’s a strong partnership and without our district partners, we wouldn’t be here today.”

He added that the school districts aren’t receiving the federal dollars they were promised to educate students with special needs.

“They’re not funded at the level they should be,” he said.

Ogas said DeVos, a critic of the traditional public school system, was open to his concerns about funding and the role it plays in supporting students after they’re enrolled in Firefly. Not only do school districts pay for students to attend the center, they often provide transportation and help complete federally required individualized education plans for students.

How — and where — to best serve students with special needs is an ongoing debate in public education. Many advocates for students with disabilities favor full inclusion in schools and, when possible, general education classrooms. Those who embrace specialized centers like Firefly may see the setting as a bridge to a more inclusive environment.

In Denver Public Schools, district officials and charter school operators are operating under a compact that calls for charter schools to open centers for students when special needs when asked.

After her remarks in Denver, DeVos was scheduled to tour the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

In visiting a private center serving children with autism and a college campus that is also a military installation, DeVos limited the potential for the kinds of public protests that have followed her on other trips. Hundreds turned out in July to protest DeVos’s appearance at a conservative political conference in Denver.

On Wednesday, no more than a handful of protesters shadowed DeVos outside the Firefly autism center, holding signs in support of a program that provides protections for young immigrants. The Trump administration has announced it will roll back the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, initiative. DeVos has said her “heart is with” DACA recipients but indicated lawmakers must settle the issue.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that the U.S. Supreme Court did issue some new guidance in what a higher standard for special education is.

Doug Robinson, GOP candidate for governor, wants more authority to fix state’s struggling schools

2017-09-12T23:30:38+00:00

Republican gubernatorial hopeful Doug Robinson would like to see a fundamental change to Colorado’s public education system — one that gives the governor’s office far more authority.

Robinson, a former investment banker and nephew of former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, said Tuesday in an interview that he believes a lack of gubernatorial oversight has led to stagnation, especially in low-performing schools.

“That’s frankly one of the reasons why we’ve not had a lot of the successes other states have had,” he said. “We have limited tools to encourage them to make changes.”

Robinson spoke to Chalkbeat in advance of the formal unveiling this week of his education platform.

One of several GOP candidates, Robinson is calling for greater investments in charter schools and STEM education, and for reforming the state’s teacher licensure policies.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your education plan calls for expanding school choice. What does that look like and what role do private school vouchers play?

It looks like the state encouraging all of our local school districts to expand choice to all of our families.

My priority is to advocate for more choice inside the school systems we already have, and making sure all schools are getting the resources they need to compete effectively. I was very supportive of the bill to make sure charter schools got all of the mill levy revenues traditional schools are getting.

I’m open to tax credits and vouchers, but we need to proceed carefully. That might be part of the solution, but you can’t start with that or else you’ll open up a world war within the education community.

What sort of specific resources or policies would you support to improve district-run schools?

The challenge today for the governor of Colorado is that the governor doesn’t have direct control of schools like the governor does in most other states. So the governor doesn’t get to appoint anybody to the state board or the department of education. And we have local control, which is generally a good thing. So the school district gets to decide a lot of things.

A lot of governors have said, “I don’t have a lot to do here.” But what the governor has is the power of the bully pulpit.

I’d encourage statutory changes to do something like what Louisiana has done to create a Recovery School District. I fundamentally believe there isn’t a population in the state that, with the right school leadership and teachers, can’t produce great results for our kids.

I would advocate for the governor to be able to appoint the head of the department of education. And I would advocate for giving the department of education — statutorily — a bigger stick to compel accountability.

Generally, I’m a fan of more local control. You have high standards and you let the local districts get there. But if they’re failing, we need a way to reconstitute those schools. We need to do it for the kids. We cannot allow poor performance to continue.

You’re calling for public-private partnerships to increase access to STEM education. It takes a lot of time and human resources for schools to go out and create those partnerships. How would you ensure that all schools, especially those that might not have an extra teacher or aide to spare, can create those partnerships?

That’s a role where government and the governor’s office, working with the department of education, can help identify businesses or nonprofits in these communities that are looking for talent and a desire to give back and make a difference and connect them together.

Your platform says, “We must improve our (teacher) evaluation system, so we can pay our best more.” But the state’s evaluation system isn’t connected to pay. And that’s something local school districts decide. Are you suggesting this is something the state should take over — teacher salary?

No. This is more of a bully pulpit. I would not suggest the state board of education set compensation. That’s the district’s job. But we should advocate for school districts to make differentiation based on performance and to have incentives.

Even though there is a lot of research out there that suggests it doesn’t work?

There’s also research that shows that it does. I look at the experiences in some of the schools in the metro region. And business experience leads me to believe incentive compensation does work.

You’re calling for teacher licensure reform. This is something that has vexed lawmakers and Gov. John Hickenlooper. What are your ideas around reform and how are you going to succeed where others have failed?

Fundamentally, we want to put our best talent on the field. We ought to allow districts across the state to compensate and incentivize teachers to do well, and pay the physics teachers more than the gym teacher. That’s not universally happening across the state.

Whoever is the next governor, and I hope it’s me, will have an opportunity for a fresh start. It’s around leadership. It’s about a restart with a new governor. And you bring people together. And there is some compromise. And you agree to a plan. And you execute it.

You start with those harder to hire areas, such as STEM, and you provide a way for school districts to hire the talent that they need to fill those jobs and get the best teachers in the classroom. You make the reforms to allow that to happen.

Maybe they would not have to have a full teaching certificate. Districts need to be able to hire people from industry with significant experience, and who are willing to get some additional training, but not have to go back to college to get into a classroom.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos will visit private autism center, Air Force Academy on Colorado leg of tour

2017-09-12T20:56:20+00:00

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Wednesday will visit a Denver private autism center that played a key role in a historic U.S. Supreme Court case over how public schools should care for students with special needs.

The new details announced by the U.S. Department of Education come one day after the department announced DeVos’s trip through six Western and Midwestern states. The aim of the tour, the first of its kind for the Michigan billionaire since her confirmation, is to highlight schools that are rethinking education.

The nonprofit center DeVos will visit, Firefly Autism, was founded in 2002. According to the center’s website it has helped more than 400 students since then.

One of those students, known as Endrew F., was the plaintiff in a recent lawsuit that challenged how the Douglas County School District educates its students with special needs.

The U.S. Supreme Court sided with Endrew’s family. In a March decision, the court set a higher standard for how public schools must educate students with disabilities.

Public school districts often pay Firefly to educate students they cannot accommodate. Firefly has also consulted more than 17 school districts in four countries to train teachers on specific autism programs.

The U.S. Department of Education said DeVos’s tour of the center will be closed to the press at the request of the school, citing federal health privacy law. DeVos will host a roundtable with Firefly educators, then make brief statements and take questions from the press, the department said.

After her visit at Firefly, DeVos will tour the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

DeVos kicked off her multistate swing Tuesday in Wyoming, where she laid out her vision of school choice and put in a plug for personalized learning.

That vision is all about parents having lots of options for where to send their students — and for many of those options to serve one slice of students well, rather than trying to educate students with different needs.

DeVos’s tenure as education secretary has been controversial since her nomination by President Donald Trump. DeVos, who used her personal wealth to advocate for more charter schools and private school vouchers, has particularly drawn the ire of teachers unions.

Wednesday’s trip won’t be DeVos’s first trip to Colorado.

This summer DeVos spoke at a conference of conservative state lawmakers. During her speech she championed private school vouchers, something the Colorado Supreme Court has twice ruled unconstitutional. Opponents staged a rally at the Capitol in advance of her visit.

Which Colorado schools will Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visit?

2017-09-11T23:19:02+00:00

When we learned that U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos would visit Colorado as part of her “Rethink School” tour this week, we began brainstorming all the places she could go.

The Douglas County School District would seem a good fit, with its large roster of charter schools and ongoing legal efforts to get a private school voucher program off the ground. The politics in Denver are altogether different, but DeVos does have a standing invitation to visit — not from the district, but from Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, its former superintendent.

Well, we contacted both districts, and a DeVos visit is not planned, according to district communications folks.

Charter schools run by former Republican lawmakers? A couple come to mind: Colorado Early College, a network founded former state lawmaker Keith King, and Liberty Common High School in Fort Collins, headed by former Republican Congressman Bob Schaffer.

We reached Schaffer by email. His reply: DeVos isn’t coming “unless she knows of our standing Thursday 10 a.m. tours and the Secret Service is doing unannounced drop-ins these days.”

A private school? Entirely possible. DeVos could visit any one of the private schools profiled by the Independence Institute, a libertarian think tank that supports using public tax dollars to subsidize private school education.

DeVos’s team is waiting until Tuesday to share which schools the controversial school choice advocate will visit.

We do know that DeVos’s trip to Colorado is part of her first multi-state tour and will include 13 schools in six states.

The 21 schools DeVos has visited so far have been, as you’d expect, a mix, according to EdWeek. She has visited 10 traditional district-run public schools, six private schools and five charter schools.

So it’s a guessing game until then. And we want you to join in the fun!

Tell us in the comment section below, or on Facebook or Twitter, which Colorado school you think DeVos will visit. Remember, the goal of DeVos’s visit is to profile innovate programs that are “rethinking” education.

Leanne Emm, Colorado education department’s chief financial officer, to retire

2017-09-11T21:12:01+00:00

A long-running joke among Colorado education officials, policymakers and activists is that only a handful of people really know how Colorado’s complex school funding system works.

One of those people — Leanne Emm, the state’s education department’s deputy commissioner — is retiring later this month after nearly 30 years in public service.

Emm announced her retirement in an email to other school finance officers late last month. Her last day at the department is Sept. 22.

“Each of you helps your students, communities, stakeholders and decision makers with a huge array of issues,” she said in her email. “I can only hope that I will have helped contribute to an understanding of budgetary pressures that we have within the state.”

Emm was appointed to her position in 2011 — about the same time the state’s schools were grappling with deep budget cuts due to Great Recession. She worked at Jeffco Public Schools for 14 years before joining the education department.

Katy Anthes, the state’s education commissioner, said Emm’s exit will be felt at both the state and local school district level.

“Leanne’s leadership and her deep knowledge of the school finance system will be sorely missed by all of us at CDE and by the districts she has supported over the years.” Anthes said in a statement. “I will be forever grateful for her support as I transitioned to this role. I’m sad to see her leave CDE, but I suspect that her love for the state of Colorado and passion for improving education will cause our paths to cross again.”

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to visit Colorado this week

2017-09-11T20:17:13+00:00

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos will visit Colorado this week as part of her first major tour of schools since being confirmed, the federal education department announced Monday.

The department declined to identify which Colorado schools — public or private — DeVos will visit, saying that announcement will come Tuesday. Multiple school districts, charter school networks and education advocates contacted by Chalkbeat said they were unaware of any pending visit by DeVos.

The tour — which begins Tuesday in Wyoming and will include stops in Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri and Indiana in addition to Colorado — aims to highlight “groundbreaking work happening in schools across America.”

DeVos, a proponent of school choice, is expected to visit a mix of schools including district-run, charter, private and home schools, as well as traditional four-year colleges and community colleges.

“There are so many new and exciting ways state-based education leaders and advocates are truly rethinking education,” DeVos said in a statement. “It is our goal with this tour to highlight what’s working. We want to encourage local education leaders to continue to be creative, to empower parents with options and to expand student-centered education opportunities.”

While DeVos has visited numerous schools this year, mostly on the East Coast and in her native Michigan, this is her first extensive multi-state tour.

Two Democratic members of the state’s congressional delegation, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Rep. Jared Polis, previously invited DeVos to tour schools in Denver and Boulder, respectively.

Neither lawmaker’s office immediately said whether DeVos’s staff had notified them of her upcoming visit.

Officials from the state’s three largest school districts — Denver, Douglas County and Jefferson County — all said Monday that DeVos was not planning on visiting this week.

This will not be DeVos’s first trip to Colorado since taking over the federal education department. This summer she rallied conservative policymakers at a conference in Denver. DeVos’s speech was met with a protest organized in part by the state’s largest teachers union, the Colorado Education Association.

In her speech, DeVos highlighted states that have introduced vouchers or new school-choice programs including North Carolina, Kentucky and Arizona.

Before being tapped to lead the education department, DeVos used her personal fortune to advocate for school choice policies including private school vouchers and charter schools.

She’s criticized states and school districts — including Denver Public Schools — for not embracing private school vouchers.

The Colorado Supreme Court has twice ruled vouchers unconstitutional. However, a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision has given new life to a lawsuit out of Douglas County that has been tied up in courts since 2011.

DeVos’s visit to Colorado comes as the state education department prepares to finalize its federally required education plan. Colorado’s plan hit a roadblock after DeVos’s team pushed back on a state testing opt-out policy.

The federal education department is demanding the state hold schools accountable if they fail to test 95 percent of their students annually in math and English. Since 2015, Colorado has been one of the national epicenters of the testing opt-out movement. Hundreds of schools could see their quality ratings lowered depending on how the state decides to comply with the law.

DeVos is not scheduled to meet with Colorado’s Education Commissioner Katy Anthes, a spokeswoman for the state education department said.

From passionate to politics-free, here’s how Colorado school districts responded to Trump’s DACA decision

2017-09-08T23:30:23+00:00

Even before the Trump administration announced the rollback of an Obama-era program that provides protections to young undocumented immigrants, Tom Boasberg didn’t hold back.

The longtime Denver Public Schools superintendent fired off one pre-emptive statement saying that ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, would “cruelly rip the American dream” from young immigrants’ grasp. He joined other civic leaders for a news conference under the Capitol dome to call for the program’s preservation.

When DACA’s imminent demise was announced Tuesday, the DPS communications staff was ready with a statement, in both English and Spanish, decrying the move as “shortsighted, heartless and harmful.”

In Aurora Public Schools, Superintendent Rico Munn, a lawyer and former head of the State Department of Regulatory Agencies, conferred with staff about a more measured response.

Two days after the Trump White House put DACA on notice, APS emailed the school community a newsletter reiterating district policy about immigration enforcement and linking to a school board resolution passed earlier this year meant to allay community fears. The district statement did not mention DACA, nor was it signed by Munn or anyone personally.

The contrasting responses – from passionate and personal to informational and politics-free – provide a window into how school districts view their responsibilities when a divisive national policy change carries profound implications for many Colorado students and their families.

In Colorado’s urban, suburban and rural areas, officials in districts with large numbers of immigrant students are attempting to support kids at a trying time without over-promising security they may not be able to guarantee. How districts respond hinges on intensely local factors, from the political climate to leadership style and school board makeup.

“This is uncharted waters,” said Kathy Escamilla, director of the BUENO Center for Multicultural Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. “… It’s incumbent upon all school districts to say ‘This issue is complex, it’s not just legal and illegal.’ And they need to inform their communities about the complexities about dealing with these thorny issues.”

Roughly 800,000 people in the U.S., including nearly 17,300 people in Colorado, are enrolled in DACA. Begun in 2012, the program offers work permits and temporary reprieves from deportation to undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as young children.

Trump has given Congress six months to tackle immigration issues broadly before DACA is undone. He also has indicated that he may act on DACA if Congress does not.

Susana Cordova, deputy superintendent of Denver Public Schools, said leaders of the 92,000-student district felt they had no choice but to speak out.

“The conditions have been thrust on us,” she said Friday.

Cordova added that DPS leaders believe “this is a fundamental moral obligation we have to support our Latino students in general and in particular, take a stance on what we believe is a very misguided, poorly thought-out and detrimental decision.”

Some Denver school principals also spoke out publicly. A group of more than 90 school leaders wrote an opinion piece in The Denver Post calling on Congress to pass the 2017 DREAM Act to provide permanent protections for immigrants.

“Principals have real power in communities,” said author James Cryan, who is founder and CEO of the Rocky Mountain Prep charter school network in Denver and Aurora. The group, he said, wanted to use that power “to stand with folks who, in many cases, … don’t feel safe.”

The Aurora Public Schools statement sought to tamp down concerns about imminent immigration actions and said the “safety and wellbeing of our students and staff is our top priority.”

Munn said in an interview that there is no “right response” to news like DACA’s rollback, and that it varies by community. Asked about the more pointed statement from Boasberg and DPS, Munn said neither he nor the district has a track record of putting out such statements.

“We have tried to stay focused on serving our kids and making sure our kids and our families know at a very practical level what the impact is on their lives,” he said. “For us, it’s important not to be a distraction in that communication. In other communities, it makes all the sense in the world to handle it differently depending on how you relate to that community.”

Judith Padilla, an Aurora mother of three, said Friday she didn’t receive the district’s communication on immigration this week, but wishes she had more resources from the schools.

“All of us need more information about what help our schools can or can’t offer us,” Padilla said. “They need to support everyone. I am worried about what’s going to happen.”

Other suburban Denver districts, many of them with large and growing Hispanic populations, also gave a variety of responses.

In Jeffco Public Schools, Superintendent Jason Glass was quick to post on his blog about DACA, striking a tone that falls somewhere between Denver’s and Aurora’s statements.

Glass noted the opportunities DACA provides to undocumented students “who have much to contribute to our community, state, and nation.” He also linked to more information and a “do and don’t list” for educators.

In an email to Chalkbeat, Glass expanded on the district’s strategy, noting that leaders must take into account residents, boards and community values in deciding if and how to engage on issues with political dimensions.

“For Jeffco, that meant reassuring potentially impacted members of our community that our schools remain open and welcoming to them, and that we would monitor and work with our Congressional delegation in an effort to not limit opportunities for our children,” he said. “In other communities, that engagement can mean something else.”

Westminster Public Schools sent an internal communication last week to principals with “key talking points,” and reminders to staff of policy on social media, teaching controversial topics and interactions with immigration officials.

“We do not collect or share information on a student’s legal status and that will not change,” the memo said, echoing the message of many other school districts. “Westminster Public Schools values ethnic and language diversity in our district and we view diversity as a strength.”

Javier Abrego, the superintendent of the Adams 14 School District in Commerce City, put out a more pointed statement — in English and Spanish — on DACA on Wednesday.

“To be sure, the elimination of DACA will not only have a dramatic economic impact on our state and nation, it will have devastating impacts on our schools and communities,” he wrote. “Our community and schools will lose employees, coaches and school support staff. Our educational systems are already in dire need of great support and resources; the elimination of DACA just compounds an already alarming situation.”

Abrego also joined a handful of other superintendents in calling for Congress to act.

In Greeley-Evans School District 6, Superintendent Deirdre Pilch put out a one-paragraph statement Tuesday acknowledging that changes in DACA will “cause worry and concern for some of our students, families and our own staff.” It concluded by encouraging families to voice their concerns to national elected officials and expressing hope that Congress will find a solution.

Earlier this year Pilch was one of several Colorado school and district leaders who signed a letter to federal officials in support of DACA.

But not every district leader felt compelled to speak out about DACA this week.

In St Vrain Valley School District, where 30 percent of the district’s 32,000 students are Hispanic, district officials released no statement or resolution on DACA.

“I don’t know what a piece of paper would do,” said Superintendent Don Haddad. “For us, we don’t change our approach with kids and our community every time a politician says something. We care about our kids 24/7, every day of the week.”

Rural Colorado is far more diverse than most other U.S. rural areas, with significant Latino populations in some areas. Districts there, too, are grappling with responding to DACA.

In the Roaring Fork School District, Superintendent Rob Stein released a one-page statement critical of the DACA announcement on Tuesday — the district’s first day of school.

In a separate letter to district staff and board members, Stein acknowledged that immigrant rights is a political issue and said everyone should make their own choices about how to get involved. “At the same time,” he wrote, “we have a safe haven resolution as a school district that states, in part, ‘We will act where we have influence and make a difference wherever we can.’”

The 1,000-student Lake County school district has yet to send any formal communication about its stance on DACA to parents, said high school principal Ben Cairns. Instead, they’ve deferred to the community’s Latino organizations.

However, the high school is encouraging students to participate in the immigration policy debate. On Tuesday, about two dozen students in three vans traveled to a rally on Denver’s Auraria Campus.

Cairns said he’s aware of potential backlash from other community members but that hasn’t stopped him from supporting the needs of his students.

“It’s complicated,” he said. “But it’s our role to help kids process these big moments in their lives.”

Colorado conservatives are pressing Republican gubernatorial candidates on education policy. Here’s how.

2017-08-30T20:02:48+00:00

It’s just before 7 p.m. Tuesday and conservative talk radio host Ross Kaminsky asks his producer to include 30 seconds of background music to his introduction.

“It gotta be something like ‘Hot for Teacher’ or ‘School’s Out For the Summer,’” Kaminsky’s guest, George Brauchler, a Republican candidate for governor, suggests with a chuckle. “Doesn’t it have to have an education theme?”

Brauchler, district attorney for Colorado’s 18th judicial district that includes Arapahoe and Douglas counties, was the first leading GOP candidate to speak with Kaminsky about education issues in what will be a series of telephone town halls.

The hour-long conversations, which are also broadcast live on KHOW-AM and streamed online, are paid for by Ready Colorado, a political nonprofit that advocates for conservative education reform policies.

Though it’s common for advocacy groups to try to pin down candidates on issues during political campaigns, the paid radio forum — on a media platform long favored by conservatives — is an unusual strategy for elevating education as a campaign issue.

Luke Ragland, president of Ready Colorado, said the conversations are designed to help voters better understand where conservative candidates stand on policy matters such as school choice and standardized testing.

During the first town hall, Brauchler said he favors creating new entities that can authorize charter schools, establishing education savings accounts for parents that work like vouchers for private schools, and maintaining some form of end-of-year standardized testing to measure school quality.

“I need public education to be awesome right now,” said Brauchler, who has four children in Douglas County schools.. “Not in 10 years from now, but right now.”

Unlike most other states, Colorado’s governor has little sway over public schools. Most authority resides at the local school board level, while the state legislature and board of education write and put into practice statewide policies. (The governor does hold veto power over legislation).

“The governor might have little authority in the technical sense, but the governor has great power to influence education policy and how schools are run,” Ragland said. “No one has the bully pulpit that the governor has. I do think that is a great deal of power.”

Other leading GOP candidates include former state lawmaker and businessman Victor Mitchell and former investment banker Doug Robinson. Robinson is the nephew of 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

State Treasurer Walker Stapleton and Attorney General Cynthia Coffman are expected to join the race to succeed Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat who is term-limited.

The Democrats also have a crowded primary field. U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, former state Sen. Michael Johnston, former state Treasurer Cary Kennedy and businessman Noel Ginsburg all are running. Lt. Gov. Donna Lynne also is considering a run.

Democrats for Education Reform, a political nonprofit, said it is not planning to hold similar conversations with candidates.

“Unlike the Republican candidates that need coaching about policy that serves kids, I believe every Democratic candidate running for governor has decades-long records of policy making experience in the best interest of students,” Jen Walmer, DFER’s state director, said in an email.

Ragland acknowledged the Democrats have long voting records and policy positions, but said improving the state’s schools is top of mind to Republicans.

“There are some clear lines on the Democratic side,” he said. “But when you’re sit down with these guys, education is one of the first things that come out of their mouths.”

Here’s a closer look at how students performed on Colorado’s 2017 tests — in nine graphics

2017-08-25T23:09:14+00:00

When Colorado officials released a trove of test results last week, it showed the continuation of a sobering trend line: historically underserved students are lagging behind other students, and the gaps are not closing.

This is due in part, they said, to all students doing slightly better during the last three years on the state’s English and math test.

In the graphics below, we take a closer look at how those gaps are playing out across the state. That includes a look at how students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds scored on the SAT, which for the first time high school juniors across the state were required to take.

How achievement gaps on the PARCC tests changed in 2017

Looking at a sample of tests, you can see how racial and ethnic groups grew between 2016 and 2017. When most groups raise test scores, it does little to cut into achievement gaps.

A baseline for the SAT

Last spring, Colorado juniors were required to take the SAT. Previously, juniors took the ACT. This graph represents how different racial and ethnic populations scored on the inaugural exam. Asian, white and biracial students all outperformed their black, Hispanic and Native American peers.

Where students are growing the most

One way the state can close the achievement gap is by accelerating the learning of at-risk students. The state tracks this by measuring student growth.

Growth is measured by comparing how much students learn each year compared to students who have a similar score history on standardized tests. If a group of students hits the 50th percentile, that means they’ve learned about a year’s worth of material. The higher the percentile over 50, the more and faster students are learning.

These graphics show where historically underserved students are learning the most and the quickest based on the state’s student growth measurement. Noticeably missing from many of these graphics are the state’s largest school districts. That said, just because you’re small doesn’t mean growth comes easier. Several small districts also posted some of the worst growth scores in the state, as well.

Colorado tells feds it needs more time to rethink opt-out policy

2017-08-25T20:41:08+00:00

Colorado is asking for more time to figure out how to meet federal requirements for giving students standardized tests while respecting the rights of parents who don’t want their children to take them.

In a letter Thursday, Commissioner Katy Anthes told the federal government that the state needs until October to reconsider how Colorado holds schools and districts accountable when they fail to meet federal requirements for student participation on state tests.

The federal education department earlier this month told state officials that Colorado’s approach of not penalizing schools that fall below the 95 percent participation threshold doesn’t align with the nation’s updated education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act.

The federal pushback came as part of the department’s formal review of states’ education plans that detail how they will comply with the new law. Colorado was one of the first states to submit its plan.

The reviews are being watched for clues of how the federal department under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos interprets a law that was intended to shift more decision-making to states.

Colorado was required to by Thursday either submit new language in its federally required education plan or ask for an extension. Officials chose the latter.

“Because our board has a strong commitment to Colorado’s parental opt-out rights, it will need to carefully consider how best to address your concerns without designing a system that will be perceived by parents and educators as punitive,” Colorado Education Commissioner Katy Anthes said in the letter. “We are optimistic that the various interests here can be addressed in a manner that complies with ESSA and is in the best interest of Colorado students, parents, and educators.”

Colorado’s response follows a trip by one state official to Washington, D.C., to discuss the issue in person.

Alyssa Pearson, Colorado’s associate commissioner for accountability and performance, flew to the Capital Aug. 18 in an effort to better understand what changes the federal department is seeking from Colorado.

Pearson, in an interview with Chalkbeat, said the department made it clear: The first 5 percent of students at a school who do not take the test get a pass. However, any student who skips the tests beyond that line must be counted as non-proficient.

So if 10 percent of kids at a school opt out, the first 5 percent won’t count against a school. The remaining 5 percent must count as non-proficient, dragging down the school’s scores.

Pearson said federal officials will require Colorado to use this number it its school quality ratings. It can’t just be a number it submits to the U.S. education department and then ignores.

Schools and districts with large numbers of students who are labeled as non-proficient on state tests are likely to receive low quality ratings from the states. Schools that receive the lowest quality ratings for five years in a row are targeted for state intervention.

In Colorado, the largest volume of opt-outs involve mostly white and middle- and upper-class students at schools with traditionally high quality ratings.

“While we don’t know how the schools are performing today,” Pearson said, “historically schools with parental refusal rates have performed pretty well in the past.”

Before 2015 when the opt-out movement gained traction, nearly all Colorado schools met the federal testing requirement.

The prescribed changes to how Colorado calculates how many students are meeting proficiency could lead to more schools being identified as low-performing — even if they don’t need help.

“We raised that issue,” Pearson said. She added that federal officials recognized the dilemma and offered suggestions on how the state can separate schools with truly low academic performance and those with artificially deflated scores.

State officials will present a variety of options to the State Board of Education in September, Pearson said.

Those options include asking state lawmakers to rewrite the state’s school accountability system to fully comply with federal law, or running two accountability systems — one that follows state law and the other that follows federal law.

The board must sign off on any policy changes included in the state’s education plan. A decision is expected in October.

Colorado education officials hope these three ideas will reverse the state teacher shortage

2017-08-23T18:55:23+00:00

Colorado education leaders are zeroing in on three broad ways to curb the state’s teacher shortage: increasing compensation, improving preparation and training, and “lifting the profession.”

While specific strategies are still being fleshed out, those three themes were highlighted Wednesday at a press conference held by Katy Anthes, the state’s education commissioner, and Kim Hunter Reed, the executive director of the department of higher education.

“We have a lot of work to do to talk about the profession that makes all other professions possible,” Hunter Reed said.

Anthes and Hunter Reed spoke to reporters as the two departments are wrapping up a series of forums across the state to gather input on how to best the shortage, which is especially pronounced in rural Colorado and in high school math and science classrooms.

The departments are tasked with creating a strategic plan to present to state lawmakers by December. The department heads said the plan will provide a mix of approaches that lawmakers, local school districts and communities can deploy based on individual needs.

One suggestion that has been a crowd favorite at the town halls is a statewide base-salary for teachers, officials said.

However, neither Anthes nor Hunter Reed would commit to making such a recommendation to the legislature. Such a mandate would likely require an extensive influx of cash to schools, or at the least drastic cuts to other school-based programs at the local level. The latter scenario would infuriate superintendents in smaller school districts who are already feeling the squeeze to increase the required minimum wages for other workers.

“The answer doesn’t have to be to raise the entire school finance formula,” Anthes said, adding that changes to compensation could include loan forgiveness and block grants.

Both stressed that it would take more than new state laws to boost the number of new teachers and keep current teachers in the profession. That’s especially true, they said, when it comes to reframing the public conception of educators.

“You can’t legislate value and professionalism,” Hunter Reed said.

“We need to lift the profession of educators,” Anthes said. “I do think teaching is harder than rocket science.”

More specific ideas the departments are considering include developing new training at the college level, increasing awareness of alternative ways to become a teacher and providing educators better access to affordable housing.

“It’s a lot of little things that we hope add up,” Anthes said.

On first day for most Denver schools, gubernatorial candidate Michael Johnston calls for better school funding

2017-08-21T23:45:29+00:00

Colorado Democratic gubernatorial candidate Michael Johnston sent his son Emmett back to school Monday — and sent a message to voters at the same time about one of his longtime causes.

On the first day of school for most Denver students, Johnston recorded a video of his son carting off two large cardboard boxes full of supplies. In the video posted to Twitter, the former state senator called it another example of how Colorado is shortchanging its public schools.

“People often ask what does it mean to have cuts to the statewide budget to education,” he said. “Well it means a lot of those bills get passed on to parents and to kids who have to bring their own paper towels, their own wipes, their own crayons, their own boxes.”

Johnston, a national figure in the education reform movement, led an unsuccessful push to increase taxes for schools in 2013.

“We count ourselves lucky,” Johnston said in the video, adding that knows many families in Denver often feel the pinch of buying new school supplies and fees. “We think the state has an obligation to do better.”

Though the governor’s race is in its early stages, back-to-school season is a logical time for candidates to take out education positions. Earlier Monday, U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, who is also running, released an online ad spotlighting his pledge to expand full-day kindergarten and preschool.

My son Emmett’s 1st day of school! We must fight for public edu funding so all Coloradan families can afford back-to-school pic.twitter.com/L4s2cilvoL
— Mike Johnston (@MikeJohnstonCO) August 21, 2017

Colorado gubernatorial candidate Jared Polis goes back to school with preschool-pledge commercial

2017-08-21T22:16:04+00:00

The 2018 Colorado gubernatorial race is in its early stages, but Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Polis is making an initial — and modest — media pitch to voters on his education agenda.

With back-to-school season as a backdrop, Polis is debuting a new commercial exclusively on the internet that highlights his pledge to expand full-day kindergarten and provide tuition-free preschool to all Colorado families.

Chalkbeat was provided an exclusive first look at the commercial Monday.

“Every year, thousands of children — the kids of our friends and neighbors — are left behind simply because their parents cannot afford quality preschool,” Polis says on the ad over images of children in classrooms and on playgrounds. “Good, full-day preschool and kindergarten makes a tremendous difference in a child’s life. … I’m running for governor to fight for bold ideas like free, full day preschool.”

The 30-second video, which will be blasted to Colorado voters on social media, is just a glimpse at what is expected to be an avalanche of commercials from gubernatorial candidates. Colorado political observers believe the 2018 gubernatorial race will be the most expensive in the state’s history.

Although the governor’s office has relatively little influence over public schools, candidates from both major parties are incorporating messages about education into their platforms.

On the Democratic side, former state Sen. Michael Johnston has promised to provide tuition-free college, and businessman Noel Ginsburg wants to expand apprenticeship programs. Among Republicans, former state lawmaker Victor Mitchell, in a radio ad posted to YouTube this month, promises to boost vocational training.

Polis’s promise to create a “winning coalition to establish universal full day kindergarten and preschool” faces considerable roadblocks — the state is cash-strapped as it is, and voters historically have been unwilling to increases taxes for education on a statewide scale.

“If you don’t try, then it will result in failure every time,” Polis said in an interview with Chalkbeat before releasing the online ad. “Politicians have talked about preschool and kindergarten for decades in this state. And we’re going to make it a priority and get this done. … That’s where I’m going to use my political capital.”

To read more about Polis’s preschool pledge, click here. Here’s the commercial:

Find your 2017 Colorado SAT and PSAT scores

2017-08-17T17:29:52+00:00

Use Chalkbeat’s database to search for your school’s average composite score on the SAT and PSAT. Colorado juniors take the SAT, while sophomores take the PSAT. Both tests are supposed to gauge college readiness. The highest score on the SAT is 1600 and the highest score on the PSAT is 1520. For more details on the high school tests, read our report here.

SAT scores show mixed results on whether Colorado juniors are on track for college

2017-08-17T17:26:42+00:00

About six in 10 Colorado high school juniors are on track to be ready for college-level English classes, while only four in 10 are for math courses, according to state data released Thursday.

That is according to results of the SAT college entrance exam, which Colorado requires juniors to take. The results are used to hold schools and districts accountable for their performance.

Colorado eleventh graders scored an average of 513.4 on the SAT’s English exam — 33 points above the test-maker’s cutoff for college readiness, state data show.

The picture was bleaker in math: The average score was 500.9, and the college readiness score is 530. Colorado students on average perform better in English than in math on state tests in lower grades, too.

As with other tests, achievement gaps emerged. The state’s poorest students — those who qualify for government-subsidized meals — scored an average of 462 on the English test and 451 on the math test. Their more affluent peers scored more than 70 points higher on both tests.

The state publicly releases average scores as the benchmark for SAT performance. At Chalkbeat’s request, state officials also provided the percentages of students who are on pace to be prepared for college courses — 61 percent in English and 40 percent in math.

An education department spokesman said officials are still working on figuring out how particular student groups fared, including different racial and ethnic groups, and breaking down results by subsidized lunch status.

The SAT numbers serve as a new baseline in Colorado. Juniors took the SAT for the first time in 2017 as a mandatory state test. Previously, juniors took the ACT. The state’s average ACT score hit an all-time high of 20.4 points in 2016, the last year it was administered by the state.

The state’s switch to the SAT followed an overhaul of the testing system after thousands of families boycotted the state’s participation in the multi-state PARCC exams.

State officials switched to the SAT in part because the recently redesigned college entrance exam is supposed to be more closely aligned to the state’s academic standards. Those grade-level learning targets are supposed to prepare students for life after high school.

While students can use the results as part of the college applications, the state uses the data to rate school quality, and some districts use them in teacher job performance ratings.

This was the second year high school sophomores took the PSAT, a companion test to the SAT also created by the College Board.

The state’s average score — which combines results from the math and the English test — climbed by nearly 4 points to 947. That’s 14 points higher than the national average. The highest score possible on the PSAT is 1520.

About 67 percent of sophomores are on track for being ready for college English work and 43 percent are on track for college-level math work.

Next year, high school freshmen are expected to take another version of the PSAT for the first time. That’s the result of a hard-fought compromise between state lawmakers who wanted to ditch testing in the ninth grade and Gov. John Hickenlooper, who threatened to veto any such effort.

Find your school’s 2017 PARCC growth results

2017-08-17T16:00:59+00:00

Use Chalkbeat’s database to search for your school’s individual student growth percentile in math and English. Student growth measures how much groups of students learn during a year compared to students who scored similarly to them on previous state tests. The state’s average is also 50, which represents about a year’s worth of learning. The higher the score, the more and faster students are learning. The column “EMH level” refers to whether it’s an elementary, middle or high school. For more information about the state’s latest test scores, read our report here.

Math growth database

English growth database

Colorado state test scores inch up, but wide socioeconomic gaps remain

2017-08-17T16:00:25+00:00

Three years after Colorado introduced new, more demanding standardized tests, student performance statewide is slowly ticking up, according to data released Thursday.

Most students still are falling well short of meeting the state’s expectations on the PARCC math and English tests, which are meant to measure whether students are on track to be prepared for life after high school.

But state officials applauded progress: 42 percent of students who took the tests last spring met the state’s learning goals in English, and 33 percent met them in math. That’s an increase of about 2 percentage points in both subjects since 2015, the first year the tests were given.

The state’s poorest students continue to academically lag behind their more affluent peers by wide margins. The gaps remain wide — some as large as 30 percentage points — and are generally not tightening because all students are making progress at about the same rate.

Only 27 percent of Colorado fourth-graders who qualify for subsidized meals at school met grade-level expectations on the English test, while 58 percent of their more affluent peers made the grade.

“We are pleased to see performance improvements by so many students across Colorado, and we know this only comes after a lot of hard work and dedication from educators, parents and students,” Katy Anthes, the state’s education commissioner, said in a statement. “At the same time, our focus on our historically disadvantaged students must remain a top priority. In too many cases, those groups are not showing gains at a pace that will allow them to catch up, so CDE will increase our focus on providing support to our districts and schools to help them with this challenge in the next few years.”

Those results were part of a trove of student testing data released Thursday by the Colorado Department of Education.

Besides achievement data from the state’s English and math tests, the department also released results from its science and social studies tests, and the PSAT and SAT tests that high school sophomores and juniors take. Additionally, the state released student growth data, which measures how much students learn during an academic year compared to other students who scored similarly to them on tests the previous year.

Results for individual students are shared with families, and collectively the state uses them to rate school quality. Some districts use the results in evaluating teachers — one reason the tests are controversial.

About 555,000 students between the third and 11th grades took state tests last spring.

On PARCC, participation rates ticked up slightly and ranged from 96.4 percent in the third grade to 76 percent in the ninth grade statewide. Since Colorado began giving the exams in 2015, schools especially in affluent suburbs and rural areas have struggled to meet a federal requirement of testing 95 percent of their students.

This year’s results were released earlier than in past years, and more data was released at one time. One criticism of PARCC has been how long it’s taken for results to be available.

Data transparency activists, however, are sure to cringe at array of school level results that won’t be made public due to ongoing concerns about student privacy. More than 20 percent of the results released from PARCC exams were redacted to ensure the public cannot identify an individual student’s results.

The state does this by following a complex set of rules that is set off if fewer than 16 students at a school score in a particular range. Before the state adopted these rules, it would only redact results if fewer than four students had the same score at a school.

“The new tests were supposed to provide better information about what is working and now we know far less,” said Van Schoales, CEO of A+ Colorado, an education watchdog group. “It’s outrageous that CDE has arbitrarily hidden so much of the achievement data making it difficult to know whether schools or districts are working. Only through knowing what works will Colorado educators be able to improve our schools.”

There are other limitations to what the state releases. Ninth-graders can take PARCC math tests of varying degrees of difficulty. That, along with lower student participation rates on 9th grade tests, make comparisons next to impossible. This will be the last year that issue arises: This spring year, all 9th graders will take a version of the PSAT.

In fact, Colorado is beginning a transition away from PARCC tests in all grades starting this year.

District achievement results

Officials in the state’s largest school district, Denver Public Schools, were celebrating its positive test results.

The 92,000-student district, which serves a majority of low-income students, inched closer to meeting state averages on the tests. The number of students who met the state’s proficiency bar on the state’s English test climbed in every grade. Math results were more mixed. Scores went up on six of the state’s 11 tests.

Aurora Public Schools, the only school district at risk of facing state intervention next year if its quality rating doesn’t improve, showed increases in the number of students meeting or exceeding expectations on several tests across multiple grades including big increases for eighth-grade English tests and fifth-grade math.

But among the state’s ten largest school districts, Aurora continued to post the lowest scores. For example, only 25 percent of fourth graders in the 41,000-student district met the state’s expectations on the English test.

Progress was also mixed at school districts that serve large at-risk student populations and have a history of chronic low performance on state exams.

More detailed district and school-level data is expected within a month that will detail achievement gaps between different student groups, state officials said.

Growth

A student’s growth percentile, which ranges from 1 to 99, indicates how that student’s performance changed over time, relative to students with similar performances on state assessments. Put another way, growth is calculated by measuring how students progressed compared to students who had similar scores to them on tests given a year earlier.

This data, which makes up the majority of a school’s or district’s state quality rating, helps provide a better understanding of how students are progressing, not accounting for whether they are proficient.

The state average growth score is always at the 50 percentile, so any growth score above that is considered positive. A score of 50 represents about a year’s worth of learning.

As with achievement scores, the state’s poor students are behind their more affluent peers in academic growth. Students qualifying for free or reduced-priced lunches hit the 48th percentile on English tests and the 46th percentile on math. Students that don’t qualify hit 52nd percentile on English tests and 53th percentile on math.

Students in Denver continued to post strong academic growth scores, leading the state’s five largest school districts in that measure.

“Every year for the past seven, in every subject, our kids have shown more growth than their peers across the state,” said Denver Superintendent Tom Boasberg. “This year was our best growth year ever.”

Meanwhile, students in the wealthier south suburban school district of Cherry Creek fell below the state average on growth on English tests, according to the state data. While other nearby school districts were closing growth gaps between their poor and more affluent students, the gap on English tests in Cherry Creek widened by a point.

Judy Skupa, Cherry Creek’s assistant superintendent, said the district will spend time analyzing its growth data but won’t rush to make sweeping changes based on one year of data.

“Like with anything else, it’s about the trend,” she said.

– Chalkbeat reporters Melanie Asmar and Yesenia Robles contributed

Find your Colorado PARCC 2017 results

2017-08-17T02:35:20+00:00

PARCC testing in Colorado is over. Use Chalkbeat’s database to search for your school’s individual results on Colorado’s 2017 PARCC English and math tests. For more information about the state’s latest test scores, read our report on PARCC scores in Colorado here.

Colorado is about to release a torrent of test results. Here are four storylines worth watching.

2017-08-16T00:36:40+00:00

The state education department is scheduled Thursday to publicly release a mammoth amount of data detailing how Colorado students performed on last spring’s standardized tests.

We’ll get to dive into state, district and school results from English, math, science and social studies tests, the PSAT and SAT, and student academic growth, which tracks how much students learn each year compared to their academic peers.

The data — beloved or loathed depending on which educator you ask — is supposed to gauge how well students grasp the state’s academic standards that are designed to prepare them for either college or a career.

The state also uses the results, along with other factors such as graduation rates, to issue quality ratings for schools and districts. And in some instances, teachers are rated based on the data.

Here is background and some storylines to keep in mind in advance of the release:

First a reminder of where we stand:

Three years ago, the state made a monumental shift in its testing system. Colorado was one of about a dozen states to drop paper-and-pencil standardized tests in favor of a new multi-state computer-based test.

The PARCC tests would measure critical thinking, a major component of the state’s new academic standards, which devalued rote memorization.

Prior to the first release, school officials in Colorado and across the nation warned that test scores would likely be low considering the newness of the academic standards and tests.

Indeed, they were.

In 2015, only 43 percent of fourth graders met the state’s expectations on the English test. Math was worse: Only 37 percent of third graders were able to complete math equations at grade level.

In 2016, the state saw a slight uptick in scores, mirroring national trends.

However, state officials worried about how far behind students with learning disabilities were compared to their peers.

Here’s a look at the changes in test scores in English and math:

English

Math

With three years of data from PARCC, we can — finally — talk about trends. But what are we going to learn that we didn’t already know?

For the last two years, state and school district officials have warned about two things: First, don’t compare the results of PARCC to that of previous standardized tests. Second, they said we needed three years of data to pinpoint trends in student performance.

Why three years?

Derek Briggs, a professor at School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder who also sits on the technical advisory board for PARCC, said one reason why we might need three years of data is because of exaggerated bumps sometimes found in the second year of a new standardized test.

“One explanation for this sort of trend was that it would take teachers/schools a year to figure out the emphasis on the new assessment, so in the first year, the alignment between teaching and instruction isn’t optimal, so student performance in the first year is depressed,” he said in an email. “Then in the second year, it snaps back up once instruction and assessment are better aligned.”

Briggs added that so far, no state that updated its test to align to the Common Core State Standards like Colorado did had a second year bump.

So, now we have three years of data: What can we say?

It’s difficult to make sweeping declarations about state trends — especially in a local control state where so many decisions about what students learn is made at the school and district level.

But Juan D’Brot, a senior associate at the Delaware-based Center for Assessment, said that at the three-year mark, school officials and parents alike can start to better understand what’s working or not at individual schools.

“It can serve as a gut check about a school’s general performance over time,” D’Brot said. “If you have three points that are moving upward or constantly moving downward, we can quickly create a story around that.”

It’s more difficult to draw conclusions if a school’s results are less consistent, he said.

And there are some state-level benefits.

“This trend data can help the state evaluate their own efforts to work with districts and schools,” he said. This is especially valuable when school leaders use a variety of data points including patterns of student growth.

The state is suppressing data in an effort to “protect student privacy.” How much will be redacted?

Colorado was once considered one of the most education data-friendly states. But beginning with the first release of PARCC data in 2015, the state began blacking out more school-level data than it had in the past.

The effects of the new so-called “suppression rules” were even more pronounced in the state’s 2016 release. The state shielded roughly 4,000 data points that year, frustrating education reform advocates who say this data helps parents make better decisions about schools.

Stay tuned to see what we won’t learn about school performance due to these rules after Thursday’s release.

After two years of delayed and drawn-out data releases, the state is giving us everything on time and all at once. But the promise of getting data back quicker is still elusive.

In 2015 and 2016, testing data dribbled out of the state education department over several months — state-level results first, then school level, then student growth data. This was a departure from a decades-long routine of releasing test score data in August.

On Thursday, the state will release almost everything all at once. (District and school performance data disaggregated by different student groups is expected within a month.) This is a major victory for the state and the makers of PARCC because one of the longest-running criticisms of the test was how long it took to get data back to schools.

Schools received their results in June, the earliest data has gotten back to the schools since the state switched to PARCC.

But the timeline still falls short of one of the promises of new tests and the demands of the State Board of Education, which going forward wants data back to schools within 30 days.

Is the state’s gradual move away from PARCC at the high school level working to curb the opt out movement?

In 2015, Colorado became one of the nation’s epicenters for the testing opt out movement. Thousands of high schoolers, backed by their parents, refused to take the PARCC exams, claiming they served no educational purpose.

In some cases, entire schools sat empty during the state’s testing window.

In response, lawmakers eliminated some high school tests and changed others. In 2016, more high school sophomores took the state’s tests than the year before. Policymakers hope additional changes at the ninth grade level, set to take effect next spring, will move even more families back to the state’s testing system.

Will the trend continue? We’ll find out on Thursday.

And finally, here’s a roundup of previous coverage you might find helpful:

What is PARCC? An explainer.
Find how well your school performed on the 2016 PARCC tests.
Colorado is slowly moving away from PARCC.
From CSAP to PARCC: How Colorado’s testing landscape has changed through the years.

One of these seven teachers will be Colorado’s 2018 Teacher of the Year

2017-08-15T23:08:34+00:00

Call it the Academy Awards for Colorado teachers. And the nominations are in.

The state education department Tuesday announced seven finalists for the 2018 Colorado Teacher of the Year competition.

The seven emerged from 47 teachers who applied, the department said in a statement.

“Colorado values the dedicated teachers from around the state who inspire and motivate our children every day,” Katy Anthes, Colorado’s education commissioner said in a statement. “The Colorado Teacher of the Year award is just one of many ways we can honor our state’s educators. We look forward to hearing from the seven finalists in the search for the individual who will represent our state’s teaching profession.”

Here are the finalists:

Kathleen Anderson, STRIVE Prep-Kepner, Denver Public Schools
David Lunn, Liberty Common High School, Poudre School District
Renee Motter Air Academy High School, Academy School District 20
Wendy Murphy, Woodmen Hills Elementary School, Falcon School District 49
Christina Randle, Soaring Eagles Elementary School, Harrison School District 2
Amy Rehberg, Horizon High School, Adams 12 Five Star Schools
Wendi Sussman, STRIVE Prep-Federal, Denver Public Schools

The teacher of the year will be announced by Nov. 1. The winner is chosen by a committee of individuals from within the education community. The process includes a written application, letters of recommendation, site visits, endorsements from the teacher’s district and personal interviews.

The Colorado Teacher of the Year will represent the state in National Teacher of the Year competition. The National Teacher of the Year Program is a project of the Council of Chief State School Officers in partnership with Voya Financial and People to People Ambassador Programs.

Feds to Colorado: You must count students who opt out of standardized tests

2017-08-15T01:51:37+00:00

Colorado’s policy of not penalizing schools that fail to meet federal requirements for student participation in state tests isn’t going over well with the federal government.

The U.S. Department of Education told state officials in a letter Friday that the policy is not acceptable. Colorado faces losing millions in federal funding if it doesn’t change course.

Federal officials flagged the opt-out policy in a response to the state’s plan to comply with the nation’s new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act.

The federal government’s feedback to states is being closely watched for signs of how the department, under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, enforces a law that was meant to shift more decision-making away from the federal government and back to states.

“It didn’t come as a surprise,” Pat Chapman, the Colorado Department of Education’s executive director of federal programs, said of the feedback. “There’s a need to reconcile state board, state legislature and federal requirements and policies.”

In 2015, Colorado became a national epicenter for the testing opt-out movement, with thousands of students refusing to take state-required tests they didn’t see as valuable.

The State Board of Education, reasoning that it wasn’t fair to punish schools for something not in their control, adopted a policy forbidding the state education department from lowering schools’ quality ratings or otherwise punishing them for high refusal rates.

Previously, schools and districts could have seen their quality ratings lowered if they failed to annually test 95 percent of students in math and English. Schools that receive the state’s lowest quality ratings for five consecutive years face state intervention.

Education Commissioner Katy Anthes is expected to brief the state board at its regularly scheduled meeting this week on possible responses. The state has until Aug. 24 to submit a revised state plan or ask for an extension.

State board Chairwoman Angelika Schroeder, a Boulder Democrat, said Monday she doesn’t expect the board to take any formal action on rethinking the board’s policy this week. She declined to elaborate further.

“The board should have an opportunity to talk about this before I publicly comment,” she said.

Board member Steve Durham, a Colorado Springs Republican who championed the policy, also held back Monday.

“I’m not sure what all the options available are,” he said. “We’ll wait and see what the staff’s analysis is and go from there.”

The state’s unique opt-out policy wasn’t the federal government’s only criticism.

The U.S. Department of Education also raised concern about the state’s long-term academic goals, using an average of test scores to determine school quality and monitoring how well students are learning English as a second language.

The federal department is asking the state to resubmit long-term academic goals for particular student groups, including different ethnic groups and students with disabilities.

In the current version of the plan, all student groups are expected to have the same average test score in six years, which is slightly higher than the state’s current average. The goals seem confusing and unattainable. For example, students with disabilities would need to make unprecedented progress, while Asian students would need to lose academic ground in order for the state to meet its targets.

As part of its plan, Colorado also proposed rating schools based on averages from English and math test scores, not how many students met grade-level proficiency as it did in the past.

While the use of average test scores was applauded by some, it isn’t flying with the federal education department. It wants Colorado to better explain how using average scores relates to measuring whether students are at grade level.

Moreover, U.S. officials want an assurance from Colorado that students who are far above grade-level won’t “overcompensate” for students who are not proficient. In other words, the department wants to make sure high-performers aren’t masking serious problems.

Dale Chu, vice president of policy and operations for America Succeeds, a nonprofit of business leaders that support education reform, helped a coalition of education groups review state plans independently of U.S. education department. The group, the Collaborative For Student Success, was critical of Colorado’s switch to using an average of test scores.

“There’s no sense of proficiency,” he said. “There has to be some sort of sense that kids are coming out school being able to read and compute and be on a successful path.”

Finally, the U.S. education department is also seeking more clarity on how the state is tracking the progress of students learning English as a second language. It said the state needs to provide a clear timeline on when it can provide specific goals and more detail about how the state will use data to determine school quality.

Chapman said the state education department did not have the data available to provide the federal government the information it needed. However, that’s changing and he expects that portion of the plan to be accepted.

The Every Student Succeeds Act was signed by President Barack Obama in 2015. The law required states to develop plans to outline how it would use federal dollars to improve schools, teacher quality and boost language proficiency for students learning English as a second language.

Pushback from the U.S. education department to states has been more stern than many education policy observers expected given DeVos’s support of school choice and local control.

Chapman said the federal department has been helpful.

“They’re asked to uphold the letter of the law, he said. “I do think they’re approaching it in anyway that they’re being helpful to states to write a plan that’s consistent with statue.”

Colorado lawmaker to propose allowing voters as young as 16 to take part in school board elections

2017-08-10T01:13:19+00:00

A Colorado lawmaker thinks a key constituency should have a greater say about who serves on local school boards: students.

State Rep. Jonathan Singer, a Longmont Democrat, confirmed to Chalkbeat that he intends to introduce legislation next year that would give local school boards the freedom to set the voting age as low as 16 for their elections. The current minimum voting age — for federal races as well as state and local races in Colorado — is 18.

Singer is scheduled to detail his plans Friday during a keynote address at a breakfast benefit for Project VOYCE, a nonprofit that works to help public school students become advocates for education, according to a news release from the group.

The proposed legislation has been three years in the making, Singer said.

“I can’t think of a better place to actually involve our students than in local school board elections,” Singer said Wednesday.

If Singer’s proposed bill becomes law, the first time 16-year-olds could vote for a school board race would be 2019.

“This will force a conversation at the school board level to really ask the question of how much do we value our 16- and 17-year-olds who are going to become adults very soon,” Singer said. “They’re both the consumer and the product of our education system, so they have the most at stake.”

While rare, some local governments have taken similar steps, including Takoma Park, Md., which in 2013 lowered its minimum voting age to 16. Sixteen-year-olds will be able to vote in school board elections in Berkeley, Calif., starting in 2018; a similar proposal failed in San Francisco last year.

In Boulder, members of the city’s Youth Opportunities Advisory Board have pressed for lowering the voting age in municipal elections as a way to encourage civic engagement at a younger age.

Colorado testing an updated teacher evaluation system that will take less time but set a higher bar

2017-08-09T21:58:43+00:00

Lori Petersen, principal of Arkansas Elementary School in Aurora, is a huge fan of teacher evaluations. But as she sees it, there are two critical problems with the state’s system that need fixing:

First, the system is cumbersome and overly time-consuming. Second, too many teachers in Aurora and across the state are earning high ratings while student test scores continue to lag.

“I was shocked,” she said, recalling a meeting where she learned that most of the suburban school district’s teachers received an “effective” rating or higher — even as Aurora faces state intervention for chronic poor performance on state tests.

This year, the state is trying out changes to the evaluation program in 40 districts, including Aurora, that would address both of Peterson’s worries. The overhaul is aimed at making evaluations easier for principals to conduct — by halving the number of practices they are supposed to observe — and harder for teachers to ace.

Most of Colorado’s 178 school districts use the state’s system. But some large districts such as Denver have developed their own and are not part of the pilot.

The changes to the state’s system come seven years after Colorado led the nation in updating its teacher evaluation system, which included the controversial move of linking teacher ratings to student performance on tests.

The new law required that all teachers be evaluated every year, a change from every three. They’d be issued a rating from “ineffective” to “highly effective” — and teachers who earned a low ratings for two straight years would lose job protections.

The effort has failed to provide backers with what they wanted: better data identifying teachers who need help. Nearly 90 percent of Colorado teachers in 2015, the most recent year available, received a rating of effective or higher. States across the nation have seen similar results from their efforts to better evaluate teachers.

Instead, teachers and principals alike often complain that the system is cumbersome and time-consuming — and far too subjective.

Now, Colorado officials hope the updated version will alleviate detested paperwork, freeing up principals and teachers to focus more on the craft of teaching.

“We want to see a reduction in time spent on checking boxes, and that time spent in a more meaningful way,” said Mary Bivens, the state education department’s director of educator development.

The biggest change to the teacher evaluation system is the number of classroom practices principals need to monitor. The list has been cut nearly in half from 336 to 181.

The reduction comes from eliminating dozens of near-duplicative strategies that were supposed to be measured in different sections of the evaluation, said John Madden, an assistant principal at Overland High School in the Cherry Creek School District who helped with the revisions.

For example, he said, multiple parts of the current rubric ask principals to look at how teachers are incorporating technology and literacy skills, and developing challenging lessons. In the pilot, each of those topics gets addressed only once or twice.

“These changes will help teachers and principals focus on the practice and not on the tool itself,” he said. “It helps clarify some of the expectation and it cuts down on the enormity of the document. It doesn’t feel so cumbersome and hard to get through.”

Petersen, the Arkansas Elementary principal, is participating in the pilot. She said she’s reviewed the new rubric and found it to be clearer. She said she plans to monitor each classroom more carefully throughout the year instead of just checking off a box if she sees a teacher use a particular strategy just once — like she used to.

“We [were] just giving instant credit,” she said. “I now have the expectation that I have to see it over time.”

The skinny version should help her complete the 24 informal visits she plans for each of her 20 teachers.

In total, Petersen estimates that she was spending upwards of 500 hours — the equivalent of three months of work — on the evaluation process each year. That includes multiple rounds of goal setting, regularly monitoring student progress and giving her staff midyear reviews.

“It’s time-consuming,” the third-year principal said. “I had never counted the hours before.”

The state will be monitoring data from informal visits that principals track in the state’s system throughout the year and it will collect anecdotes from districts piloting the rubric. What the state wants to see more than anything is principals spending more time coaching teachers.

“We’re studying that conversation,” said Colleen O’Neil, executive director of educator talent for the state education department. “We’re focused on the growth of the people.”

Not all of the changes under consideration are aimed at simplifying the process for educators. Some are meant to raise the bar on what it takes for a teacher to earn a top rating.

Previously, teachers could earn the state’s highest rating if they earned roughly 68 percent of the total points from classroom observations. Under the pilot, teachers will be eligible for the highest rating only if they’ve earned about approximately 78 percent of points. But that number could change as a result of the pilot, state officials said. In both cases, students must show more than expected academic growth on state tests and other course work in order for a teacher to earn a highly effective rating.

The Colorado Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union and a critic of using student test scores in Colorado’s evaluation system, declined to comment on the changes, saying the pilot was too new for the union to have formed an opinion.

Elizabeth Ross, managing director for state policy at the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit that advocates for more stringent evaluations systems, applauded Colorado’s work to update its evaluation system.

“It’s crystal clear that the system is not working as it was supposed to in Colorado,” she said. “It’s not giving them the information to figure out where there are teachers who need more support to improve their practice.”

Hickenlooper, on national TV, calls for bipartisanship on job training for high school graduates

2017-08-07T18:56:50+00:00

Gov. John Hickenlooper on Sunday said Republicans and Democrats should work together to rethink how states are preparing high school graduates for the 21st century economy.

“It’s not a Republican or Democratic issue to say we want better jobs for our kids, or we want to make sure they’re trained for the new generation of jobs that are coming or beginning to appear,” he said on CBS’s Face the Nation.

Hickenlooper, a Democrat, appeared on the Sunday public affairs program alongside Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican, to discuss their work on healthcare.

The Colorado governor brought up workforce training after moderator John Dickerson asked what issues besides healthcare both parties should be addressing.

“Two-thirds of our kids are never going to have a four-year college degree, and we really haven’t been able to prepare them to involve them in the economy where the new generations of jobs require some technical capability,” Hickenlooper said. “We need to look at apprenticeships. We need to look at all kinds of internships.”

Hickenlooper has long supported a variety of education reform policies including charter schools and linking student test scores to teacher evaluations. Last fall he backed a new program that is expected to this year connect 250 Colorado high school students with paid job training.

Watch Hickenlooper and Kasich here. Hickenlooper’s remarks on job training begin right before the 11- minute mark.

Colorado’s new director of school choice: If we hold all schools accountable, divisiveness over charters will go away

2017-08-03T23:01:57+00:00

For decades, both Republicans and Democrats in Colorado have embraced charter schools.

And it can stay that way if the state continues to hold all schools accountable and push for better quality, said the new director of school choice at the Colorado Department of Education.

Bill Kottenstette, the former executive director of Jefferson County charter school Compass Montessori, is settling into a role at the department that includes overseeing a $36 million grant program to help launch charter schools.

Kottenstette, a father of five who also worked with charter schools in Denver, started in June. In an interview with Chalkbeat, he spoke about the controversy over the term “school choice,” whether charters need to work harder to be integrated and what’s next for the charter sector.

(Spoiler alert: He thinks district-run schools face the same challenges as charters!)

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I don’t think a lot of people in the education community know this office exists. What do you guys do?

We have two primary roles. The big role is to administer the federal charter school startup grant. The other role is to serve as the point of online and blended learning for the state. We also work with innovation schools.

How do you hope to shape the department into your own?

I’m fortunate enough to have been a teacher, a school administrator and also a district administrator. I’m excited that those formative experiences will help shape my thinking for this office.

Primarily, I look forward to finding where I think this office could help in supporting school administrators. An example of that: We’re working on our annual school finance seminar where we provide technical assistance and information sharing between business managers, school administrators and charter boards. I know as a former administrator that it would have been helpful to have an expert on facilities who could speak to strong financial metrics for school bonds.

Coming from the district side, I know the anxiety of working with the state on innovation applications or charter applications is: “We want to put our best foot forward. So, can you help provide guidance and instructions so we can submit applications that are complete and strong? And if we need to go to the state board, can you provide us the right coaching so we feel calm?”

You worked with charter schools in both Denver and Jefferson County. What are the similarities and differences between charters in an urban environment and a suburban environment?

I’d say the similarities aren’t even all that unique to charter schools. Public schools in general have similar challenges: They want do right by their community. They want do right by all the kids that they serve. They’re really looking at, “How do individualize education today?”

Charter school supporters aren’t monolithic. But there appear to be two general camps. One camp believes charter schools should be held to high standards by the government that funds them. The other believes the market — families — should decide what a quality school is. Where do you fall?

I don’t know if I can give you a solid answer for where I personally fall. But I can tell you the priority of the work for the office, which is the charter school grant. And we do have definitions of quality in the application. We have a rubric and we score schools based on the extent that we’re seeing indicators of quality. This is based on the belief that if you’re authorized with these foundations in place that you’re more likely to be successful and stay opened.

School choice has become more of a hot topic than ever before. Why do you think that term is so politically charged?

At the national level, there are broader issues that are playing out in different states. In Colorado, school choice can still be a hot-button topic. But it’s much more embraced here than in other areas. As I’ve seen conversations around charter and innovation schools, typically they’ve been supported in a positive, bipartisan way. We’ve avoided a lot of controversy at the national level. My optimism is that we in Colorado can stay in that space. The way we do that is really honoring our commitment to following best practices and say we’re about kids, we’re about making sure all kids have a great opportunity in their schools. And when we’re going to hold people and institutions accountable for quality and effective outcomes, that level of divisiveness goes away because people can see progress.

There are some lawmakers who are very excited about technology playing a larger role in education. They envision a world where students can be handed a laptop and told, “Here’s 100 different courses — go learn.” Do you think schools and the sector are ready for that sort of revolution?

Last week there was a report on blended learning that came out — a road map. A lot of that conversation was looking at the idea of blended versus an online school. We know and recognize the impact that technology is having on education. The great benefit is that technology increases access to information. A student in rural Colorado can access Chinese classes, even if the expert isn’t in their community. But I think in general, where people are falling, is that it needs to be in balance. If I’m a school, I’m asking, “How do we introduce technology in our environment while anchoring our practice in the education philosophy we have?”

There is a challenge in convincing some people to really embrace technology in school given some of the criticism of online schools. They have such a bad rap. Is there any sort of quality control the sector needs to do to help folks embrace technology in classrooms?

I’m excited about partnering with my colleagues at CDE. We collectively come together and say our work is to support schools that are struggling. And when we see indicators where we would not like them to be, we have support structures that kick in so we can help them be successful.

Something that is really fascinating about Colorado’s charter schools is that the overall student population is more diverse than the state average. But charters schools are slightly more segregated than district-run schools. What role do charter schools play in integrating schools?

Charter schools always have to ensure equal access to all kids. So we need to make sure those policies are really being followed.

Enrollment policies are a big issue. We need to make sure a school is available to all and can be accessed equally. Where there is a gap, we need to ask if there is a strategy we can take to overcome that. I think that those approaches are going to be incubated over time. Denver, I believe, is doing some really exciting work around transportation.

One of the big levers we have is the charter school startup grant. We were able to get authorization to encourage weighted lotteries. So, if a school is seeing a lower level of applications for students who qualify for free or reduced lunch, you can provide added weight those so they have a greater chance to access enrollment.

If you were to look into your crystal ball, what would you say is the next big policy conversation for charter schools?

I think that in Colorado, we’re so far along relative to other states. The conversation for charters is no different than that for all schools. It’s a public school conversation. What can we do to invest and improve the quality, make the public schools in Colorado great? District schools, charter schools, innovation schools will all be engaged in similar conversations.

What is the one thing you’d like charter school critics to know about charter schools?

There’s a lot of excitement and energy in the charter world. People come into that space because they’re passionate about the work, they’re passionate about serving their community. There’s a lot of positive energy in the space.

Charters are part of the system. They’re comprised of the same DNA that serves the same public system. Educators who strive to be the best professionals they can be, to serve their kids well. They’re motivated day in and day out to serve kids well.

After years of stagnation, Colorado’s innovation schools see breakthrough in improvement, data show

2017-08-02T22:40:35+00:00

A year ago, as the State Board of Education began to consider fixes for Colorado’s lowest-performing schools, there was scant evidence that giving schools freedom from some state laws and local policies would significantly boost learning.

Since 2010, only three low-performing schools that had been awarded “innovation status” had succeeded in jumping off the state’s academic watch list for poor performance. Many more innovation schools continued to lag. Gaining innovation status gave the schools flexibility to develop their own calendars, curricula and budgets, and hire and train teachers outside union contracts.

A Chalkbeat analysis of a state report on innovation schools relying on more recent data shows a shift in a short time period: Ten schools with innovation status improved enough between 2014 and 2016 to avoid state-ordered improvements.

The near quadrupling of schools that improved — most of them run by Denver Public Schools — could bolster backers of giving schools greater decision-making authority, an experiment playing out at school districts across the nation.

Some Colorado schools with innovation status continue to struggle. Seven innovation schools continue to rank among the lowest-performing in the state after multiple years of increased autonomy. And four innovation schools that had one of the state’s highest ratings in 2014 dropped to one of the lowest in 2016.

The state report did not provide any possible reasons for the sudden spike in improvement at low-performing innovation schools.

Colorado began issuing quality ratings shortly after the state established innovation schools. The state rates schools each year based on standardized test scores and other factors such as graduation rates. Schools that receive the lowest two ratings for five consecutive years face state intervention. That could include granting schools innovation status to try to turn things around — an option that was among those favored by state officials this year.

Any school — not just those with poor quality ratings — can apply for innovation status. Colorado has has 86 innovation schools in 13 school districts. Some schools, like those in the Falcon 49 school district near Colorado Springs, have used innovation to carve out niche programs.

The state has approved more than 30 new innovation schools during the last two years. Concerned about whether the state’s innovation law was working as intended, the state board asked state lawmakers this year to grant them additional oversight of innovation schools, including the possibility of revoking some waivers.

The legislature did not go that far, but did give the board more leeway to reject requests it considers to be poorly designed.

Marci Imes, principal of Roncalli STEM Academy, a Pueblo middle school that was one of the innovation schools that improved enough to get off the watch list, said time, focus and years of hard work were necessary to raise her school’s quality rating.

“We can’t change instruction without changing the climate and culture first,” she said last fall after learning her school’s fate. “We had get the kids to believe in themselves, staff who believed in the kids, and supports to make sure things were happening.”

Denver Superintendent Tom Boasberg said innovation status grants teachers and school leaders the flexibility they need to meet student needs.

But “innovation is not a magic wand,” he said. “The reason our innovation schools have driven improvements and progress is because we have a very talented leader, a talented faculty and a strong culture of teamwork among all the educators in the building.”

Boasberg said it’s likely that innovation schools that have not improved are lacking one of those components.

Last year, the DPS school board approved the formation of a new innovation “zone” of four schools granting them even more freedoms, including much more control over how they spend the state funding attached to their students.

“The zone helped drive some important changes through real dialogue about how we unbundle and allocate funds,” Boasberg said.

Starting next year, DPS will extend the same flexibilities to all innovation schools.

Correction: An earlier version of this story reported the incorrect number of innovation schools that improved in 2016 — it was 10.

Colorado’s 2017 innovation report

Teach for America’s Tameka Brigham joins Denver Public Schools as chief of staff

2017-08-01T23:45:17+00:00

Tameka Brigham, a former classroom teacher and Teach for America official, will be the new chief of staff for Denver Public Schools, the state’s largest school district announced Tuesday.

Besides helping manage daily operations, Brigham will lead multiple districtwide efforts including a task force to study gentrification and racial integration in schools.

“I am excited that Tameka will be bringing her incredible skills and experience, in education and in community engagement, to Denver Public Schools,” Boasberg said in a statement. “She has focused her career and community service on improving pathways to success for our students and will be an extraordinary asset in support of our vision, Every Child Succeeds.”

Most recently, Brigham was managing director of research for Teach For America, a nonprofit that recruits college students to teach in poor school districts for at least two years. She was also the managing director for teacher leadership at Teach For America’s Denver branch.

Brigham also served as the diversity coordinator for Great Education Colorado, a nonprofit that advocates for more school funding, according to her resume on LinkedIn.

Brigham has taught both in K-12 public schools and at the college level, DPS said.

“I’m really excited to work alongside so many passionate leaders who, without a doubt, put kids and families first,” Brigham said in statement. “I have a strong belief in community engagement and listening to those impacted most by potential decisions so I am eager to dive right in and have the tough conversations and, at the same time, celebrate our successes and our wins.”

Brigham will succeed Eddie Koen, who is leaving the district Sept. 20 to work for the Mile High United Way as its chief impact officer.

Brigham, a native Coloradan, begins Aug. 21.

Colorado’s education plan earns cheers, jeers from national reform groups

2017-07-27T22:40:44+00:00

Reviews of Colorado’s federally required education plan are beginning to trickle in from national observers. And they’re mixed.

What’s there to love, according to national education think-tanks? Colorado is taking seriously new requirements to include more information about how students are succeeding in school.

What’s there to gripe about? The state’s plan is not very detailed and lacks strong goals for student achievement, which critics say raises questions about how it plans to improve schools.

Colorado was one of the first states earlier this year to submit its plan to comply with updated federal education law — the Every Student Succeeds Act — to the U.S. Department of Education. The State Board of Education and state education department officials spent more than a year developing the plan with scores of teachers, advocates, parents and business leaders.

While state officials wait for an official response from Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — who must approve the plan to keep federal dollars flowing to the state’s schools — there’s no shortage of commentary from the education reform class.

Here’s what you need to know about three reports released this summer on Colorado’s education plan:

The Collaborative for Student Success has the most detailed look at the state’s plan — and is the most critical.

While this organization, which worked with Bellwether Education Partners, praised Colorado for its commitment to rigorous academic standards and data reporting, it raised several red flags that are consistent with some early criticism that the federal education department has shared with other states.

Chiefly: Colorado’s long-term academic goals are based on a confusing percentile system and make no sense.

Instead of setting a goal to increase the number of students reaching proficiency on state exams, the state wants to increase its average test scores during the next six years.

While that sounds simple enough, the goals are muddled because the state has set the same goal for different student populations. Students with disabilities who historically earn the lowest test scores are expected to raise their achievement to meet the state average. Meanwhile, Asian students who historically outperform the state would need to lose ground in order for the state to meet its goals.

The goals, the organization says, are “difficult for parents, educators and the public to understand, (do) not set strong expectations for all schools and all groups of students to improve, and may not be ambitious” enough.

The group also raised serious concerns about the state’s lack of detail in several areas, including how the state would weigh different factors that determine school quality.

Throughout the development of the plan, Colorado officials repeatedly said that they intended to provide limited responses to the federal education department’s questionnaire, which guided the plan’s development.

That’s because they believed the new education law’s intent was to provide states with greater flexibility and less federal oversight. Therefore, Colorado officials reasoned, the federal education department didn’t need an excessive level of detail.

What’s more, the federal law does give states the opportunity to continually update and amend their plans. That’s something Colorado plans to do as it receives guidance from the federal government and the state legislature.

Colorado’s plan continues to garner praise from the center-right Fordham Institute.

The folks at the Fordham Institute can’t say enough good things about Colorado’s plan. The Washington D.C.-based nonprofit came out early with an editorial praising the plan’s development. Now they are giving Colorado strong marks across the board.

Fordham graded state plans in three areas regarding school quality ratings: were they clear, focused on all students and fair to schools that serve mostly poor students?

What really gets Fordham revved up is Colorado’s switch to a normative approach of rating schools. Most states rate schools based on how many students meet or exceed a certain proficiency standard on annual English and math tests. Colorado rates schools based on a school’s average score on those tests. The closer the school is to the overall state average, the better the quality score.

Fordham and state officials believe this move requires schools to focus on the performance of all students, not just those who are near the proficiency line. Critics argue that the measure can be misleading.

Colorado is one of eight states to include a variety of “promising practices.” But it’s not the leading the pack.

A third group, Results for America, took a slightly different approach in critiquing the first batch of state plans. Working with the Council of Chief State School Officers, Results for America identified 13 strategies states could use in their plans as ways to improve student learning.

Strategies include giving federal tax dollars only to schools that are using proven reform methods and creating a state system to support school turnaround efforts.

Colorado’s plan included four of the 13 strategies. Meanwhile, New Mexico is using nine and Tennessee is using seven.

Colorado’s plan was recognized for requiring schools to create annual improvement plans that are based on proven techniques and consolidating multiple grant applications for school improvement work into one.

Network of education reformers continue to help shape governor’s race in Colorado

2017-07-18T20:55:06+00:00

Education-oriented donors continued to play an outsized role in the latest fundraising round of a governor’s race where all leading Democratic candidates have strong connections to Colorado schools.

Former state Sen. Michael Johnston, a Denver Democrat and a national figure in the education reform community, added another $301,000 to his campaign between April 1 and June 30, new records show. More than $200,000 came from outside of Colorado.

National donors included Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix and a charter school supporter, and Michelle Yee, an education researcher and wife of the co-founder of LinkedIn. Both have a history of giving to education reform candidates and causes in Colorado.

Locally, civic leader and megadonor Daniel Ritchie also gave to Johnston.

Johnston, who grew his war chest substantially in the last round by tapping his wide network of supporters across the country, has raised nearly $1 million since January.

But the Democrat who raised the most during the last quarter, according to reports filed Monday, was Cary Kennedy, the author of a 2000 state constitutional amendment mandating that Colorado annually increase spending on schools.

Kennedy, a former state treasurer, raised nearly $340,000 between April 1 and June 30. This puts her in a much stronger position to compete than some insiders originally thought.

Johnston’s continued nationwide support and Kennedy’s early fundraising success faced strong competition from the personal wealth of U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, a multi-millionaire who has helped start charter schools and once chaired the State Board of Education.

He reported $274,155 in donations, including $250,000 that he donated to himself.

Colorado has strict limits on campaign donations, which favor wealthy individuals who can self-fund a campaign.

The competitive race has already seen one dropout, U.S. Congressman Ed Perlmutter. The Jefferson County Democrat was the supposed frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. But he dropped out of the race earlier this month.

Noel Ginsburg, a Denver businessman who leads a nonprofit focused on apprenticeships, reported $92,792 in new contributions.

Political observers predict the race to succeed Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, will be the most expensive in history. And with unaffiliated voters making up a third of the state’s electorate, both parties see paths to claim the governor’s mansion.

The Republican field is still forming but so far features District Attorney George Brauchler, former state lawmaker Victor Mitchell, and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s nephew Doug Robinson.

Robinson raised the most during the fundraising quarter: $207,532. Brauchler reported raising $183,398. And Mitchell raised a little more than $15,000.

But Mitchell has more cash on hand than any other candidate — Democrat or Republican — after loaning his campaign $3 million.

Each Republican candidate has named education as a top issue. However, the Republicans have less pronounced ties to the state’s public schools.

Colorado shied from taking aggressive action to fix its lowest performing schools. Will it be enough?

2017-07-13T23:55:16+00:00

At historic Aurora Central High School, the last few years have been a trial.

Students have described widespread fights, high truancy rates and a heavy police presence. Academic performance has suffered, with fewer than half of all students graduating on time.

The clock finally ran out on the city’s oldest school this year. After six years of academic struggles, it was time for state education officials to intervene with a plan of action.

State officials could have closed Aurora Central or handed it over to a charter school.

But instead, they chose a far more lenient path — allowing the 2,100-student high school to continue a plan that began a year ago that gives the school more flexibility from the district’s school schedule, curriculum and hiring practices. The school was required to hire a consultant to help execute the plan.

This kind of approach — relatively cautious, devised in close collaboration with local school districts and reliant on outside consultants — sums up Colorado’s strategy this year for trying to turn around five districts and a dozen schools that have persistently struggled since 2010.

This was the first year under Colorado’s current school accountability system that required the state to take such action. The strategy of working collaboratively with school leaders reflects both the power of local control in Colorado and the philosophy of a department that has evolved in recent years from one that is less strong-armed regulatory enforcer and more partner.

Colorado’s approach is part of a growing trend away from aggressive state takeovers that produced mixed results in states such as Tennessee, New Jersey and Michigan.

“States have increasingly recognized that the work of school improvement is hard,” said Ashley Jochim, a researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.

State takeover of districts and schools was not on the table in Colorado. That’s because Colorado’s constitution puts ultimate control of schools in the hands of local school boards.

State and district officials explained in some cases why more aggressive steps — such as school closure or charter school takeover — weren’t feasible given the circumstances.

But concerns have arisen — including from some members of the State Board of Education, which had the final say on the plans — that Colorado’s efforts may not be drastic enough.

“Will this program work?” Republican board member Steve Durham asked while discussing the plan to improve Westminster Public Schools, a district with more than 9,000 students northwest of Denver. “I hope so. But I’m not sure it’s the kind of change that can ensure that.”

Van Schoales, CEO of A-Plus Colorado, an education reform advocacy group, said the state gave the schools and districts a pass.

“Nobody is losing their job, no one is forced to hand over a building,” he said. “I just think it’s outrageous and systemic. There were a lot of options — and the state board and CDE decided not to take them.”

No ‘silver bullet’

The 2009 law that created Colorado’s current accountability system gave the state board four options. It could direct schools be closed; turned over to a charter operator; redesigned under the state’s innovation law, which would give the school some flexibility from state law and district policies; or be managed in part or completely by an education management company.

The state also had the option to order a school district with too many low-performing schools to merge with a nearby district with higher test scores — a step officials did not take.

Colorado Education Commissioner Katy Anthes acknowledged the challenges of choosing a course.

“What kept me up at night was that these are high-stakes decisions that affect real students and teachers and educators in these systems,” she said. “The toughest decision was making a decision, because you know there isn’t one silver bullet and there isn’t one right answer.”

As the state prepared to intervene, it appeared the favored course would be to allow districts and schools to radically redesign under the innovation law. The law allows for freedom in curriculum decisions, different school calendars, and makes it easier to hire and fire teachers.

But state board members and department officials grew worried the struggling schools were in no position to manage those responsibilities on their own.

In three cases, the state board approved a school’s innovation plan on the condition it also contract with a management partner to help put it in place. The state also directed six schools and districts not seeking innovation waivers to contract with an outside group for assistance.

“The state board found (innovation) as a strong option, as there would be some dramatic change,” said Brenda Bautsch Dickhoner, a state education department official who helped shepherd this year’s accountability hearings. “But we also want to make sure” the schools had strong leadership and necessary help putting the plans in place, she said.

While state officials may believe the combination of innovation status and external help could prove fruitful, one observer cautioned that the strategy poses risks.

“Schools often adopt a million different strategies, not recognizing that some of those are incompatible with each other,” said Lorrie Shepard, the former dean of the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. “New leaders sometimes want a million of those things. Incoherence is bad, and only adds to the churn and the chaos in schools.”

The amount of authority each management partner will have varies from school to school. The Aguilar School District turned over considerable decision-making power to its partner, Generation Schools Network, a nonprofit organization that works in Denver and New York.

Westminster’s partnership with AdvancED will involve a more traditional consultant role, in which the outside officials will review and make recommendations to the district on how to better see through its unique approach to learning. AdvancEd has accredited the district, and officials told the state they will pull that accreditation if the district doesn’t meet their standards.

In some cases, like with Pueblo City Schools and the Adams 14 School District, the state board pushed for management companies to have more authority than the districts had envisioned.

During the process, department officials said that some options were just not viable.

State documents outlining recommendations for changes to schools and districts said that closing schools was not a good idea, in many cases because a better alternative was not available nearby. Other schools could not absorb such a large number of displaced students.

Turning over schools to charter operators was a nonstarter for many school districts, according to district officials.

Deirdre Pilch, superintendent of the Greeley school district, told the state board during a hearing that high-performing charter networks were not interested in taking over her schools.

Pilch said the former superintendent approached at least one high-performing charter network and was told Greeley’s low student funding wouldn’t support its model. Greeley voters have never approved local property tax increases, known as mill levy overrides, for school funding.

“They are not coming,” said Pilch, whose district does have seven existing charter schools. “So you know what? The work is on us. It is our job to take care of our kids.”

Dan Schaller, director of governmental affairs for the Colorado League of Charter Schools, challenged that contention.

“We’ve got charter schools operating all across the state in different districts and they make it work,” Schaller said. He added that “the real question” is whether school districts are willing to share available money with all schools or hold some back from charters.

Board member Durham, at one hearing, cited a lack of time as a barrier to charter schools playing a greater role. He said that by the time the board reviewed options, it was too late to suggest a charter school take over a school program in just a matter of months.

Schaller agreed, and added that charter school operators in Colorado are interested in playing a larger role in the turnaround of low-performing schools.

“It just has to be a much longer-term conversation,” he said.

The education department is considering options to make charter schools part of the mix moving forward. Charters receive tax dollars but are run independently of school districts.

One possibility is the state requesting proposals months in advance from charter groups that would volunteer to take over one or more schools in a certain region.

Working together — and the trouble that brings

In 2010, the Colorado Department of Education began a philosophical shift under the direction of then-commissioner Robert Hammond. The department would be less focused on making sure schools and districts are complying with state law and more focused on supporting their efforts.

That’s a philosophical approach Anthes, the current commissioner, continues to embrace.

“This is a human relationship-driven, complex endeavor,” Anthes said. “I find interacting positively, working toward a common goal, will bring us to a higher quality outcome faster. And that’s my North Star: higher quality outcomes the fastest way possible.”

In an effort to support schools — and avoid the political and emotional conflict typical of school improvement efforts — the department created a grant program for schools and districts to develop their own plan that the state board could endorse.

Javier Abrego, superintendent of Adams 14, called the state’s approach a wise decision that his community appreciated.

“Allowing us to choose our own pathway, I thought that was a very important strategy,” Abrego said. “It gave us ownership. They didn’t mandate anything.”

Other states, including Massachusetts and Tennessee, are experimenting with similar approaches, hoping that better involving communities into the school improvement process will yield better results than more heavy-handed takeovers. In both states, however, the education department has considerably more sway over how schools are run compared to Colorado.

The dual role Colorado plays in holding schools accountable and supporting school improvement efforts brings a host of problems, said Jochim, the Washington state-based researcher.

“When you’re charged with holding people accountable, can you also take responsibility for guiding the improvement process?” she said. “It’s tough to tell schools what to do, and when (they) fail you sanction them.”

Anthes said she sees the roles as complementary. She said the education department’s role is to provide guidance and expertise to help school districts complete the work.

“I do have confidence in the process and the plans that were put forward,” she said. “I’m not going to say they’re perfect. But I don’t think any intervention is the perfect solution.”

Debora Scheffel, former state board of education member, announces bid for Douglas County school board

2017-07-07T22:37:12+00:00

A conservative Republican former member of Colorado’s State Board of Education is part of a slate of four candidates running for the Douglas County school board.

Debora Scheffel, who narrowly lost her re-election bid to the state board last fall, announced her candidacy in a joint release with the other candidates.

The Douglas County school board race will be one of the most closely watched in the state this year. With four of the board’s seven seats up, the direction of Colorado’s third largest school district is on the line.

All four seats in play this year are held by members of the board’s conservative faction. So far, none of the incumbents has filed paperwork indicating an intent to run.

In 2015, three insurgent candidates running against the conservative board’s reform efforts — including a controversial private-school voucher program — won seats.

Other conservative reform school board candidates lost elections elsewhere in Colorado that year, including three Jefferson County school board members who were recalled.

Since the Douglas County school board’s ideology split in 2015, the district has been in a constant state of conflict. Scheffel’s slate, in its release, said it hopes to calm the acrimony.

“Students are impacted for life by what happens in school,” Scheffel said in the release. “I am running to ensure that Douglas County can return its focus to providing an excellent education for students of all levels throughout our district.”

Scheffel’s three running mates are Randy Mills, an electrician; Grant Nelson, a commercial real estate developer; and Ryan Abresch, a legal analyst. All three men either had or have students enrolled in Douglas County schools.

Two other Douglas County residents have filed paperwork to run for school board: Krista Holtzmann and Kevin Leung. Neither was immediately available for comment Friday.

Leung is a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the board before. He declined an endorsement from the Douglas County Republican Party, saying that he believed school board elections should be nonpartisan and “not be drawn into party politics.”

From CSAP to PARCC, here’s how Colorado’s standardized tests have changed (and what’s next)

2017-07-05T23:34:39+00:00

For more than two decades, Colorado public school students have taken annual tests to measure how well they’ve mastered the state’s English and math learning standards.

The spring tests have evolved since 1997, when they were first given to fourth graders. These days, they’re measuring whether students met updated standards that emphasize critical thinking and are usually taken on a computer or tablet, not with paper and pencil.

Now the state’s tests are about to change again — for the third time in seven years.

Last month, the state education department announced it would back away from the multi-state testing partnership known as PARCC to begin developing its own English and math tests with help from the international testing conglomerate Pearson. The British-based company already helps the state design and administer its social studies and science tests. Pearson also provides the technology used to give the PARCC test.

State officials said the multi-year transition should cause little disruption. Beginning next spring, Colorado students are expected to take an abbreviated PARCC test. Then in 2019, the state will use a sampling of questions purchased from PARCC and new questions it develops with Pearson’s help.

One of the goals of the protracted transition is to maintain year-to-year comparability between tests. Colorado uses the results of the tests to measure school quality, and in some cases teacher ratings. If the tests were to be completely overhauled as they were in 2015, the state would lose a year of data, forcing a pause on school ratings.

How did we get here? Here’s a timeline of the past, present and (anticipated) future of Colorado’s standardized tests.

1993

Colorado lawmakers require the state education department to develop academic standards and tests to measure how well students know those standards. The tests were known as the Colorado Student Assessment Program, or CSAP.

1997

The CSAP is given for the first time to fourth grade students. Additional grades were added in later years.

2001

President George W. Bush signs the No Child Left Behind Act into law. The landmark legislation requires states to test every student in grades three through eight and once in high school in the subjects of math and English. Testing in Colorado is expanded to meet federal requirements, which also included math tests for third and fourth graders, and science tests for fifth and 10th grade students.

Students practice taking the CSAP in 2002. (Denver Post file photo)

Colorado high school juniors are required to take the ACT, a college entrance exam. Previously, the test was voluntary.

2008

Colorado lawmakers order an update to the state’s academic standards and new tests to measure how well students are learning.

2010

Colorado adopts new academic standards, including the Common Core State Standards. The national standards, created by association groups of governors and education commissioners, put a greater emphasis on critical thinking in both math and English.

2012

Colorado students begin taking a new English and math test, the Transitional Colorado Assessment Program, or TCAP. The test was meant to bridge the gap between the state’s previous academic standards and the new ones.

Colorado becomes a governing member of PARCC, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. Begun with seed money from the federal government, PARCC is one of two multi-state efforts that built new tests to measure how well students are learning the Common Core standards.

2014

Seniors at Fairview High School in Boulder protested a standardized test in November 2014. (Photo by Nic Garcia/Chalkbeat)

Colorado launches its new science and social studies tests on computers. The tests are given to students in one grade each in elementary, middle and high schools. The online tests were a break from the pencil and paper tests of the past.

Some high school seniors refuse to take the tests, making Colorado one of the national centers of the testing opt-out movement.

2015

Before Colorado gives its first PARCC tests, state lawmakers go to work reducing the number of tests public school students take. Lawmakers reach a last-minute compromise that scales back testing in high school.

Colorado becomes one of a dozen states to give the inaugural PARCC tests. School districts in mostly suburban and rural areas report a large number of students opting out of the tests.

As a result of the legislative testing compromise, the Colorado Department of Education announces a shift from the ACT to the SAT college prep exam for high school juniors, and to the PSAT for sophomores.

2016

Colorado high school sophomores take the PSAT test for the first time, while high school juniors take the ACT for the last time.

The State Board of Education directs the state education department to take bids for a new math and English test for grades three through eight. The board outlines three goals: make the tests shorter, get results back quicker and give Colorado exclusive authority over the design of the tests.

2017

Colorado lawmakers continue to tweak the state’s testing system: They scrap the PARCC test for ninth graders, in favor of a test aligned to the SAT.

Colorado juniors take the SAT for the first time.

The state education department announces that the textbook and testing company Pearson won a competitive bid to help the state develop and administer its own English and math tests. The company also will continue to administer the state’s social studies and science tests.

The department begins working with teachers to develop new questions for English and math tests.

2018

Colorado will begin its transition away from PARCC, working with the organization to limit the length of the final round of tests to meet the expectations of the state board. The state is also working with PARCC to have student results returned sooner. However, the 2018 math and English tests will be largely unchanged.

The state will complete it review of its academic standards, informing any additional changes to the state’s tests.

2019

Colorado, working with Pearson, will take sole control over the design of the state’s English and math tests. The state plans to purchase some questions from the PARCC organization, as well as develop new test questions with Pearson. Colorado officials said they plan to only purchase questions from PARCC that were developed with Colorado teachers.

Update: This post was updated to clarify that Pearson provides the technology to administer the PARCC tests, which Colorado currently uses.

Colorado, a closer look at how your school spends tax dollars is coming Friday

2017-06-29T22:33:35+00:00

Coloradans will have a chance to better understand how the state’s public schools are spending tax dollars Friday when the state education department launches a new website that tracks annual financial data.

Commissioned by state lawmakers in 2014, the website reports how much money each school and district collects from federal, state and local taxes, and donations — including those given to charter schools.

The website also charts how each school spends the money on a long list of categories such as personnel, technology and food programs.

The site is the latest development in a multi-year effort to better explain Colorado’s complex school funding system and how schools use their tax dollars. Schools and districts have been required to publish budgets, credit card statements and check registers since 2010.

The new financial details and website put Colorado ahead of most states in school financial reporting.

All states will soon be required to submit school-level financial data to the federal government. The new and rarely discussed mandate is part of the nation’s education laws, which were updated in 2015 with the Every Student Succeed Act.

The financial data in Colorado — and soon across the nation — is a boon for civil rights and education activists who have long argued that poor communities are being short changed by wealthier white communities that have political clout.

“This level of information will show us how school boards divide up their mega budgets,” said Marguerite Roza, a research professor at Georgetown University who studies school finance policies. “And if it’s not equitable, then schools should be engaged in knowing that and speaking up on their behalf.”

Colorado is one of a few states that allocates more money for students with greater learning needs. However, inequities still exist in the state’s funding system.

Part of the inequity stems from mill levy overrides. Those are local voter-approved tax increases that wealthier school districts such as Cherry Creek and Boulder have little trouble passing.

But voters in school districts such as Greeley and Pueblo, which both serve large populations of poor students, have never approved such an increase.

One shortcoming of the site, Roza said, is the dearth of academic data.

Student data “should be paired with spending,” she said. “You can’t look at outcomes in the absence of costs and you can’t look at costs in the absence of outcomes.”

The legislation that established the new website did not call for academic data to be part of the website. State education department officials said they expect the website to continue to evolve after it becomes public.

One aspect of the site that could prove popular is a feature that allows side-by-side comparisons of how schools and districts spend their money. That worries some who work in education, however.

“It’s fun to do the comparisons,” said Diane Doney, chief financial officer for Littleton Public Schools, which helped the state test the website. “But I really think there is a danger when you start comparing raw numbers and try to make some sort of conclusion about what you’re seeing.”

Doney stressed caution in making comparisons for two reasons.

First, the website does not include student demographic information or other reasons why one school district might receive more money on a per student basis. Small rural school districts, for example, often receive twice the amount of money per student from the state that a large urban district receives.

Second, schools and districts allocate money in different ways. One school district might budget all of its reading coaches at the district level, while a nearby district might allocate that cost at the school level, Doney said.

Users of the website should call their school leader or district finance department if they have questions the website can’t answer, she said.

The website launches about three weeks before a group of lawmakers are scheduled to begin debating how the state should update its school funding system. Part of the conversation is expected to be whether Colorado is spending enough on its schools, or whether schools need to spend tax dollars differently.

Meanwhile, another coalition advocating for more money for schools is working on a potential 2018 ballot initiative.

“I do think the website will start the conversation that will be healthy for parents and constituents,” said Jennifer Okes, executive director of school finance at the Colorado Department of Education. “For the most part, schools are making really good use of their limited resources. This will show where they really are investing their dollars.”

On Friday, the site will contain financial information from the 2015-2016 school year. The site will be updated each year before July 1 with the preceding school year’s finances.

Colorado Supreme Court ordered to reconsider Douglas County school voucher case

2017-06-27T23:50:52+00:00

The Colorado Supreme Court must reconsider its ruling against a private school voucher system created by the Douglas County School District, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Tuesday.

The edict comes a day after the nation’s highest court issued a ruling on a case that touched on similar issues.

At issue is whether Douglas County parents can use tax dollars to send their students to private schools, including religious schools. The Colorado Supreme Court said in 2015 the program violated the state’s constitution.

What connects the Douglas County voucher debate to the just-decided Trinity Lutheran v. Comer case from Missouri is that both states have so-called Blaine Amendments. Such provisions prohibit state tax dollars from aiding religious practices. Nearly 40 states have similar language.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that the state of Missouri violated the U.S. Constitution by prohibiting Trinity Lutheran’s church-run preschool from participating in a state program that repaved playgrounds. The court found that the state must allow churches to participate in state programs when the benefit meets a secular need.

That distinction likely will be the question the Colorado Supreme Court wrestles with when it takes up the issue again.

“The Supreme Court in Trinity Lutheran expressly noted that its opinion does not address religious uses of government funding,” Mark Silverstein, the ACLU of Colorado’s legal director, said in a statement. The ACLU was one of the organizations challenging the voucher program.

“Using public money to teach religious doctrine to primary and secondary students is substantially different than using public money to resurface a playground,” Silverstein said.

The school district said it was encouraged by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision.

“We look forward to the Colorado Supreme Court’s second review and decision on this important matter,” William Trachman, the district’s legal counsel, said in a statement. “As always, the Douglas County School District is dedicated to empowering parents to find the best educational options for their children.”

It’s unclear when the Colorado Supreme Court will take up the Douglas County case. The court has three options: It may revise its earlier opinion, request new arguments from both sides or ask a lower court to reconsider the case.

Given the national implications, it’s unlikely the Colorado justices will have the final say — especially if they again conclude the voucher program violates the state’s constitution. The question could end up being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Douglas County School District launched its voucher program in 2011 after a conservative majority took control of the school board. The district was prepared to hand out more than 300 vouchers to families before a Denver District Court judge blocked the program from starting.

These 10 Colorado lawmakers are rethinking how the state pays for its public schools

2017-06-27T21:12:22+00:00

Ten Colorado lawmakers, many with longstanding ties to the education community, are set to begin debating the future of Colorado’s school finance system.

The legislative group tasked with studying and making recommendations about how the state pays for public education includes former teachers and superintendents, a former State Board of Education member and a practicing charter school lawyer.

State Rep. Alec Garnett, a Denver Democrat, will lead the committee during its first year.

Garnett helped establish the committee earlier this year when he co-sponsored House Bill 1340 with state Rep. Paul Lundeen, a Monument Republican. Lundeen also will serve on the panel.

State Sen. Owen Hill, a Colorado Springs Republican, will be the vice-chair.

The committee was formed against a backdrop of fear that the state’s schools would face deep budget cuts next school year. However, lawmakers at the last minute averted putting the state’s schools in an even deeper financial hole.

Still, lawmakers from both parties and members of the state’s education community agree the funding system is outdated and in need of a massive overhaul. The state last made significant changes to the system in 1994.

The committee’s first meeting is scheduled for July 24. Among its first decisions will be selecting a third-party consultant to help with research and guide discussions and decisions.

Here’s the full committee:

State Rep. Alec Garnett, Denver Democrat, chair
State Sen. Owen Hill, Colorado Springs Republican, vice chair
State Sen. Janet Buckner, Aurora Democrat
State Sen. Bob Gardner, Colorado Springs Republican
State Rep. Millie Hamner, Frisco Democrat
State Rep. Timothy Leonard, Evergreen Republican
State Rep. Paul Lundeen, Monument Republican
State Sen. Michael Merrifield, Colorado Springs Democrat
State Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, Sterling Republican
State Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, Arvada Democrat

Douglas County voucher supporters encouraged by Supreme Court decision in similar case

2017-06-26T23:48:24+00:00

A significant U.S. Supreme Court ruling Monday on a church-state issue opens a new chapter in a court fight over a Douglas County private school voucher program, with both supporters and opponents finding encouragement in the high court’s decision.

The court ruled that the state of Missouri violated the U.S. Constitution when it barred a church-run preschool from participating in a state program that repaved playgrounds.

While the court’s narrow 7-2 decision fell far short of legalizing private school voucher programs, it still has implications for the Douglas County program, which the state Supreme Court rejected.

Most likely, observers said, the Douglas County case will be kicked back to the Colorado Supreme Court for examination under the precedent the U.S. Supreme Court set with its new ruling. Or the U.S. Supreme Court could hear the case, the preferred outcome of voucher backers who would like to set a more sweeping precedent for their cause.

“This is a huge victory for folks who are believers in religious liberty,” said Ross Izard, a senior education policy analyst at the Independence Institute, a Denver-based free-market think tank. “Unfortunately for those of us who are invested in the school choice movement, it doesn’t accomplish everything we hoped it would.”

The legal fight over vouchers has engulfed the suburban school district south of Denver since 2011. That’s when a new conservative school board established the Choice Scholarship Program.

Unlike other voucher programs, which are designed to provide low-income families with educational alternatives, the Douglas County program was opened to all students in the district with a median household income of $107,650.

Lawyers representing the Douglas County School District and families who participated in the voucher program before it was halted by a lower court said they expect the Supreme Court to decide this week whether they’ll take up the years long debate over the voucher program.

“We’re certainly encouraged,” said William Trachman, general counsel for the Douglas County School District. “The policy reasons that underlie the program are to give students educational choice. That’s what Douglas County cares about.”

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that the Douglas County School District’s voucher program, which would have allowed parents to use taxpayer dollars to send their students to private religious schools, was unconstitutional.

The state’s constitution includes a provision that forbids tax dollars to be used by religious institutions. Colorado is one 38 states that have these so-called Blaine Amendments.

The district, along with three Douglas County families and Colorado’s attorney general, later appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court has held the case for nearly two years as it considered the Missouri case, Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer.

In that case, Trinity Lutheran sued the state of Missouri after it prohibited the church from participating in a state program that used recycled tires to resurface playgrounds.

The U.S. Supreme Court said the state could not prohibit the church from participating in the program since the benefit of the program — new asphalt for the playground — was secular and did not further the church’s religious mission.

That’s an important distinction opponents to the Douglas County voucher program highlighted in reacting to the decision.

“The majority opinion in Trinity Lutheran explicitly distinguished the facts in that case from cases like ours where government funds run afoul of state anti-establishment clauses because the funds are being used to pay for religious education,” Cindy Barnard, president of Taxpayers for Public Education, a nonprofit that supports traditional public schools, in a statement. Barnard was the original plaintiff in the Douglas County voucher case.

Mark Silverstein, legal director of the Colorado ACLU, one of the organizations that argued against the voucher program, echoed Barnard.

“The Douglas County school district’s voucher program violated the state’s constitution as of yesterday. It violates the state constitution even today,” he said. “This case today is not about using public money for religious indication. And that’s a distinction I believe most of the justices see as important.”

Pueblo schools must give more authority to management group, state board says

2017-06-15T21:57:19+00:00

The State Board of Education on Thursday gave an outside nonprofit group significant authority in efforts to improve three Pueblo schools.

The group, Achievement Network, or ANet, will have the power to determine the schools’ schedules, tests, and teacher and leadership training.

The board also ordered Pueblo City Schools to submit redesign plans for two of the schools — Bessemer Elementary and Heroes Academy — under the state’s innovation law. That would give the schools flexibility from some state and local policies.

A third middle school, Risley International, already has innovation status.

Thursday’s final plan is not far off from what Pueblo officials had originally suggested to improve student learning. But the board, concerned with high turnover among teachers, principals and district leaders, pushed to give ANet more authority.

Pueblo officials at a meeting earlier this week described its relationship with ANet as a “partnership.” But state board members challenged the idea of giving Superintendent Charlotte Macaluso, and not ANet, final say on a variety of issues.

ANet “needs to be the ultimate decision-maker,” board member Joyce Rankin, a Carbondale Republican, said Wednesday.

Dalton Sprouse, a spokesman for the 17,000-student district, said officials would review the board’s decision with its lawyers.

“There’s still some clarification that we need. We’ll be working on that throughout the day and the coming weeks,” he said. “But for the most part, we’re excited that we get to move forward with our innovation plans and with the partnership with have ANet.”

Under Colorado law, low-performing schools and school districts that fail to improve student learning within five years face state-directed improvement plans. The state board’s decision to approve the Pueblo plan was the last it will consider this year.

A year ago, Pueblo was expected to be the state’s greatest challenge, with more than a dozen schools on the state’s accountability watchlist for persistent low performance. A last-minute boost in test scores saved most of the city’s schools — and the district itself — from state intervention. That left the three schools the state board considered Thursday.

Throughout the spring, the board directed most of the state’s low-performing schools and districts to either develop an innovation plan or contract with a third-party to take over some operations of the schools or districts. In the case of Pueblo, it did both.

The state could have taken more aggressive steps, but didn’t. Officials could have ordered that a charter school take over a failing school, or forced a low-performing district to either split up or merge with a nearby high-performing district

The scope of each state-ordered innovation plan and partnership agreement varies widely between school to school. Pueblo’s management plan is one of the most specific about the authority the management organization has, and had the most input from the state board.

“I feel as though we’ve all learned together,” said state board chairwoman Angelika Schroeder, a Boulder Democrat. We’ve tried to be true to the intent of the legislation. There’s an element of faith to all of this — the commitments that are being made to us, work that is going to be done by outside vendors that is going to helpful to school districts. But I’m optimistic.”

Schools and districts that met with the state board this year will have either one or two years to show improvement or face more drastic direction from the state.

Colorado backing away from PARCC English and math tests, forging its own path

2017-06-14T16:57:08+00:00

Colorado will begin shifting away from standardized tests developed as part of a controversial multi-state effort and toward tests developed mostly by Colorado educators.

The move, one consequence of a contract announced Wednesday by the state education department, will end Colorado’s membership in PARCC, one of two multi-state testing collectives that were supposed to allow for easy comparison across states but have fallen short of that promise.

However, Colorado will likely keep using some PARCC questions in the math and English tests given to students in grades three through eight, said Joyce Zurkowski, the Colorado Department of Education’s executive director of assessment. Doing so would ensure the state could track student academic growth data and continue rating schools without pause.

“We’re not tossing everything out and starting from scratch,” Zurkowski said. But “we are expecting that Colorado educators will be much more involved throughout the development process — and we’re going to need more Colorado educators to be involved in the process.”

The break from PARCC grew out of a December directive from the State Board of Education that the education department find a vendor that could reduce testing time, provide results within 30 days and give the state authority over test questions and administration policies.

That effectively ruled out sticking with PARCC because Colorado is but one founding member of the group’s governing board and can’t dictate all terms of the test.

State education officials said the multi-year transition on the math and English tests will begin next spring and should cause little disruption to classrooms.

State officials announced Wednesday that the multinational testing and technology company Pearson had won a competitive bidding process to administer the math and English tests. Pearson administers the current PARCC tests along with the state’s science and social studies tests, which are given annually to students in one grade in elementary, middle and high school.

“Because Pearson has been already providing the testing services for CMAS (the state’s tests) for a number of years, the transition to the new contract should be seamless for educators and students,” Katy Anthes, Colorado’s education commissioner, said in a statement. “Educators and students are familiar with Pearson’s systems, so this will allow them to continue to concentrate on teaching and learning the Colorado Academic Standards, which is the content assessed by the tests.”

Results from next year’s tests will be comparable to past CMAS results because the standards, test questions and scoring are not dramatically changing, officials said.

Colorado has already changed math and English testing twice in the past decade, making comparing past results extremely difficult — if not impossible. Officials say it won’t be the case now because this is essentially a contract change. However, more significant test changes may need to be considered after the state’s academic standards revision process is completed in 2018.

Board member Steve Durham, a Colorado Springs Republican who led the effort to abandon PARCC, was critical of the decision to continue using Pearson as the state’s testing administrator.

He pressed the department to ensure Pearson could deliver on the board’s directive, especially limiting testing time to eight hours and delivering results quickly.

“It simply can’t run on for days or weeks as it did,” he said, referring to the amount of time some schools needed to complete the tests.

A 13-member panel comprised of Colorado school administrators and education department staff reviewed bids from Pearson and one other company, Questar.

Pearson, the world’s largest textbook and testing company, has been criticized for its extensive lobbying practices to win business from states and school districts.

Zurkowski said the panel choose Pearson because of its user friendliness, superior technology to provide interactive question online and data privacy protections.

“Knowing our current legislation, and our board’s priorities in that area, we couldn’t go backward,” Zurkowski said, referring to Pearson’s ability to protect student data.

Reaction of the state’s announcement was mixed.

Reilly Pharo Carter, executive director of the nonprofit education reform group Climb Higher Colorado, said the state’s decision was another step toward re-engaging families in the state’s testing system.

“We are seeing continued buy-in to our system of statewide assessments as a result of ongoing, thoughtful adjustments made by our state board, state Department of Education and legislature,” she said in a statement. “Most importantly, these changes simultaneously protect rigorous assessments aligned to the education standards and ensure continuity for our students, educators and systems of accountability.”

Angela Engel, a leader in the testing opt-out movement and founder of the nonprofit Uniting4Kids, said the change did little to alleviate her concerns about the role of standardized testing in schools.

“This new direction by the State Board of Education is simply another version of a bad idea,” she said in a statement. “Colorado has already changed test vendors, test names, and test styles – all with the same failed outcomes. Innovation and equity require an entirely different approach than administering a test.”

The state’s testing contract with Pearson can be renewed annually until 2024.

Under federal law, states must give English and math tests in grades three through eight and once in high school. They must also test students in science once in elementary, middle and high school.

Results are used to measure school quality. Schools and districts that repeatedly fall short are subject to state-ordered improvement plans — a process that has taken center stage this year at the state Board of Education. Results in some cases are also used to measure teacher performance.

The state had to make decisions about the future of its testing system; the state’s multiple contracts with Pearson and the PARCC organization began expiring this spring.

Colorado was one of the founding members of PARCC, which formed to develop tests measuring student’s mastery of Common Core academic standards in math and English.

PARCC became the focus of protest two years ago as part of a wave of anti-testing backlash. Large number of high school students, especially, opted out of PARCC tests, starting a long conversation that resulted in legislation that reduced the volume of state tests.

Colorado will become the latest in a long line of founding members of PARCC to leave the consortium. Five states and Washington, D.C., remain as governing members.

Because Colorado is no longer a member of the consortium, it will have no say in the development of the new questions that the group develops. State officials said they plan to only purchase test items from PARCC that Colorado teachers helped develop.