Opinion: Why I voted no on Lobato appeal

This commentary was written by Elaine Gantz Berman, a Democrat who represents the 1st Congressional District on the State Board of Education.

I voted against appealing the Denver District Court’s Lobato decision. I cannot come up with any reasonable rationale to defend the status quo of how we fund schools, and I believe the students of Colorado deserve a first class education system. Today, we do not have a first class education system in our state.

It is time we work on these issues and develop an equitable funding system for Colorado’s public schools. The appeal only means an unnecessary delay in this important conversation. Even if the state were to prevail at the Colorado Supreme Court level, the current funding system isn’t getting the job done. The facts speak for themselves.

State board of education appeals Lobato

Updated – The State Board of Education has voted 4-3 to appeal a judge’s ruling in the Lobato school funding case.

Opinion: Key advisor explains school grades site

I recently had coffee with a friend who works in K-12 education and who had a strong negative reaction to Colorado School Grades. I was the technical advisor, data manager and analyst for Colorado School Grades, which assigned a grade to most public schools on their overall performance, achievement, and growth. It also provides other data on schools and information for parents on how to engage in school improvement.  I wanted to try and respond to my friend’s concerns here, as I think his concerns are held by others as well.

First, my friend expressed a deep suspicion that this project was not aimed at helping our public education system, but instead part of an effort to tear it down.  The project goals were outlined early in the Colorado School Grades process:

• Create a user-friendly tool that will facilitate parents’ access to school performance data.
• Use familiar, “A though F” letter grades to provide parents with a clear indication of school performance.
• Improve parents’ understanding of school performance by translating existing Colorado Department of Education (CDE) data into a more intuitive, easy-to-understand report card.
• Develop more rigorous cut points or dividing lines between grades to provide a more precise indication of school performance.
• Empower parents to make informed decisions so that they can more confidently navigate the open enrollment process and/or engage in improving their chosen school.

I see these goals as supporting our education system and I think we met many of these goals in product we produced. I can unequivocally say that those I worked with clearly voiced the belief that this effort will lead to an improved education system. I think there is a range of school performance and that being open about differences in performance is good for education.  This type of transparency helps build support for our schools.

Colorado finally wins R2T

The state has won $17.9 million of federal Race to the Top funding in its fourth attempt at the grant program

Hick appeals Lobato ruling

Gov. John Hickenlooper is appealing the Lobato court decision, but the State Board of Education is still thinking about it.

Slow and steady best on revamped evaluations

I’m often struck by the potential for progress – and for detriment – in the national movement to tie educator evaluations to student performance data. Evaluations should be the impetus for ongoing conversations and activities that lead teachers and principals to improve. Instead, unfortunately, they often become mechanical compliance exercises that can easily become punitive.

Anyone who advocates basing some portion of a teacher’s job evaluations on student performance is bound to have been sobered by early reports from some cities and states that are well along in the process of designing and rolling out such approaches. Several recent news stories from places like Chicago, Tennessee and New York reveal myriad concerns, ranging from worries by teachers about fair application of the new criteria to frustrations by principals about inadequate training, lack of confidence in the reliability of test scores and cascades of rules that reduce them to process-driven grinds.

Another theme in these stories is that some jurisdictions apparently rushed to put these complex, radically different evaluation systems in place without testing them adequately or making sure that people who would be most affected understood the new criteria. All of these factors decrease the likelihood that student growth-based evaluation systems will, in practice, empower educators or improve student achievement.

Wednesday Churn: Lobato appeal set

Updated – Gov. John Hickenlooper is appealing the Lobato court decision; State Board delays vote.

Tempered good news on K-12 funding

Improved state revenue forecasts are a nice present for school districts, but the gift isn’t as large as some might hope. With audio

Opinion: ELL students and changing minds

Additional attention to English Language Learner (ELL) students is unquestionably a good thing. Particularly given the large percentages of ELL students both in Denver and across Colorado, there can be no doubt that this is a critical issue.  There is simply not enough concerted attention on how schools support ELL students — and especially on specific strategies at both the district and school level to see what is most effective.

What there should not be, however, is opinion substituting for fact.

A recent discussion on these page does exactly that. The claim is that any attempt at quantitative assessment — through state and district tools such as School Performance Frameworks, or representation on sites like ColoradoSchoolGrades.com  – unjustly punish schools with high percentages of ELL students.

These kids, so the theory goes, don’t learn as fast as their non-ELL peers, and schools who have more of them will always do worse on academic growth.  And growth percentiles are the primary driver in most assessments.  By holding all schools equally accountable for the academic growth of their students, as a member of the Denver school board put it, these systems are shamefully guilty of:

“accountability blinders that punish schools and kids for their English-proficiency differences by trying to lump them all into the same bucket as native and fluent English speakers”

Well, there is a blindness here, but it’s not the assessments.  It’s us. Conventional wisdom dictates that including scores from ELL students will depress academic growth — and I’ll admit that I believed it as well (although to a lesser extent than some).  I doubt I’m the only one.  But we are all mistaken, as this perspective could be Exhibit A when’re blind acceptance of opinion and conjecture at the expense of data.

Tuesday Churn: Revenues improve

Updated – Growth in state revenues could soften the impact of K-12 cuts in 2012-13, legislators learned today.