Welcome to Education News Colorado, the only news service devoted to continuing, in-depth coverage of education policymaking in the legislature and state government and to comprehensive coverage and serious analysis of such issues as school choice, accountability and education reform.
Our goal is to provide the kind of detailed, balanced news and analysis that readers don’t get from interest groups and professional associations or from the commercial media.
- We offer breaking news briefs and detailed stories, as well as reporting on education lobbying and analysis of the latest education studies by Colorado research and advocacy organizations.
- We offer real-time tracking of education bills in the legislature.
- We offer two weekly newsletters on education issues, a brief daily email of what’s new on the site and a separate, daily newsletter during the legislative session. Sign up here.
- For lively commentary, there’s our blog.
Education News Colorado is designed to allow its readers to follow education policy as it’s being made and to help them understand how policy interacts with the on-the-ground realities of public education.
Organization and funding
This site is a division of the non-profit Public Education and Business Coalition. EdNews is funded by grants from The Daniels Fund, The Piton Foundation, The Colorado Health Foundation, the Donnell-Kay Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the Carson Foundation. Our paid sponsors are the Colorado Association of School Boards, the Colorado Association of School Executives, the Colorado Education Association, the Colorado League of Charter Schools and RBC Capital Markets. We also solicit membership donations and have received donations from over 100 individuals.
We share a deep interest in education with our partners but the news side of Education News Colorado does not represent particular points of view about governance, curriculum, testing, financing or any other education issue. We cover education with a bit more verve and attitude than traditional outlets but our overarching goal is to give our readers the kind of complete information they need.
Our opinion and commentary blog, like the op-ed section of a newspaper, is editorially separate from our news section. Contributors to the blog include EdNews publisher Alan Gottlieb, whose opinions are his alone and do not represent editorial positions of the EdNews staff , website, funders or sponsors. Other blog contributors represent a range of opinions and beliefs about education, and their positions are theirs alone. We aim to be a forum for a diversity of thought on education issues.
We believe Education News Colorado provides the most complete and thought-provoking coverage of education available in Colorado – and a national model for issue-area coverage in the era of online news.
Staff members
Alan Gottlieb, publisher of Education News Colorado, spent 15 years as a newspaper journalist before moving into the world of education policy.
From 1997 until June 2007, Gottlieb served as education program officer at The Piton Foundation in Denver. Among other endeavors during that time, Alan launched and supported programs and initiatives that promoted socio-economic school integration.
Gottlieb also founded and edited The Term Paper, a Piton publication focused on education issues. In 2006, he became editor of HeadFirst Colorado, a statewide education magazine. HeadFirst ultimately became Education News Colorado.
From 1988-97, Gottlieb was a reporter with The Denver Post. His work focused primarily on urban social issues, including public housing, homelessness, and, from 1995-7, Denver Public Schools. His coverage of DPS earned several statewide journalism awards.
Gottlieb is the author of In the Shadow of the Rockies (Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1994), a book about the inaugural season of Denver’s Major League baseball team. His first novel, Ultimate Excursions (Paandaa Entertainment), was published in 2008.
A native of Chicago’s South Side, Gottlieb has a B.A. in English for The Colorado College and an M.S.J. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Contact Alan Gottlieb at agottlieb@ednewscolorado.org.
Todd Engdahl, EdNews capitol editor, has more than three decades of experience in Colorado journalism and public affairs reporting.
His reporting on education issues in the Colorado legislature and from key state agencies like the State Board of Education and the Colorado Commission on Higher Education has brought EdNews readers a level of detail, insight and analysis unavailable in any other Colorado media outlet.
Before helping found EdNews in January 2008, Engdahl had an extensive career at The Denver Post. He covered state government and political campaigns during the 1970s and later directed political coverage as an assistant city editor.
From 1985 to 1995 he was executive city editor, supervising the newspaper’s local and state coverage.
In 1995 Engdahl started denverpost.com, Denver’s first online news site. He ran the site for eight years, taking it from an online magazine to a full web news service.
From 2003 to 2007, Engdahl was assistant editor of The Post’s editorial pages, helping guide the paper’s editorial policy, producing the Sunday Perspective section and overseeing guest commentaries for the section.
Contact Todd Engdahl at tengdahl@ednewscolorado.org.
Nancy Mitchell, news editor of EdNews, has written about K-12 education for a dozen years in Florida and Colorado. She and Burt Hubbard, now with the Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network (I-News), led the Rocky Mountain News team that put together a first-of-its-kind analysis of families leaving Denver Public Schools. The five-part series titled Leaving to Learn examined why one in four school-aged children in Denver are not enrolled in the city’s public school system and where their families are choosing to go instead. In response, DPS board members and then-Superintendent Michael Bennet published a letter acknowledging, “We will fail the vast majority of children in Denver if we try to run our schools the same old way.”
In 2005, Mitchell also was part of the Rocky team that created another first-of-its-kind analysis of students dropping out of DPS. The resulting series, titled Early Exit: Denver’s Graduation Gap, won the national Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism. Judges’ comments included: “This enlightening, comprehensive package may be the most precise and nuanced statistical portrait of dropouts that has yet been done in a big-city school district. The newspaper constructed an evaluation model that could be used by urban-school reformers who want to confront and improve their record of holding onto at-risk kids.”
Mitchell has won numerous national and state education awards for projects following new teachers in their first year on the job, examining the possible impact of a proposed statewide ballot amendment to eliminate bilingual education and analyzing the success of West Denver Preparatory Charter Middle School, which became Denver’s most successful middle school in academic growth in only two years.
Contact Nancy Mitchell at nmitchell@ednewscolorado.org.
Julie Poppen joined the EdNews team in March 2010 to help create, launch and run a new interactive section for parents interested in hot K-12 issues, from teacher quality to healthy schools.
Poppen has worked as a journalist for nearly 20 years, beginning as a reporter for City News Bureau of Chicago, a now-defunct 24/7 news service that also once employed novelist and Cat’s Cradle author Kurt Vonnegut and Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko.
Over the years, Poppen has covered a range of issues, including K-12 and higher education in Michigan and Colorado, and won a variety of awards. Most recently, she worked as a freelance writer after reporting for the Rocky Mountain News until it closed. While at the Rocky, she, EdNews colleague Nancy Mitchell and EdNews blogger Holly Yettick spent a year chronicling issues faced by newly minted teachers. At the Rocky, she also broke a story picked up worldwide in 2002 that questioned claims of genius surrounding a 6-year-old boy. At the Daily Camera in Boulder, Poppen spent a year closely monitoring the inaugural year of an innovative charter middle school that emphasized experiential education. While at the Coloradoan newspaper in Fort Collins in the mid-1990s, she broke a story about the mishandling of hazardous wastes in some Colorado State University labs.
Over the course of the years, she has written about the hazing of high school and college students, underage drinking, standardized testing and just about everything else you can imagine. Poppen also teaches journalism courses as an adjunct faculty member at her alma mater, the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Contact Julie Poppen at jpoppen@ednewscolorado.org.
Rebecca Jones, “Healthy Schools” writer for EdNews, has a long history of covering both education and health-and-fitness topics in Colorado. She was a full-time staff writer and editor for the Rocky Mountain News from 1985 to 2003, and continued to work part-time for the Rocky until its demise in 2009.
She insists that there is no beat she didn’t have at some point during her stint at the Rocky, including K-12 education, higher education, health, fitness, medicine, food, gardening, pets, cops, courts, the suburbs, the zoo and “anything else we thought we could beat the Post on.” When she wasn’t writing the stories herself, she was editing them.
Since leaving the Rocky to pursue a freelance journalism career, Jones has written for a number of publications and is a regular contributor to Health Elevations, the quarterly journal of The Colorado Health Foundation.
She is also a former staff writer for the Associated Press in Columbus, Ohio, and for newspapers in Tennessee.
Jones has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from East Tennessee State University, a master’s in journalism from Ohio State University and a Master of Divinity degree from Iliff School of Theology. And while she firmly believes there is no “higher calling” than journalism, she is also an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church and spends much of her time ministering to the homeless and advocating on behalf of the poor and the marginalized.
Contact Rebecca Jones at rjones@ednewscolorado.org.
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EdNewsColorado.org reserves the right to change its terms of use at its discretion and at any time. These terms are dated Jan. 8, 2008.
