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, and a separate, daily newsletter during the legislative session. Sign up for either or both on our home page.
• 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 understand how policy interacts with the on-the-ground realities of public education.

This site, produced by the Public Education and Business Coalition, is sponsored by The Daniels Fund, The Piton Foundation, The Colorado Health Foundation, the Donnell-Kay Foundation, the Colorado Children’s Campaign and the Colorado League of Charter Schools.

We share a deep interest in education with our partners, but Education News Colorado does not represent particular points of view about governance, curriculum, testing, financing or any other education issue. We do plan to 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.

We believe Education News Colorado provides the most complete and thought-provoking coverage of education available in Colorado, and provides a national model for issue-area coverage in the era of online news.

Here are quick bios of the EdNews staff:

Alan Gottlieb, editor 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.

Todd Engdahl, capitol editor of Education News Colorado, 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 Education News 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.

Nancy Mitchell, EdNews staff writer, has written about K-12 education for a dozen years in Florida and Colorado. She and Burt Hubbard, now with The Denver Post, 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.

Among them, Nancy, Todd and Alan have over five decades of experience in Colorado journalism and public policy.

Education and journalism both are in an era of change. Our commitment is to cover education change with a changed type of journalism.

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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.