Voices: Money for education
A Colorado education researcher explains why higher education and preschool need to be funding priorities in the 2013 legislative session.
Follow @ednews
EdNews Colorado
Archives for Robert Reichardt
Voices: Reforming teacher licensure
A Colorado education researcher questions a couple key findings in a report by The New Teacher Project that he believes will play a key role in revamping Colorado’s teacher licensure system.
Voices: Can evaluations do more than sort teachers?
A Littleton education researcher says newly-available evidence from two economists suggests the act of evaluating teachers can result in improved performance.
Voices: Dougco reform drama puzzling
An education researcher wonders whether Dougco’s voucher dispute and animosity with its teachers union will ultimately be good for the district.
Voices: Diving deep into SchoolChoice
Researcher Robert Reichardt has taken a close look at data gleaned from Denver’s new SchoolChoice process, and he has discerned some interesting trends.
Commentary: Choose the right policy tool
Depending on local conditions, class-size reduction or improving educator effectiveness may prove to be a more successful strategy, says a local policy expert.
Commentary: Turnaround lessons from a pilot program
This week, the Denver Post ran a three-part series on the federal school improvement grants (SIG) being used to turnaround some of Colorado’s lowest-performing schools. This article highlights many of the challenges faced in implementing these turnaround efforts, but offers little guidance to practitioners and policymakers on how to do this work well.
There are lessons to be learned from prior efforts at the Colorado Department of Education and in districts. I was part of a team of researchers from the School of Public Affairs and Augenblick, Palaich and Associates that evaluated the Pilot Closing the Achievement Gap (CTAG) grants program ran by CDE (our report can be found here). This program can be seen as precursor to current SIG efforts and provides valuable insights for practitioners.
The CTAG pilot awarded grants to six small- to medium-sized districts to close persistent achievement gaps in their schools. These districts were identified because of their large and persistent achievement gaps AND because of their perceived capacity to implement reforms. The report has 17 recommendations, but I want to highlight a few key themes.
Commentary: In-class breakfasts a promising innovation
Robert Reichardt, the former director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at CU-Denver’s School of Public Affairs, is president of R-Squared Research, LLC, a local research firm
Commentary: Diving deep into value-added study
A lot of attention has been paid to the recent work on the long term impacts of teachers by Chetty, Freidman, and Rockoff. The New York Times, EdNews Colorado, and Mother Jones all discussed this remarkable research. The researchers were able to show a correlation between value-added measures of teacher effectiveness in English and math for Grades 3 through 8 and:
- Reduced teen pregnancy rates (with larger reductions for minority and low income students).
- Increased college attendance rates.
- Increased quality of colleges attended (as measured by earnings of the college’s graduates).
- Increased lifetime earnings.
They also found that, as would be expected, movement of an effective teacher out of a school reduced the average growth of students in that school and movement of an effective teacher into a school increased the average growth of students in that school.
Finally, they showed that the removal of a low-performing teacher (bottom 5 percent of teachers) and the replacement of that teacher with an average teacher would increase the average lifetime earnings of a student in that class by $9,422.
Commentary: Options for higher ed funding
The Lobato case is a win for Colorado K-12 education. It adds weight to the call for increased funding to K-12. But is probably a loss for higher education in Colorado. Over the past decade, higher education has been the place to cut when money is needed for K-12, healthcare, human services and corrections. And in some ways this makes sense: higher education has access to another source of funding (tuition) which makes it easier to maintain operations. However, the trend is clear (with or without Lobato): unless we find a new sustainable source of money for higher education, state support for higher education will drop to near zero within the decade.
