This commentary was written by Jessica Cuthbertson, an educator with 10 years’ experience. She is a literacy coach in Aurora Public Schools and an active member of the Denver New Millennium Initiative of the Center for Teaching Quality.

How do you measure the effectiveness of an educator?

As a literacy coach I experience firsthand the multi-tasking, the magic, and the mishaps that occur in schools every day. I see teachers and kids on their best days, their worst days and all of the days in between.

I see teaching and learning in action. And I see the planning, thinking and “behind the curtain” decision-making that drives the day-to-day instruction in classrooms.

So it was with mixed feelings that I agreed to serve on the “alternative evaluation team” for three teachers this year. Would this blurring of instructional coaching and evaluation make teachers more or less responsive to collaboration and feedback? Would it foster trust and honesty or fear and fabrication?

Despite my initial reservations, being a part of each teacher’s team has strengthened our relationships and added layers of depth to our work.

This commentary was written by David Svaldi, president of Adams State College in Alamosa.

Our nation must address the problem of rising college tuition. In a January speech at the University of Michigan, President Obama cautioned institutions that continuing tuition increases could potentially result in loss of federal funds. He was clearly appealing to college and university students, as well as those recently graduated – a constituency that he carried easily in the 2008 election.

For this generation, student loan debt dwarfs any other debt. The national average student loan debt is above $25,000 – 47 percent higher than a decade ago – with many students at elite institutions graduating with debt in six figures.

In his January State of Union Address, President Obama implied that he favored some sort of maintenance of effort by the states as a condition of federal support for public institutions. Indeed, the rapid increases in tuition at public institution are a direct result of state funding cuts.

This commentary was submitted by Dena Goldberg, a National Board Certified high school social studies teacher at Lakewood High School.

SB 10-191, now known as the EQuITEE Act, is aimed at improving quality instruction. This ironic name will do little to improve quality instruction unless education funding increases dramatically.

The Center for Teaching Quality recently published recommendations for evaluating teachers. The report recommends that teacher evaluations include not only administrators but trained peer evaluators who are monitored to “ensure inter-rater reliability.”  This report contains excellent ideas on evaluation reform but cannot be implemented without substantially increasing funding for training and teacher release time.

The Colorado Department of Education spends approximately $50 million a year on standardized tests, yet scores remain stagnant and achievement gaps persist. Further, independent groups have not validated efficacy. Additionally, a recent news article exposed serious problems surrounding private companies that hire poorly trained temps to grade student writing.

This piece was written by Kate Mulcahy, an English teacher at Northglenn High School, a Boettcher Teachers Program graduate and a member of the Denver New Millennium Initiative.

I feel overwhelmed.  Colorado is hammering out a new teacher evaluation model that ties teacher tenure to student performance. The Ensuring Quality Instruction Through Educator Effectiveness Act, formerly known as SB 10-191, is on the lips of most educators. This bill has been the pride and joy of well-intentioned education reformers and the bane of existence for others who see it as a misguided political move to attract Race to the Top money.

Me? I’m on the fence.

I fought this bill initially, contacting my state representatives and voicing my concern. But recently, I have heard good teachers make solid, positive points about SB 10-191. I’m being persuaded…but not yet convinced. When contentious issues overwhelm my mind, I approach them with the time honored method of discerning which side of the issue deserves my allegiance: The yay-boo system.

After suffering the sting of defeat in last year’s school board elections, Douglas County union officials and a disaffected vocal minority of community members have launched an aggressive campaign to defame the sitting board. It’s perfectly their right to call into questions any actions of their elected officials with which they disagree. But they also set themselves out to be held accountable for the information they purvey. There have been at least two major fronts to union officials’ campaign.

First, their allies manipulated the Denver Post to make it look like the board is callously hoarding district funds to harm students and employees intentionally. Really? DCSD’s clearly laid out budget facts strongly belie the accusation. It would be interesting to review previous years’ fund balances from the district to see the context of current budgetary decisions. I have a hard time believing the opposition wouldn’t make hay of the board’s actions had they irresponsibly spent district reserves into oblivion.

Second, as covered in EdNews, AFT officials and other critics seized on a union-sponsored survey that showed low employee morale to hurl invective at the board. The attacks were sprung in ambush fashion, questioning the lip service some groups give to a spirit of “collaboration.”

This article was written by Michael J. Petrilli,  executive vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He spoke at the Feb. 10 “Hot Lunch” event in Denver.

Education reform does not suffer from lack of energy or activity. Everywhere you look—Congress, state legislatures, local school boards, wherever—scores of eager-beavers are filing bills, proposing solutions, calling for change, and otherwise trying to “push the ball forward.” Yet for all the effort, for all the pain, we see little gain. What gives?

The conventional answer, in most reform circles, comes down to: “The opposition of special interests.” Teachers unions, school administrators, colleges of education, textbook publishers, and other defenders (and beneficiaries) of the status quo fight change at every step and guard their selfish prerogatives jealously.

That may all be true, but our challenges are much more fundamental. It’s not that the wrong people are in charge. It’s that there are so many cooks in the education kitchen that nobody is really in charge. And that is a consequence of an antiquated governance structure that practically forces all those cooks to enter and remain in the kitchen.

We bow to the mantra of “local control” yet, in fact, nearly every major decision affecting the education of our children is shaped (and misshaped) by at least four separate levels of governance: Washington, the state capitol, the local district, and the individual school building itself.

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

This commentary was written by Michael Elliott, executive director of the Medical Marijuana Industry Group (MMIG), the largest medical marijuana trade association in Colorado, and Norton Arbelaez, MMIG’s board chair.

Staff  Sergeant Mary McNeely joined the military, went to Iraq and served her country with honor. While there, she was injured in a car bombing.

Upon returning to Colorado Springs, physicians at the Veteran’s Administration prescribed her narcotic pain medications to treat her various injuries. Nonetheless, her health kept deteriorating. The drugs did not effectively treat her pain, made her irritable, nauseous and unable to function. She grew distant from her daughter and husband.

Through Colorado’s medical marijuana system, she discovered that cannabis controlled her pain and nausea with minimal side-effects. As a result, she was able to stop taking several high-risk prescription drugs including percocet and vicodin. Medical marijuana allowed her to regain a semblance of a normal life.

This article was written by John Suthers, Colorado’s attorney general

Eleven years ago the citizens of Colorado passed an amendment to the Colorado Constitution called Amendment 20. The amendment simply created an affirmative defense against the enforcement of state marijuana laws for people with debilitating medical conditions who have physician approval to use the drug. But in recent years, a series of policy decision at the state and federal levels have opened the door to the creation of a medical marijuana industry in Colorado.

We have gone, over the course of a half decade, from a state that had roughly 1,700 medical marijuana patients and a system of individuals or caregivers growing small amounts of the drug to a state with tens of thousands of patients and hundreds of marijuana dispensaries and industrial-scale grow operations.

Why should you care? Are dispensaries just gaudy, neon-green eyesores that we should just learn to live with? And is the occasionally whiff of marijuana smoke nothing more than a passing annoyance?

Many Coloradans, including myself, think otherwise. Indeed, I am convinced that the adverse consequences of legalization of marijuana, or de-facto legalization through widespread distribution of medical marijuana, will far outweigh the benefits in terms of social costs, and that belief stems largely from my concerns about the impact of marijuana use on adolescents.

Film trivia: the movie The Graduate has only one mention of an undergraduate major, and it belongs to the character that is not a graduate.  Mrs. Robinson intended to major in art history, but left college early.  The movie contrasts her unrealized ambitions with the promise of Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), who has just completed an unspecified degree and has only to decide on which of the many roads to opportunity he wants to travel. Simply being the eponymous Graduate is enough to confer considerable potential.

One of the current mantras of education reform is to give students academic skills to be The Graduate, and to have the opportunity to follow any one of several professional paths. And rightly so, for the modern economy is ruthlessly demanding of ever-greater skills and abilities, and many entry-level jobs now require analytical thought and problem solving commensurate with advanced education.  But while more and more students are attending college, the number that major in areas which hold the most future promise are essentially unchanged. We are getting kids into college, but dropping them off without a map.

The value of a college degree is the focus of a recent report from Georgetown University titled “The College Payoff.”  Over the last decade, the earning premium between a high school and bachelor’s degree has widened, so that on average and over a lifetime, a bachelor’s degree is now worth $2.8 million.  But the report also found that there is an increasing emphasis on what someone studies, and which occupation they pursue.