Wednesday’s White House proposal is casting a wide net to help more debt holders. A fact sheet provided to reporters indicates the White House expects college loan holders to save “hundreds” of dollars per month through this relief package. During the press call, Duncan said a nurse earning $45,000 a year with $60,000 in loans can expect a $451 reduction in monthly payments.

A summary of the call:

· Starting in January of next year, allow individuals to consolidate their Federal Direct loans with subsidized loans. The White House says this move can tack off half a percentage point in the interest debtors pay. Barnes told reporters submitting payments to two different loan services increases the risk of default.

· Expanding the IBR program through a pay as you earn service that caps the discretionary income considered to 10 percent that will also go into effect January of next year. While the president had Congress approve a similar IBR measure that lowers the percentage of income considered, that rule won’t go into effect until 2014. White House numbers project the move will help 1.6 million student borrowers. Today’s proposal also excuses all unpaid debt after 20 years of successful minimum payments, rather than the 25 years originally legislated. Discretionary income is calculated by subtracting150 percent of the poverty line from a person’s adjusted gross income–that dollar figure at the end of one’s tax return.

· The CFBP, less than 100 days old an a product of last year’s big bank regulation law known as Dodd-Frank, is in the finishing stages of a simple Financial Aid Shopping Sheet, which would de-jargon the language on college award letter and scholarship documents. “The form would also make the total costs — and risks — of the student loans clear before they enroll by outlining their total estimated student loan debt, monthly loan payments after graduation and additional costs not covered by federal aid,” indicates a White House press release.

Present on the call were Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council Melody Barnes and Raj Date, Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP).

Tackling student debt is part of the administration’s larger effort to circumvent policy changes that need Congressional approval. “We simply can’t wait for Congressional Republicans to act,” said Duncan, who highlighted portions of the plan.

While Congress in 2009 approved a measure called Income Based Repayment, which went into effect last year, only 450,000 college loan holders have signed on out of the over 30 million Americans juggling higher education debt. That program caps the amount college debt holders pay on federally-backed loans to 15 percent of their discretionary income.

Perhaps coincidentally, College Board released a report today showing college tuition and fees rose this year by more than 8 percent from last year for public four- and two-year colleges. Still, more students are entering college, the report noted, as an additional 2.8 million students enrolled in school between 2007 and 2010.

Higher education has been under a microscope as job prospects are low for many and additional education is sought after. The swell of new students is forcing campuses to find new revenue streams to keep up with services, often resulting in admitting students who pay higher tuition. The trend is most visible at public universities that have set their sights on out-of-state candidates who pay considerably more than local students — at times three times as much.

Taking into account a student’s ability to weather the financial burden of higher education is an increasingly ethical dilemma. Student default rates, as determined by the two-year cohort rate calculated by the U.S. Department of Education, is at a 12-year high, with 8.8 percent of graduates not paying their college loans for 270 days or more. Using a more comprehensive metric, a report issued (PDF) by the New America Foundation found that 15 percent of graduates defaulted, while 21 percent were delinquent on their payments.

But despite the costs and risks of falling behind in payments, arguments college is still worth it abound.

Individuals possessing a college-equivalent degree can expect to earn 80 percent more than a person with a high school degree. In an earlier study from researchers at Georgetown University, a college degree holder can expect to make $1.4 million more than one witha high school degree. And owning a college degree goes a long way to having a job: while the unemployment rate in this country is 9.1 percent, only 4.3 percent of college degree holders are jobless.

To chair of the subcommittee Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), “charter schools empower parents to play a more active role in their child’s education, and offer students a priceless opportunity to escape underperforming schools. These innovative institutions also open doors for teachers to experiment with fresh teaching methods and curricula that they believe will have the greatest positive impact on students in their individual community.”

However, Western Michigan University’s Dr. Gary Miron, who advocated for charter schools in the mid-1990s, explained the success of those early models are much harder to emulate today given the top-down regulations public and charter schools must comply with as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Nor are charter schools necessarily an improvement on traditional public schools: A Stanford University study that found for every 17 charters that perform better than public schools, 37 charters do worse.

Dr. Miron also cautioned against regarding charter schools as laboratories of experimentation: “Involvement of local persons or groups in starting charter schools is shrinking, replaced instead by outsiders, particularly private education management organizations (EMOs), which steer these schools from distant corporate headquarters. Claims that EMOs can make charter schools more effective have not been substantiated by research.”

Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) pressed Dr. Miron to clarify the degree of choice charter schools afford in a community. Dr. Miron admitted parents with greater “aspirations” for their children and with a higher education attainment level are more likely to seek out education alternatives for their children. He also stated two-parent households are more likely to put in the time and research to compare available schools and education programs in the community, referring to an OECD study (PDF) that found similar results.

Continuing on the subject of choice, Dr. Miron explained many charter schools receive public money to offer transportation to the student body, yet can still keep the tax dollars if they select to direct those funds to different expenses.

Debbie Beyer, executive director of Literacy First Charter Schools near San Diego described (PDF) the twenty-year movement as “not the panacea to all the ills of public education, and not all charters are doing a bang up job. But they are an incredible option for families that are becoming acute consumers of public education.” She also highlighted the difficulty of securing accreditation, and alleged charter schools receive more scrutiny than public schools. She said her team had to explain a two-point drop in reading levels even though her school was one of the county leaders in test results despite those English Language scores.

To Beyer, public education should not be bound to any one institution, saying, “Literacy First “[serves] at the pleasure of the taxpaper.” Unlike traditional public schools with collective bargaining agreements between the district and educators, her teachers do not receive tenure. They are, however, given pay incentives for pursuing experiments that yield positive results, a model the president and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would like public schools to follow.

Rep. Hunter released a press release following the hearing that omitted mention of Miron. He was the only education scholar witness. The other three professionals mentioned in the press release were either administrators or executives of charter school-related groups.

Not to be outdone, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who chaired the entire House Education and Labor Committee between 2007 and 2011 and has called himself a supporter of charter schools, released a press statement that made mention of only Miron.

A new report (PDF) from the National Center on Education and the Economy has concluded the U.S. is not proactive enough in adopting successful education models from abroad.

The study used internal data and built upon similar research conducted by the international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It scrutinized K-12 equivalent systems of learning in Canada, China, Finland, Japan and Singapore, determining, “that the strategies driving the best performing systems are rarely found in the United States,” while U.S. models are conspicuously absent in these leading countries.

International benchmarking has emerged as a crucial component in improving K-12 education domestically. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan convened a high-level policy summit in March, inviting domestic stakeholders like unions and administrators to meet with international delegates. The report also notes countries like Canada, Japan and Singapore import much of the best from abroad and tailor those qualities to fit their existing education policies. That practice, NCEE states, allows leading nations to avoid going “down blind alleys wasting large amounts of resources on initiatives that fail to pay off as countries that base their strategies on untested theories, which is what the United States has tended to do over the years.”

The report urges organized labor groups in education to shed their protectionist roles. NCEE says teachers unions should trade-in seniority and retention demands for greater autonomy. While such a standard allows for easier worker disqualification, it opens the door for teacher-led reform projects and a pay system that uses bonuses and other rewards to encourage forward thinking and risk taking. Secretary Duncan and the president have signed off on these ideas — the Race to the Top initiative includes these incentives.

The report draws on international models of teacher assessment, noting those systems treat educators like doctors, with very high standards for entering the field and a greater knowledge base coming into the classroom. Those high expectations permit teachers unions to play a crucial role in national policy decisions in countries like Finland and Canada.

The final pages are a call to policy arms for states, listing dozens of recommendations. The report argues state governments can be far more impacting than the federal government in improving education standards.

Lt Gov. Barbara O'Brien

Colorado Independent: Can you talk at all about how the application is shaping up?

Barbara O’Brien: A lot of our proposal is about implementing, on a statewide basis, some of the policy changes that took place over the last three years, under Gov. Bill Ritter. So higher standards, creating a new CSAP test. Everyone hates the current test.

Any idea what that new CSAP test would look like?

We’re thinking that it will be a combination of online quizzes during the course of the year. So, instead of students just taking a drop-dead test in the spring, they’ll be able to take little informal assessments throughout the year to see where they are on a track. They’ll be able to actually re-take quizzes if they find they didn’t do well. So progress is encouraged.

We also want a test that is really going to be meaningful; it’s really going to fit in with what they’ve been studying. Right now the CSAP is out of sync with a lot of what students are taught. There are districts that teach chemistry in a different order, but the chemistry questions on CSAP, for example, don’t match up with what students learned in the first semester.

So higher standards and a new CSAP. What other proposals will be in the Race to the Top application?

We’re required to have a plan for greatly increasing student performance in the state’s worst 5 percent of schools—that’s about 95 schools in Colorado.

This is where district participation is really important. We really want districts that have some of these struggling schools to sign on to a plan for turning them around—because if we’re selected for Race to the Top, we can give them some new resources, some new tools: more teachers, more career counselors (to help students understand the connection between high school and a career or going on to college), longer school days (so they have more time to learn), and more tutoring.

And then if, after a couple of years, a school isn’t getting measurably better, the option is to take it over, and turn it over to some other group that has a track record of running excellent schools.

Probably the least exciting part of this application is the longitudinal data system. That’s actually something where Colorado has been a leader. But we have a number of small districts that can’t afford to upgrade their information systems. So part of this money would be used to help those smaller school districts modernize their computer systems so they can feed student data into the systems and the state can analyze what kind of algebra programs seem to be working best, what kind of reading programs, et cetera. It would create a real data system for education around the state.

Teacher evaluation is another part of the application. I understand there are some bills proposed for the next legislative session related to teacher evaluation. Is the governor’s office involved with those?

There are at least two senators pushing state legislation. We are not. We have been working with a large committee of people since July on this. We think they have a really strong plan for a teacher evaluation system. We don’t think we need legislation quite yet, because we’ve got to pilot the plan and see if it works first.

The legislature will do what it does, and they might push forward with something. But for our proposal, we’re just describing what our consensus is and hoping we get the funding to try it out.

Can you talk about what that new evaluation would look like?

Half of the evaluation system has to be based on student growth data. The problem is that a lot of teachers teach subjects not tested on CSAP. The teachers, and I think rightly so, feel that’s not fair— to have some teachers held accountable and others, well, their subject isn’t even tested.

So what we would have to do is to come up with some kind of quantifiable evaluation for all the teachers who teach subjects that aren’t on CSAP, like social studies.

Then we’ll add to that other measures that teachers feel are really important for knowing how kids are doing. I can’t tell you what those are. But we’d put together a committee that will include teachers and principals to take a look at what kind of fair components could be added to this evaluation.

Colorado recently won $250,000 in Gates Foundation money to solicit help to write the grant. Can you talk about why the proposal was successful?

We heard a couple of things about that proposal.

One was that we were taking this so seriously that we seemed like a state that, no matter what happens with Race to the Top, we’re going to try to implement a lot of this anyway. It would just be slower.

Part of it is that we are a local-control state— which is not like the majority of states. They were interested in helping us develop a proposal that just has to be different than other states’ because of our local control traditions.

And then we really needed help budgeting this thing. We’ve been through budget cuts, and we just weren’t in a position to have a whole lot of people with technical skill working on this. So they put us in touch with a consulting company that has great experience with education budgeting and human resources just to give us some technical expertise.

I hear there is some confusion around getting school districts on board with the state’s Race to the Top plan. Can you talk about that?

Part of the emphasis in the proposal requirements is that you have the participation of local districts. It’s voluntary, but the idea is to show that you have enough district participation to have a statewide impact. So we are asking school boards and local associations, if the district has one, to sign [a] Memorandum of Understanding [signifying its approval] as soon as possible.

The confusion has been that the latest possible date is January 6. But for budgeting purposes, getting those in sooner would have helped us know what number of districts we were dealing with.

How many districts have signed on?

We have 33 school districts, so we’re up to 18 percent of all school districts.

[Note:  by the end of the day on December 22, the count was up to 73 school districts that had either signed up or indicated that they will. That represents 906 schools and 53% of the K-12 student enrollment.]

That’s a pretty low number this late in the game. Do you think school districts don’t want to sign?

We’re very certain they want to sign because we did a survey and 90 percent were interested.

You know it’s the holidays and a lot of people aren’t working right now. So we think it’s just a matter of the fact that they’re kind of understaffed this time of year and there was a little confusion over the date.

Have you had any school districts say they just won’t sign?

There are some rural districts that are really afraid that they can’t meet the reporting requirements because they don’t have the personnel. So we think there’s going to be lighter participation out on the eastern plains, in all of those rural districts— but that the main ones, along the Front Range, will be signing up.

Have you been able to give districts any kind of preliminary draft of the application?

We haven’t had a proposal to show anyone. We’re planning on doing that in about a week.

So far, we’ve been trying to sort through all the ideas that came from input process. And then because the governor and commissioner have to approve content, we had to run everything past them before we could start writing. So our writing team really just started writing last week.

But we intend to make this available for people and put it on the website just as soon as we had a decent draft.

That doesn’t hurt your chances if you show your cards to other states?

You know, we’re assuming that by now, if other states aren’t pretty much committed to their own plan, it’s going to be hard to make mid-course corrections. But because we’re local control, and buy-in is so important, I think it’s more important to make sure that we continue to be transparent and inclusive.

The federal deadline has really made everyone work through the holidays, hasn’t it?

This is the one thing where I could wring [U.S. Secretary of Education] Arne Duncan’s neck [laughing] because the federal government missed every one of their own deadlines. They were supposed to have the guidelines to us in August— and they didn’t come out until November 18. So they’ve missed theirs, and now they’re done and every state in the nation has a team that’s going to have their Christmas ruined.

Do you have a hard deadline for when the federal government will announce the grants?

They’ve told us that they will pick the top five states and invite them to Washington to do a verbal presentation in March or early April. And then they plan to have a decision in late April. And then, if we’re selected, we have 90 days for participating districts to write their scope of work for implementing. That takes us to mid- to late-summer, so that’s when the money would start flowing.

Interview edited and condensed by Katie Redding.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Pundits have long argued, writes the Education Equality Project, that the most important element of school reform involves making sure all students have access to good teachers:

“The single most important factor in determining [student] achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from,’’ says President Obama. “It’s not who their parents are or how much money they have-it’s who their teacher is.” Without “the right people standing in front of the classroom,” the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution concludes, “school reform is a futile exercise.”

And yet, according to the Education Equality Project, studies show that districts routinely put the least-qualified teachers in front of the most needy students:

How wide is the teacher effectiveness gap in high-poverty schools? A recent study in Los Angeles of 9,400 math classrooms in grades 3-5 found that students in the district’s poorest schools were nearly three times as likely to have teachers from the bottom quarter of teachers (measured by teacher effectiveness in raising math achievement) than students in the district’s most affluent schools. At the same time, the Los Angeles study shows that effective teachers have a profound impact on student learning. On average, students assigned a teacher in the top quartile increased their math achievement scores 10 percentile points more than students who had a teacher in the bottom quartile—a huge one-year gain.

In New York, writes Samuel G. Freedman in the New York Times, unions finally agreed to  make it easier to remove bad teachers from classrooms in 2005:

During my own 20 years of observing and writing about public education in New York, I’ve seen firsthand how exasperatingly difficult it has been for principals to oust abusive, incapable or negligent teachers who are protected by a powerful union. Instead, some principals would privately agree to swap problem teachers in a process known as “trading turkeys.” Others would offer such teachers a positive rating if they used their seniority to transfer to a different school.

The transfer rules were ended in 2005, under an agreement between the city and the teachers’ union.

But New York is hardly a model of reform. Freedman goes on to explain that now New York teachers   accused of wrongdoing end up in the city’s infamous “rubber rooms,” where teachers are paid to show up for weeks, months, or even years while their cases are arbitrated in a seemingly endless process.

Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education

In an interview with The Colorado Independent, Van Schoales, urban education officer for the Piton Foundation, points out that Colorado–which is currently writing its Race to the Top application–could certainly choose  to cease the practice of shunting inadequate, unqualified teaches to low-income schools.

But Schoales also pointed to a federal requirement that states have as many school districts as possible—and their superintendents, board presidents and union presidents—sign on to the state’s application. He worried that such a strict buy-in requirement will push the state to leave controversial proposals about what to do about inadequate teachers out of its application.

According to the Times editorial, Duncan is not the first to fail to require districts to reform this practice. President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 also originally aimed to stop the practice of sending unqualified teachers to the most challenging schools. But then the Bush administration backpedaled.

The country would be much further along on the reform trail had the Bush administration followed the law. Instead, it allowed the states to define away the problem by re-labeling the existing, inadequate teacher corps as “highly qualified.”

The U.S. Congress tried again to keep unqualified teachers out of high-needs schools when it passed the stimulus act, writes the Times. But Congress, too, backpedaled, eventually couching the issue in “euphemistic language that asks the states to describe in vague terms whether the teacher corps is “highly qualified.”

The Times argues that this time around a timid White House is hoping to save the controversial issue until next year—and deal with it as part of the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

According to the Denver Post, charter-school advocates are warning that a union victory could have far-reaching statewide implications, given the current push for reform at the federal and state level.

Their claim:

If union-backed candidates were elected, the district’s momentum toward improvement would suffer and that could ruin Colorado’s shot at a share of the U.S. Department of Education’s competitive $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” fund.

The $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition, which has been billed as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s greatest tool for reform, will grant stimulus funds to states that develop comprehensive reform strategies in four areas:  standards and assessments, data systems, teacher hiring, firing and evaluation, and turning around struggling schools. Duncan has made it clear that the money will not be divided equally among the states.

But winning candidates, reported the Denver Post, shrugged off the assumption that they will slow the district’s—or state’s—work toward education reform.

Still, there’s no questioning the fact that the Denver Public School District—historically, one of the state’s most innovative—now looks to be dominated by candidates who have spoken out against the district’s reforms.

Media reports in the days leading up to the election framed the battle as one between unions and charter school supporters. In large part, this was because candidates appeared to either be receiving donations from reform-minded Denver businessman Thomas W. Gamel or unions, including the Denver Classroom Teachers’ Association, the Colorado Education Association, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and the Colorado AFL-CIO.

Gamel was a notable—and generous—contributor to the non-union candidates, spending more than $90,000 on Mary Seawell’s successful campaign over Christopher Scott.

According to EdNews Colorado, union-backed Scott had a less-than-graceful response to his defeat:

“I hope Mr. Gamel is as personally committed to DPS and our children as he is financially,” Scott said. “As we like to say in the consulting business, ‘You buy it, you own it.’  We will hold Mr. Gamel accountable for the actions of the board members his money has supported.”

But union-supported candidates Nate Easley and Andrea Merida won the other two seats—Merida with the help of scary union-backed pamphlets (pdf) about her opponent’s support for charter schools. In the same overblown language that the GOP used in Douglas County, a 527 group called Coloradans for Accountable Reform in Education (CARE) warned voters that charter schools are the enemy of neighborhood schools.

“Why can’t your kids walk to school?” asked the pamphlet. “Because charter schools across town too often siphon tax dollars away from local neighborhood schools.”

Though CARE will not have to release fundraising information until after the election, its spokeswoman told EdNews Colorado that the group receives money from the Denver Classroom Teachers’ Association and the Colorado Education Association.

Merida told EdNews Colorado that while she welcomed the group’s support, she had no idea who CARE was.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

The $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition, which has been billed as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s greatest tool for reform, will grant stimulus funds to states that develop comprehensive reform strategies in four areas:  standards and assessments, data systems, teacher hiring, firing and evaluation, and turning around struggling schools. Duncan has made it clear that the money will not be divided equally among the states.

In this high-stakes environment, the Gates offer of help with the application process could be key for states like Colorado, which the New Teacher Project has ranked(pdf), along with 15 other states, as “competitive” in the race (a change from an earlier “somewhat competitive” rating for Colorado). The nonprofit ranked just two states, Florida and Louisiana, as “highly competitive.”

According to the AP, to be eligible for Gates Foundation funds, states will have to meet eight criteria. Among other things, they’ll have to demonstrate the ability to link student testing data to teachers and demonstrate clear support for a proposed common standards effort.

The Gates Foundation move apparently comes in response to criticism over the Foundation’s announcement last summer that it had handpicked 15 states for a $250,000 grant toward creating a strong Race to the Top application.

Critics argued the move indicated a too-close-for-comfort relationship between the Gates Foundation and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s office. And some, like the National Conference of State Legislatures, felt that the Gates Foundation, not the U.S. government, would end up actually picking the winners.

From the New York Times:

“We expressed concerns that it appeared that Gates people were involved in helping the department pick winners and losers,” said David Shreve, federal affairs counsel at the national conference.

So will Colorado apply for the funds? In an email to the Colorado Independent, Evan Dreyer, spokesman for Gov. Bill Ritter, said that the state hasn’t yet seen any specific application guidance from the Gates Foundation yet, so he couldn’t say for certain.

“However, we are interested in seeking as much support as possible,” said Dreyer, “so if we are eligible we likely would apply.”

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

The $4.3 billion competition, which has been billed as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s greatest tool for reform, will grant stimulus funds to states that develop comprehensive reform strategies in four areas:  standards and assessments, data systems, teacher hiring, firing and evaluation, and turning around struggling schools. Duncan has made it clear that the money will not be divided equally among the states.

Here’s where the contest gets hard:  the federal government has laid out very clearly what reforms it wants to see from states. It’s up to the states to convince their local school districts to sign on to the reform plans—which are likely to include controversial ideas like tracking teacher effectiveness through student test scores.

But Duncan has provided a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down:  districts who sign on to state plans will receive 50 percent of the federal government’s millions, should their state be chosen as a winner. Colorado Department of Education spokesman Mark Stevens confirmed that districts who don’t sign on to state reform plans are not eligible for the funds, per RTT guidelines.

According to Sterling’s Journal-Advocate, 85 of Colorado’s 178 districts have agreed to sign onto the state’s Race to the Top plan. Formal memorandums of understanding have not been signed, however, Stevens said. He explained that the MOUs can’t be written until the official guidelines for the contest are released by the U.S. Department of Education.

The Summit Daily reported that a district that signs on to the application must demonstrate the support of the superintendent, school board president and the president of the local teachers’ union.

As for what the state’s RTT application will look like, that is still a matter for the state’s work groups. But the Summit Daily had some hints:

The first draft includes several proposals such as “early warning indicator” data systems that help identify and intervene with at-risk students, online instructional offerings for struggling schools and student engagement to help determine educator effectiveness.

Jones plans to visit Salida and Colorado Springs this week.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan likes charter schools so much he has made them a cornerstone of his education reform plan, requiring schools to lift caps on charter schools, making them eligible for his $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” contest. To date, seven states, including Colorado, have lifted restrictions so they can compete for the money.

Charter schools have been a huge boost to U.S. education reform. So what happens when a charter school goes bad? That scenario has been playing out this year at Colorado’s Cesar Chavez Schools network. The network, which educates over 2,500 students  in Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Denver, and online is, to put it mildly, having a bad year.

Let’s recap.

May 28: Colorado Education News reporter Nancy Mitchell reports that founder Lawrence Hernandez received 53 percent pay increase in three years, from $171,466 in 2005 to $261,732.

July 2: Colorado Commissioner of Education Dwight Jones orders an investigation into testing practices after former superintendent John Covington allegedly pleads with him to investigate.

July 10:  Mitchell reports that over half the students at Cesar Chavez schools receive testing accommodations.

August 3:  Mitchell publishes a stunning investigation into the Chavez schools. In addition to finding concerns about the school’s finances and testing practices, she notes that Hernandez has initiated a dozen legal actions in eight years—against former teachers, former board members, and the state of Colorado, among others.

September 21: After the Colorado Charter School Institute directs the network to set up a separate board for Cesar Chavez Academy North and the Guided Online Academic Learning (GOAL) Academy, chaos erupts, according to the Pueblo Chieftan. The Colorado Springs Gazette reports that Hernandez orders the locks changed at GOAL Academy’s computer labs, locks teachers out of the online network, and fires two administrators. When an administrator refuses to give him student information, he allegedly takes it by force.

September 22: The Colorado Springs Gazette reports that GOAL Academy staff were told by Cesar Chavez officials that they must sign a loyalty oath at 4:30 p.m. or the network would assume they had resigned.

September 23:  Commissioner Jones releases a statement expressing concern about rumors that GOAL Academy student records may have been destroyed. He reminds administrators that destruction of student records is a violation of state and federal law.

September 24:  Hernandez, his wife and another top administrator are placed on paid leave by the Cesar Chavez Network’s board president. Informed by letter, the couple refuse to leave school grounds until the police arrive.

September 25:  A Pueblo judge issues a restraining order against Hernandez and six others.

Sure, greed, cheating and misconduct seem to be the hallmarks of 2009. But there are 2,500 kids involved here, not to mention their teachers. If we’re going to be increasingly reliant on charter schools, we have to be able to weed out the bad ones early, just like we do with public schools.

Kudos to the Department of Education for launching an investigation into the network. And if you find misconduct? Look next into why you didn’t catch this sooner.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

“Improving Teacher and School Leader Effectiveness:  Designing a Framework for Colorado” follows similar studies by the New Teacher Project and the Piton Foundation (in conjunction with National Council on Teacher Quality), both published this past summer.

The Colorado Legacy Foundation report began by arguing that the most important topic in education reform right now is the concept of “teacher effectiveness.”

Rarely in public policy discussions does a simple concept, like “teacher effectiveness,” rise so suddenly and dramatically to the top of the national and state policy agendas. The importance of the concept is so obvious, much like the idea of evidence-based practice in medicine, that one wonders what else we used to talk about when discussing teacher issues. The idea that teachers should be effective in producing student learning outcomes, and that such teachers should be distributed to all students, not just those in school districts or schools with more resources, hardly seems revolutionary. But, it is now dominating the education policy space.

And, like the Piton Foundation report, the Colorado Legacy Foundation argued that Colorado’s evaluation processes are the biggest barrier to improving teacher effectiveness. Here, the report goes further than those that have come before it, by asking experts to discuss what an effective evaluation tool might look like:

One ideal measure for evaluation purposes is the value added by a teacher to a student over the academic year. [Dan]Goldhaber describes value-added measurement as not only a good tool, but “the only tool right now that actually gives us rigorous kinds of ways of assessing teachers.” Using value-added measures in conjunction with other measures, such as supervisor and peer reviews, allows the more subjective measures to be “checked” by the value-added measure.

Barnett Barry of the Center for Teaching Quality suggests that an evaluation system take into account the extent to which the teacher helps students learn, and how the teacher benefits the school organization by helping to spread his or her expertise to others at the school and beyond…Ultimately, says Barry, evaluation of teacher performance would have several components: evidence of student performance, such as results on classroom-based assessments like Measures of Academic Performance (MAP) and conclusions from classroom observations; self-analysis and reflection using tools such as videotapes; analysis of student engagement, which could be based on student input; peer reviews; and parent input.

Granted, a new teacher evaluation still looks like it’s still in the brainstorming phase. But one thing is clear:  given the state’s enthusiasm for the Race to the Top contest, Colorado teachers shouldn’t expect the current evaluation system to last much longer.

For the full report, head to the Colorado Education News website, where Nancy Mitchell discusses the report’s argument that Colorado school districts have long used “local control” as an excuse to justify inertia.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.