Hudak seeks way to pay for youth prisoner education

DENVER– Colorado state Senator Evie Hudak, D-Westminster, is weighing strategies to secure passage of a bill she’s sponsoring that seeks to ensure youth prisoners charged as adults receive education. Lawmakers have signaled that any bill that requires new spending will likely fail this session. There are currently more than 130 young prisoners in Colorado awaiting trial whose constitutional rights to an education are not being met.

Untried youth languish in Colorado’s adult prisons

DENVER– Juvenile suspects awaiting trial as adults in Colorado jails languish without education, sometimes held in solitary confinement while they wait for their day in court. The harsh conditions come partly as a fact of the state’s more generally overcrowded prison facilities, where the young people are held in adult prisons, shunted into solitary confinement in order simply to keep them segregated from the adult population. State Sen. Evie Hudak, D-Westminster, told the Colorado Independent that young people held in these conditions have committed suicide.

For charter school extra credit: What’s the difference between accommodating and cheating?

Last week, the Colorado Department of Education released an outside audit of standardized testing procedures at Pueblo’s Cesar Chavez Academy. In essence, the audit found that while an unusually high number of students received accommodations (usually extra time or…

New K-12 academic standards are almost here

For the first time in 10 years, Colorado will adopt new K-12 academic standards this December. “These standards are not like the old ones,” the Colorado Department of Education website warns. “They are not a curriculum or an…

Commissioner Jones seeks support for state’s Race to the Top application

Dwight Jones, Colorado’s Commissioner of Education, is on a 14-city race himself right now, in order to seek support from local school districts for the state’s Race to the Top application.

The $4.3 billion competition, which has been billed…

Rural Colorado students less likely to drop out of school

Rural students in Colorado are less likely than their urban and suburban counterparts to drop out of school, says a new report conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University:

In smaller schools located in smaller communities, it is much

…

For now, stimulus funds stabilizing Colorado schools

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan may be talking big about promoting innovation with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) education dollars, but Colorado schools won’t see any sweeping developments this fall. That doesn’t mean, however, that the stimulus program won’t be making an impact. Federal Recovery funds are being used to prop up current programs and to lay the groundwork for more ambitious future change.

Colorado Dept. of Ed. releases student scores, eyes stimulus Race to the Top funds

On Friday came the annual start to the school season here, marked as ever by the release of the Colorado Student Assessment Program scores.

And while the Colorado Department of Education’s Friday press release predictably led with the…

Colo. online education still expanding; oversight still failing

The Colorado Department of Education, which took heat in 2006 for not adequately policing online charter schools, still isn’t.

The news comes as the popularity of online learning continues to rise. A report issued by the CDE in…

For New Ed Commish, The Numbers Don’t Lie

Mark Twain once offered up advice that, nearly a century after his death, is always sure to amuse. There are three kinds of lies, Twain famously said. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Yet no matter which part of the…