Kansas City’s second act

The budget rumbles begin, but the story in KC has a lot more context. To start, from the Wall Street Journal (or try the NYT):

The Kansas City Missouri School Board voted Wednesday night to shutter nearly half of its schools in an effort to avoid going broke. The action closes 28 of 58 campuses and eliminates about 700 of the district's 3,300 jobs, including 285 teachers. [...] The Kansas City School District, which serves 18,000 students, was twice as large a decade ago. That decrease has led to cuts in state funding. The district now runs a $12 million monthly deficit and expects to run out of money by 2011. [...] Less than one third of elementary school students are reading at or above grade level. In nearly three quarters of the schools only one quarter of the students are characterized as "proficient," according to the district.

In 1985 a federal district judge took partial control over the troubled Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) on the grounds that it was an unconstitutionally segregated district with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly. In an effort to bring the district into compliance with his liberal interpretation of federal law, the judge ordered the state and district to spend nearly $2 billion over the next 12 years to build new schools, integrate classrooms, and bring student test scores up to national norms.

College Summit gets Nobel

College Summit, is a non-profit with strong Colorado ties. Its founder, JB. Schramm, is a graduate of Denver's East High School. The 17-year-old program, which address the under-enrollment of capable low-income youth in college, works in several Colorado districts, most notably Mapleton, where college-going rates have gone up and dropout rates down since College Summit appeared on the scene. Today, College Summit learned that it is one of 10 non-profits across the country that will receive a share -- $125,000 --of President Obama's $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize award. Susan Bross, executive director of College Summit's Colorado chapter, says a portion of the money will go to the organization's Colorado work. Here is a list of all the charities getting a slice of Obama's Nobel money.

Systemic change vs. atomization

I have not thrown in the towel on systemic change for our schools. I continue to worry that the atomization of schools—charters, magnet schools—brings about pockets of excellence in urban school districts opposed to improvement in larger numbers. Michael Fullan has written extensively on his education reform work with the Province of Ontario in Canada and other large districts in the United States and England. He has a new book “Motion Leadership: the Skinny on Becoming Change Savvy.” It is a quick read (78 pages) and it is a nice companion to some of his other books.

From the editor: Parents propose marriage

Let’s say a group of parents at a neighborhood school banded together and proposed to a high-performing charter school that the two schools combine efforts to create a PreK-12 school that would help send all kids from the struggling neighborhood to college. What’s not to like, right? Parental involvement at its best. Community engagement. A tacit recognition that ideological food fights over charter versus traditional public schools are meaningless; all that matters is how to serve kids well. Who might object, and on what grounds? Stay tuned for some possible answers. Last Friday, Denver’s Cole Arts and Science Academy (CASA) parents, along with Principal Julie Murgel, held a news conference to announce they had asked the Denver School of Science and Technology to open its third campus at Cole in the fall of 20l1. See video). The idea, hatched by a group of parents, had been presented to DSST leadership some weeks earlier, and DSST had responded with interest.

Is this the best we can do?

A February 27 Denver Post editorial and a related article on Colorado higher education funding were frustrating in an amazing number of ways. Both barely touched upon the single most important issue: Our higher education funding levels are not sustainable. In 2008, before the current crisis, Colorado ranked 48^th in the nation in per pupil funding. Since then our funding level has dropped. As the February 24^th School of Public Affairs event (Ungovernable States: Prospects for Constitutional Reform in California and Colorado) made clear, at the present rate within 10 years the entire general fund will be spent on K-12, health care and corrections, leaving no funding whatsoever for higher education. Without that context, the rest of the conversation is, at best, misleading. I sure hope this is the first salvo in a longer campaign by our leadership to discuss the value of higher education with Colorado taxpayers. But inaccurately characterizing the system as inefficient and suggesting that competition is bad for government seems like a foolish way to start the conversation. How about a proactive discussion about how to make competition spur improvements in our system, or how our higher education institutions serve our communities, or what we as a state need from higher education? I wonder why this story even made the paper. Is this the best thinking we can expect to get from leaders in our state?