April 01, 2010 06:53 PM UTC

Race to the Top status (and a suggestion)

• 4 Comments
• by: DavidThi808

From the Denver Post

The decision of whether Colorado should apply for up to $175 million in federal education grants in the second round of the Race to the Top competition seems like a no-brainer, but state officials aren’t sure.

I think the key point, and it’s very valid, is:

“That’s one of the questions that we have” for the U.S. Department of Education, said Nina Lopez, director of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for the Colorado Department of Education. “Are you expecting us to explain the same plan for less money and, gee, get all the districts to sign on?”

A large part of the idea behind the Race to the Top was to dangle very large amounts of money out there, and see if that could get states to make significant change in their systems. Every state (except Hawaii) did something. But only a few made systemic changes.

Colorado fell in the middle:

In the first-round application, Colorado said that of 88 school districts with collective-bargaining agreements that supported the application, only 38 locals signed on. In fact, only 45 districts have collective-bargaining units. The others are called “meet and confer” units that work through terms and conditions of employment for the rest of the teachers.

Nevertheless, the state’s application lost points for that lack of union support.

In one sense Colorado is hurt by how decentralized our system is. So Denver & JeffCo signed up, but Boulder & Cherry Creek did not. And so as go the naysayers, so goes the state.

An Alternative:

So here’s my thought. What we do seem to have a decent consensus for is to put in place a strong system of measuring every district, every school, every classroom, every teacher, every student. And this is a very good and necessary first step. No it’s not everything, but it is progress.

What if the Colorado software industry stepped up to implement this for free, as open source code? I would definitely be willing to assign some resources from Windward to work on this. I think many others would be willing to contribute also.

And if we can keep OIT out of the process, then instead of it being a multi-year 400M effort, it probably would come out to be a 6 month effort where the contributed time would be the equivalent of 2M – 3M.

So Nina Lopez, Lt. Gov O’Brien, Gov Ritter, CEA, and others – if you’re interested, please give me a ring.