Schools for Tomorrow Blog

Bruce Randolph School’s bid for autonomy won unanimous approval from the Denver school board tonight.

Board Resolution 3060 basically codified Randolph’s “Professional Autonomy Agreement,” submitted to Denver Public Schools and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association earlier this month. Until and unless otherwise specified in the agreement, Randolph is now free of burdensome aspects of district regulations and many provisions of the union contract.

Rather than having to navigate two bureaucracies to specify what it wants to opt out of, the school instead gets a clean slate, and can choose which pieces of the contract and the bureaucracy it wishes to embrace.

Under a best case scenario (with apologies to singer/songwriter Steve Earle), the revolution starts now. “My hope is that we will soon have 20 proposals like this on our desks,” school board President Theresa Peña said, moments before voting.

That degree of solicited chaos makes some people nervous, including board member Jeannie Kaplan,…

The Denver Post reports on a new proposal for a statewide pay-incentive program for teachers.  According the proposal by House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, teachers’ pay would be based on what they teach, where they teach, and how well their students do on state tests.  Romanoff says that the state could pay for the system by decreasing pensions and strengthening incentives earlier in a teacher’s career.

Liberals and conservatives alike should embrace the type of plan Romanoff proposes. Public schools already use some sort of criteria to financially reward teachers.  In most schools, the sole criterion is the number of years the teacher has been in the system. Essentially, we are rewarding teachers simply for growing old.  No one could reasonably argue that this is even close to an accurate measure of teacher competence or effectiveness. 

Tying a teacher’s pay to his or her performance – in addition to years of service – …

As As Bruce Randolph School Principal Kristin Waters hurdles toward the edge of the nest, ready to make a leap for it, I’m a little nervous for her.  This is not a reflection on her, the staff, or the students, but the result of having just returned from visiting a charter school management organization (Envisions) in California that nails the balance between giving schools autonomy and support.

In order to create high performing schools, they’ve figured out that the schools need a strong, agile support system—a microcosm of a school district–that is able to respond to schools’ needs. The “Support Teams” are broken into an Operations side and an Academics side, led by a CEO and CAO. They are staffed by a cadre that might analyze test scores for each student, study teaching and learning data and pedagogy, recruit teachers and staff, fix buildings, etc. For me, this was the magic of…