That’s the opinion of more than 60% of respondents in a recent poll of education attitudes among Colorado voters. Magellan Strategies surveyed a representative group of 1,550 Colorado registered voters in September. The survey has a margin of error of 2.5%.

Magellan Strategies has done regular polling about education attitudes for several years. This is the first time the firm has included questions about CTE and higher education attitudes.

Respondents cited the high cost of college and questioned how useful college is to helping graduates get jobs, even though the majority of the respondents had a bachelor’s degree or higher themselves. Registered voters as a group have higher education and higher income levels than the general population.

Read the full story from our partners at Chalkbeat Colorado.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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Parker Baxter, who directs the University of Colorado Denver’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, was the lead author of a study released last year that found significant improvements in student test scores and graduation rates during the time Denver Public Schools was most invested in education reform strategies.

Two critiques of the study were that it didn’t isolate the effects of particular strategies, such as closing schools with persistently low test scores or opening new charter schools, and that it didn’t fully account for changes in the student population of Denver, which grew by some 20,000 children during the same time period.

Baxter hopes to address both those concerns and provide better information about which school improvement strategies boosted student academic performance by using student-level data from Denver and 11 comparison districts. Federal student data privacy law allows for this type of research. Individual student data is anonymized and never reported publicly.

Read the full story from our partners at Chalkbeat Colorado.

Chalkbeat Colorado is a nonprofit news organization covering education issues. For more, visit co.chalkbeat.org.

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And in many Colorado school districts, parents who speak a language other than English don’t see a copy of their child’s plan in the language they understand best until they’re being asked to sign a legally binding final version.

A bill in the Colorado legislature would change that, requiring that final education plans be translated, as also required by federal law, and allowing parents to request draft documents in their preferred language. A separate school finance bill would allocate $500,000 to offset school district costs for translating more documents.

By law, parents are a part of the team that comes up with each student’s educational plan — known as an IEP or individualized education program — alongside teachers and other school professionals. And federal law requires that the final version of an IEP be translated into a language parents can understand.

But community organizers and parent advocates said that’s too late in the process for parents to play their role effectively. Parents need to be able to understand draft documents and information from assessments so they can ask questions and provide feedback to the teachers who work with their children, they said.

Read the full story from Colorado Chalbeat on its website.

Chalkbeat Colorado is a nonprofit news organization covering education issues. For more, visit chalkbeat.org/co.

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“The change to school finance is historic,” said Joint Budget Committee Chair Rachel Zenzinger. Average per-pupil spending is proposed to reach $10,579, a 10% increase from this year.

The bill, SB23-287, could set Colorado on the path to fully funding its schools according to constitutional requirements by the 2024-25 school year. Zenzinger said an amendment will lay out a two-year process to eliminate the practice of diverting K-12 dollars to other priorities, known as the budget stabilization factor.

The school finance act would also set aside money for rural districts and those with limited property wealth and give more assistance to charter schools authorized by the state, which miss out on local revenue-sharing.

But the school finance act also kicks the can down the road — for at least one more year — on any bigger changes to how Colorado distributes money to K-12 schools.

Lawmakers on a special school finance committee had proposed in November to take on a major rewrite of Colorado’s school funding formula. Instead, the committee concluded its work after five years without recommending changes to the General Assembly.

Most districts opposed changing how the state distributes money to schools without significantly increasing the overall education budget. That made a formula rewrite a heavy political lift in a session already consumed with contentious fights over gun control, housing policy, and access to abortion and gender-affirming care.

Read the full story from our partners at Chalkbeat Colorado.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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Families were supposed to learn which programs they had matched with on Thursday. But on Tuesday, officials with Colorado’s Department of Early Childhood announced they plan to tell families on April 26.

As reported by Chalkbeat, more than 20 education and early childhood groups had asked the state to push back initial matches due to problems with the algorithm that meant some families might miss out on top choices and other families might be offered seats that didn’t meet their needs. They feared the program was being rushed, and families would end up frustrated.

State officials held firm to the initial March 30 matching date until just two days prior. Denver Public Schools even sent an email to parents Tuesday afternoon telling families to watch their texts and emails for state notifications this Thursday.

Tuesday evening, state officials said in a press release that to “maximize the likelihood of families receiving their first or second choice, allow for additional time that will enable providers to fully consider their capabilities to expand their offerings in the coming school year, and give families the opportunity to fine-tune their preferences, the department is extending the release of the first round of matching until April 26, 2023.”

Read the full story from our partners at Chalkbeat Colorado.

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Where have the kids gone?

A new analysis by The Associated Press and Stanford University’s Big Local News project found an estimated 230,000 students in 21 states absent from publicly available data on public and private school enrollment and home schooling.

That tally includes as many as 9,000 uncounted in Colorado, or about 1% of the state’s school-age children.

The uncounted likely include students learning in private school and at their kitchen tables who simply haven’t been reported, along with children who aren’t in school at all.

The findings further illustrate the pandemic’s profound impact on education, with some families rethinking their options and other students struggling to stay connected. They also demonstrate the difficulty of getting a full picture of where students have landed as a result of the upheaval.

States like Colorado where kindergarten is voluntary have many more unaccounted-for children than states where kindergarten is required, the analysis found. Birth rates have declined, meaning there are fewer 5-year-olds than even a few years ago, and thousands of families have moved out of state. But those changes don’t fully account for the decline in kindergarten enrollment.

More families could be keeping their 5-year-olds home even as Colorado prepares to launch a major expansion of public preschool.

“That’s important because kindergarten is the first experience kids have with a formal learning environment, and readiness to learn is really important as they move onto older grades,” said Thomas Dee, a Stanford University education professor who worked on the analysis.

At the other end of their school careers, more Colorado students are dropping out, state data shows, with 10,500 middle and high school students leaving the system in 2021-22, a 23% increase from 2019-20 and the highest dropout rate in four years.

Read the full story from our partners at Chalkbeat Colorado.

Chalkbeat Colorado is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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Both men agree they had an argument Friday morning about Anderson’s December vote to move the school Pryor founded, Robert F. Smith STEAM Academy, from its current location to a former elementary school miles away from the Far Northeast community it serves. But their accounts of what happened differ.

In an affidavit filed with Denver County Court and in an interview with Chalkbeat, Anderson said Pryor swore at him, used abusive language, and threatened him in his place of employment. Pryor said he works in the same building and stops by regularly. He said the affidavit is a lie, that he never threatened anyone, and that Anderson swore at him first.

Anderson also filed a municipal criminal complaint against Pryor on Monday. A Denver Police Department spokesman declined to release a police report on the incident, citing an open investigation.

The restraining order issued Tuesday is temporary, according to Denver County Court. A hearing is set for Feb. 7 to determine whether it will be extended.

The restraining order requires Pryor to stay 10 yards away from Anderson at public forums and otherwise stay 100 yards away from Anderson. Pryor is not allowed to contact Anderson while the order is in place.

Read the full story from our partners at Chalkbeat Colorado.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. For more, visit co.chalkbeat.org.

The district announced the change in a letter from school board President Debbie Gerkin on Friday afternoon.

The Aurora school board plans to vote on a transition agreement and plan at its Tuesday meeting. Munn’s contract expires at the end of this school year. This fall, the board and superintendent had been in conversations about Munn’s evaluation and contract.

Munn “will begin transitioning to a support role” for the remainder of the school year, with a modified schedule, the announcement says. The board plans to hire an acting superintendent for the rest of this school year.

The district will launch the search for its next permanent superintendent later this month. Munn has agreed to help the new superintendent adjust to their job during the first semester of the 2023-24 school year.

Read the full story from our partners at Chalkbeat Colorado.

Chalkbeat Colorado is a nonprofit news organization covering education issues. For more, visit co.chalkbeat.org.

Over the last year and a half, Steve Durham has pushed for the state’s academic standards to connect the Holocaust and other genocides to socialism. Durham succeeded in omitting the word Nazi from an early version of the standards in favor of the party’s full name, the National Socialist German Workers Party.

Durham agreed to include the word Nazi after Jewish community members lobbied the State Board of Education — so long as the full name with the word socialist remained.

“People don’t know and have a right to know that this party was and is a socialist party,” Durham said at an August State Board meeting. “That is largely lost on the American people and on a number of history teachers as well. I oppose dumbing down the standards.”

Read more at Chalkbeat Colorado.

At the same time, Colorado charter schools continue to enroll students with disabilities at some of the lowest rates in the nation, and many parents don’t think charter schools will accommodate kids with specialized education plans related to disabilities.

Two reports out this week point to the potential promise of charter schools and changes that still need to happen for them to function like truly public schools, open to all students.

More than 15% of all Colorado students now attend charter schools, putting the state third behind only Arizona and Washington, D.C., for proportion of charter school enrollment, according to a report from the Keystone Policy Center, a nonprofit that works on a wide range of policy issues. Charter school enrollment rose during the pandemic even as enrollment in traditional district-run schools declined.

Read the full story at Chalkbeat Colorado.

Chalkbeat Colorado is a nonprofit news organization covering education issues. For more, visit co.chalkbeat.org.