Colorado ballot initiative

Speaking of DFER, it's joined with both teachers unions to support a groundbreaking ballot initiative in Colorado that will hopefully pass on Tuesday. Here's an op ed by the NYT's Frank Bruni on it (with a well-deserved plug for TFA alum and CO state senator Mike Johnston):

If there's a key to this nation's sustained competitiveness, it's education. And if there's a key to the kind of social mobility that's integral to our country's cherished narrative, to its soul, it's giving kids from all walks of life teachers and classrooms that beckon them toward excellence. But like all aspects of American policy making these days, the push to improve public schools bucks up against factionalism, pettiness, lobbies that won't be muted and sacred cows that can't be disturbed. Progress that needs to be sweeping is anything but.

That's why my eyes turn to Colorado. That's why yours should, too.

The state is on the precipice of something big. On Election Day next Tuesday, Coloradans will decide whether to ratify an ambitious statewide education overhaul that the Legislature already passed and that Gov. John Hickenlooper signed but that voters must now approve, because Colorado law gives them that right in regard to tax increases, which the overhaul entails. Arne Duncan, the nation's education secretary, has said that the success of Amendment 66, which is what voters will weigh in on, would make Colorado "the educational model for every other state to follow."

It's significant in many regards, especially in its creation of utterly surprising political bedfellows. Amendment 66 has the support of many fervent advocates of charter schools, which the overhaul would fund at nearly the same level as other schools for the first time. In fact one prominent donor to the campaign for Amendment 66 is Ben Walton, whose family's philanthropy, the Walton Family Foundation, champions school choice and is loathed by teachers' unions.

And yet the two most powerful of those unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, have endorsed Amendment 66. The N.E.A. and its state arm, the Colorado Education Association, have together donated $4 million toward the amendment's passage.

...He's by no means a conventionally liberal Democrat. Neither is the overhaul's chief architect, a young state senator named Mike Johnston who used to be a schoolteacher and principal and previously sponsored a law that ended traditional tenure in Colorado's public schools. It drew robust Republican support.

His education overhaul is a shrewd grab bag of ideas from different camps that recognizes the political imperative of such eclecticism and the lack of any magic bullet for student improvement. It invests in early childhood education, teacher training, a fund for innovative projects, charters. It ratchets up local control and flexibility, giving principals an unprecedented degree of autonomy over spending. It also enables parents to see, online, how much money goes into instruction versus administration at their children's schools. There's transparency. Accountability.