Charter Schools: Colorado's Mandate For Change
Blackmon, a mother from boulder, says charter schools would serve 13 interests including neighborhoods, diversity, equity, measuring performance school pride, reducing dropouts, better teaching, parental involvement, raising standards, facilitating choice, maintaining student interaction, preserving extracurricular options, and Strengthening school leadership.
Taken For A Ride: How the Taxi Cartel and the State Are Disserving Denver's Economy
The Colorado Public Utilities Commission has blocked new competitors from entering Denver’s three-firm taxicab market for nearly half a century. Job creation and entrepreneurship, especially for low income people are hurt by this policy…
Denver International: America's Most Inconvenient Airport
The common abbreviation for newly-opened Denver International Airport is DIA. But to comply with truth in labeling, the abbreviation really ought to be MIA. Because the new airport is the Most Inconvenient Airport in the United States.
Stop Cooking The Books on Set-Asides
How statistical disparity misleads and multiple regression excels for assessing discrimination in public works contracting.
How to Think About Health Care Reform: Disasters pf Price-Fixing and Cost Shifting Can't Be Cured by More of the Same
Close observers have been urging reform of America’s health care system for at least a decade. But it was not until last year’s presidential election that the political community finally responded and through their campaigning, made health care a serious issue in the minds of the public.
Privatizing Medicaid in Colorado
For many years virtually everyone has agreed that the current Medicaid system is broken, but instead of fixing it we simply throw more money at it. Medicaid costs rise far faster than the rate of inflation or the rate of health care cost increases. Yet few people believe that Medicaid adequately provides essential health care for the needy.
True Pay-For-Performance Is Vital To School Reform: What Kids Learn Must Drive What Teachers Make
Teacher effectiveness is becoming a focal point of public dissatisfaction with the education system. Evaluation of teachers is seldom linked to their salaries, and merit pay when attempted usually fails because criteria are too subjective. Raises should be tied to what a given class learns in a given year, above an agreed baseline, adjusted for student aptitude.
Quality Alternatives To Government Schools In Greater Denver
Here is evidence that if Amendment 7 passes on Nov. 3, Parents in the countries of Denver, Boulder, Adams, Arapahoe, Jefferson, and Douglas will be able to take vouchers into an independent and church related educational sector that is socially inclusive, responsive to harder-to-educate children, quality-driven, and remarkably affordable.
Data in this issue paper, obtained through an Independence Institute survey of 48 schools and state records on 100 others, support that characterization. They contradict the bleak picture of an expensive, exclusive, unaccountable nonpublic sector as commonly portrayed by voucher opponents.
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Heavy Job Losses Foreseen If Tax Hike Passes
Amendment 6, Gov. Roy Romer’s school tax increase proposal, could cost Colorado 57,000 jobs if Romer’s own economic and political assumptions are correct. A leading economic researcher says the loss could reach 75,000 jobs. No one foresees an economic boost from the tax.
How Not To Improve The Schools
Children First, the sales tax and school reform proposal facing voters on Nov. 3, is fiscally unnecessary because next year’s revenue estimates have made a “nonexistent bogeyman” of Gov. Roy Romer’s alleged 12% funding cut. In addition, the measure is educationally counterproductive because it would disempower families and school districts, and economically harmful because it would destroy up to 75,000 jobs.
Amendment Six Puts Taxpayers Last
Introduction by the Editor: Everyone agrees our kids and their schools deserve first priority. But must it be done by giving our hard-working Colorado taxpayers last priority? Such would be the effect of Amendment Six, the misnamed “Children First Initiative” which teacher unions and Gov. Roy Romer want voters to approve on Nov. 3.
Driver's License Privacy
Actress Rebecca Schaeffer, co-star of the television series “My Sister Sam,” had a lot of admirers. One admirer, a crazy gentlemen named Robert Bardo, decided he wanted to kill the actress.
Killer Bardo had no idea where the actress lived, but luckily for Bardo, the state government of California provided him with his victim’s address.
Bardo went to a private investigative agency, claimed that Ms. Schaeffer was a long-lost friend, and asked for help in tracking her down. The investigative agency went to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, paid a one dollar fee, and was told the address that Ms. Schaeffer had listed on her driver’s license.
