Welcome to Chalkbeat Colorado, your new home for education news

Dear readers,

You might have noticed some changes around here. After more than five years as EdNews Colorado, we have changed our name to Chalkbeat Colorado — the latest step in our efforts to serve you the most relevant news about education policy and practice in the loveliest possible package.

Since first announcing the creation of the Chalkbeat network in October, we have opened bureaus in Tennessee and Indiana, grown our staff in Colorado, and added a new community editor to grow our relationships with readers. Now, we’ve also redesigned our website to improve your reading experience.

CO.Chalkbeat.org is pretty different from the evolutions of EdNews Colorado you’ve seen over the years. You can still see the top stories here, as well as stories on the issues you’re most interested in — now organized by topics and narratives. And you will still get our email newsletters.

We’ve also built tools to help you understand the context behind the stories you read. You can now look for “The Backstory” beside articles or navigate by narrative rather than by date. And we’re publishing detailed guides about the big issues in Colorado schools, from the Common Core standards to teacher evaluation to school funding and finance. More “href=”/topics/”>Chalkbeat Explains guides are coming soon.

An exciting year ahead

This is a period of significant change for Colorado. In fact, some observers have described this school year as among the most challenging for districts in recent memory. School officials across the state are managing a tricky balancing act as they implement initiatives like Common Core standards and new teacher evaluations while trying to minimize the impact of budget cuts to their instructional programs. We plan to cover the rhetoric, action, and inaction, and keep policymakers and education professionals accountable.

To do that, we have selected several areas of focus that each of our reporters will cover for the year:

  • School finance and funding:  In the wake of voters’ rejection of Amendment 66, which would have poured nearly $1 billion into the state’s public school districts, policymakers and district and school leaders are now facing a choice. Do they press for money to simply backfill large budget cuts that the state has made since the start of the recession? Or do they try to enact some of the specific policy proposals that the amendment contained, like an expansion of early childhood education or more programs for English language learners? We’ll follow these questions over the course of the year, paying extra attention to effects on classrooms.
  • Implementation of new teacher evaluations: As new teacher evaluations roll out throughout the state this year, we’ll take a look at the new system’s effectiveness at helping individual teachers improve their performance. Are the evaluations being used as professional development tools or as incentives to elicit better performance? We’ll also examine how the new evaluations and implementation of new standards throughout the state intersect. We’re beginning to evaluate teachers just as we task them with changing the way they teach. Is that fair?
  • Common Core and new standards implementation:  In Colorado as across the country, schools are in the process of implementing new standards for what students should know to be prepared to succeed in college and beyond. In addition to Common Core standards, which are being adopted around the country, Colorado is also adopting new standards in social studies and science. How is the roll-out process going? And are challenges that schools run into due to lack of oversight, lack of training or because of a fundamental policy objection to the idea of shared content standards? We’ll also take a look at how much schools are paying to introduce the standards and what the consequences of those costs are.
  • Turnaround/school improvement: Under Colorado’s school accountability system, schools and districts that receive low ratings are given five years to show significant improvements or face what could be radical interventions from the state. Some schools and districts facing the deadline are calling the state’s bluff about how drastic interventions will be. We will be taking a look at the methods schools and districts around the state are using to improve and what they could mean for efforts statewide. We’ll also be taking a close look at school improvement efforts in Denver, where tensions have arisen over whether the district should try to improve its comprehensive neighborhood schools or offer parents choices among a variety of schools across the city.

How to get involved

Our stories will be strongest with your help. Here are a few ways to pitch in:

First, meet our community editor, Tiffany Montaño, who will be creating more opportunities for you to interact with our reporters, share your experiences, and help deepen our coverage of public schools. To start, please consider submitting to our First Person section, which highlights the experiences of teachers, administrators, students, policymakers, and parents. To find out more or pitch an idea, e-mail Tiffany.

Another way to share your experiences and thoughts with us is through our comments section. Here is a look at our new comments policy, which we will be enforcing aggressively with the help of our engagement director, Anika Anand. We want Chalkbeat Colorado to be a place where educators, policymakers, and families can come to voice their concerns, talk to one another and ultimately, act in a way that leads to better schools for everyone. So please, be courteous and respectful in your comments so that we can all learn something from each other.

Here are some other ways to stay up to date on our reporting and help us make our reporting the best it can be:

New commenting policy and system

One big change that loyal readers of our site in Colorado will notice is that we will be using a new commenting system and, along with that, a new commenting policy for the site. We are proud of the respectful, productive conversation that our readers conduct in our comments section now and we have been searching for ways to make that conversation more inclusive of all of our readers.

To that end, we’re now accepting comments from readers anonymously, although we’re simultaneously building new ways to moderate comments thoroughly—including by enlisting the support of our readers, who can use our new system, Disqus, to promote an especially constructive comment or flag a contribution that was inappropriate. You can read our full comments policy here.

Happy reading,

Maura Walz, Chalkbeat Colorado bureau chief

Elizabeth Green, Chalkbeat editor-in-chief