DFER Colorado
DFER Colorado Advisory
Committee:
Elaine Berman -
Member of the Colorado State Board of Education
Terrance Carroll - Speaker
of the House for the Colorado General Assembly
Mike Johnston - Colorado
State Senator
Tom Kaesemeyer
Donna Lynne
Courtney Messenbaugh
Chris Meza
Barbara O'Brien - Colorado
Lt. Governor
Christine Scanlan -
Colorado State Representative
Van Schoales
Mary Shay
For all inquiries please contact:
Moira Cullen
Interim State Director
(303) 868-8452
moira@dfer.org
1576 Sherman Street, Suite 300
Denver, Colorado 80203
DFER Colorado
DFER Colorado Staff
DFER Colorado
State Director - Moira Cullen
Moira Cullen, State Director for DFER-Colorado since August 2008, specializes in advocating for education reform, higher education, non-profit advocacy, and children's policy issues as a lobbying expert in Denver, CO. As a mother of two children in the Denver Public School system, Moira is incredibly active in local and statewide ed-reform projects and policies. Her expertise in helping to pass SB 10-191, a bill to help ensure that there are effective teachers and leaders in every school, marked a significant milestone in the education reform movement in Colorado. The bill is now hailed as a national model for educator effectiveness legislation. Moira also serves on the Board of West Denver Prepatory Charter School, and was named a 2009 Mover & Shaker in the Colorado education community in Education News Colorado.
DFER Colorado
Joel Klein: Lessons Learned In NYC
(From In Denver Times, October 27, 2009)
By NANCY MITCHELL
Joel Klein led the government's antitrust prosecution of Microsoft before he took over the nation's largest school district. Fighting Bill Gates, he said in Denver on Monday, was easier than trying to move public education.
"The one thing we've got to understand if we're really going to transform public education is the education system, by and large, doesn't want to change," the New York City schools chancellor said at a gathering of the Colorado branch of Democrats for Education Reform.
"Sure it wants to get better, sure it wants to do a better job," he said. "But it doesn't want to do the tough transformative work. Because the system serves lots of needs quite effectively -- it just doesn't serve the needs of our children."
Seven years into running the district of more than 1 million students, Klein is "revered" by some and "reviled" by others for his reform efforts, according to a New York Times profile. Next week, on Election Day, he'll learn whether the mayor who appointed him, Michael Bloomberg, keeps his job.
But in his talk about lessons learned since his 2002 appointment, Klein seemed optimistic as he described the efforts undertaken in NYC's 1,400 schools and his belief that public education can transform children's lives.
