Education

The Education Issue Team is concerned with the latest statistics on Colorado's education spending.  We are now 50th - dead last - in higher education spending, and 46th in spending on K-12. These dismal statistics tell us that we can only improve - and provides ACT with no other option but to jump in feet first in the attempt to better funding and ensure the funding that's there is best spent. The goal of this team is to push forward the issues that we feel will improve our education system.

Emerging Themes

1. Support our American Public Schools!  Imagine what this country would look like without them.
2. Our public schools are accomplishing wonderful things every single day, have a broad diversity of students, including the learning disabled, who are welcomed and mainstreamed to everyone’s advantage. Public schools work with families to improve the home educational environment, teachers are a special group of caring individuals who work very hard to help our children, and in most instances do not deserve to be labeled as “failing our children”
3. “No Child Left Behind” has an unsustainable future.  All children will not be proficient by 2014 because not enough remedial work is funded. As a second problem, good schools cannot keep getting better indefinitely; it is a statistical impossibility.
4. CSAP and other testing procedures have negative and positive points. They eat up classroom time, are unfair in many ways, are impossibly rigid in administration and scoring,  the data is time-consuming to process and it costs the State of Colorado a great deal of money as each test is individually scored.  However, our members believe the testing has  improved instruction in writing and math, but possibly not in reading.
5. Upcoming national legislation may be primarily targeted at inner-city school improvement, and one-size-fits-all legislation that emerges may not apply to currently successful schools.
6. Preschool programs and small-group remedial work (<6 in a group) are key to getting kids proficient in reading and other early skills. There is not enough funding for these critical activities

Challenges

1. Charter schools have the advantage of being small and locally-controlled, they get public funding, yet they do not have to take challenged children because they do not provide appropriate programs for them
2. Passing children from grade to grade when they are not proficient is a detrimental practice, both to the student who just keeps falling further behind, and also to the next teacher who has to provide remedial time for the non-proficient student who has been passed on inappropriately to her class.
3. Evaluating teachers and paying for performance is a concept fraught with caveats.  It has advantages, but also disadvantages.  We don’t want a competitive environment in our schools to develop, where teachers don’t help each other because they want to stay the most desirable teacher. Evaluating teachers on the basis of CSAP scores could only work if applied to student improvement over a school year. Even using tests in this way does not take into account the many variables that affect how a teacher can work with any one group of children or the circumstances of that child’s life at the time.
4. Classroom size is critical to good instruction and is not protected – it is regularly compromised when budgets are tight. 
5. Proper attention and recognition is not given to children’s readiness issues. Brain development and readiness for certain types of learning does not always progress at the same rate in different children and this is not recognized or properly built into current ideas about curriculum and testing
6. Nutrition in the schools is often problematic, does not set a good example, and may diminish concentration and learning
7. Using CSAPs to grade schools may not make sense. Perhaps we should use them to follow student progress and teacher effectiveness. Can you really improve “schools” or does one need to dig deeper and look at the teachers and students who make up the school. Punishing a school may be a machete tool when a scalpel is needed.
8. Teacher unions serve a good purpose to get and keep teacher benefits in the face of low salaries, to protect them from unfair practices, but they have sometimes been detrimental  when they protect poor teachers and prevent their discharge, and when they suggest actions like “slow-downs” which are contrary to what our children need.
9. Lobbyists like McGraw Hill Publishing (makes testing materials) push for more and more tests and over-estimate their value.
10. The Army of 100,000 Presidentially-licensed teachers may or may not be successful. Making inner –city schools an attractive place to work might be more effective. Loan-forgiveness for students, bringing back retired master teachers, other incentives might be at least as good, if not better.
11. It should be recognized that not all children will attend college – vocational tracts and/or opportunities should be resurrected and funded. The idea that every child should go to college is a misguided goal.

Potential Solutions

1. If someone really wanted to see if kids were smarter since CSAP was introduced, they should administer the Iowa Tests and compare with the year before CSAP was introduced - ?2002
2. Keep classrooms small – perhaps 21 in elementary school, up to 35 in high school for some subjects, but less for writing classes where grading time is prohibitive.
3. Provide more resources for public schools for the learning disabled they take charge of – they should get at least double the amount of state funds that a non-challenged student gets.
4. Improve school nutrition – this has been shown to improve student performance
5. Evaluating teachers over time (say 3-5 years) can help even out variables that can make a teacher look particularly bad if she has a particularly challenging class, and use the growth she can bring about in a student, not just a snapshot of where any student is at any one time. – So, the use of CSAPS must change.
6. Extend time period to tenure, and facilitate the process of moving poor teachers out of the teaching profession. Get them out early.
7. Educational policy experts should examine schools that do work – try to apply some of their techniques to schools with similar demographics.