Dave Chandler

Colorado Black Hole of School Funding

How many new teachers could we hire with $17,400,000? How many schools around the state could be physically renovated or repaired with $17,400,000? How many new text books could be purchased with $17,400,000? How much extra tutoring could be obtained for disadvantaged students with $17,400,000?

Worthy items that might actually assist in real classroom teaching and learning will miss what $17,400,000 could do because federal and Colorado public school educrats and bureaucrats want to spend that money on "data collection."

That's the news today in the Denver Post: Colorado gets $17.4 million grant for data system to track student progress. It's another prime example of how the education theory currently in vogue with the "we know what's best for you" crowd is obsessed with administrative process to the exclusion of what might actually teach and educate real live, breathing students in the classroom.

Millions and millions of taxpayer-levied and borrowed dollars are to be funneled down a black hole of endless "evaluations" of teachers and students to tell us what we already know: the socio-economic status of student populations is predictive of performance.

So, instead of using dollars to enact some real educational plans that might concretely help students and mitigate the effects of negative economic influences, the national and Colorado governments are going to spend millions of more dollars so that administrators and clerks and consultants and specialists and computer geeks and data-heads can build a "statewide longitudinal data system" to track "test scores and attendance and enrollment data."

I wonder how many fourth graders will be helped to read better once the PDFs containing that vital information are sent around to ... to whom? Why the very people who produced it. (And politicians and bureaucrats and educrats wonder why the citizenry has such a low opinion of them.)

Of course, we also know in advance what the politicians and educrats will do with the 'new' information generated by this $17,400,000 system --- which will inevitably show that public schools are still stagnating or falling behind: demand and plead for yet more money from the taxpayers to spend on more evaluations, testing and tracking of students and teachers.

Regular folks in Colorado and the nation should be outraged at this waste of millions and millions of dollars being used to perpetuate a failed educational theory.

Colorado Gets $17.4 Million Grant for Data System to Track Student Progress | Denver Post

The 'Discount' Teacher

The era of the "discount" teacher has arrived in Colorado.

The state legislature on the last day of its 2010 session acceded to the desires of Gov. Ritter and Colorado's top educrats by passing the so-called tenure reform bill.

Oh boy, now we have to be considered serious contestants for the big second round jackpot prize on "Race to the Top" (I think it's telecast right after 'American Idol').

What this new law will really mean, however, is that fewer and fewer of the "best and brightest" young adults will have much incentive to join the teaching profession. What new college freshman is going to risk racking-up a $30,000 student loan debt in order to get into a 'career' in Colorado where they could be deemed "inefficient" and fire-able after three years on the job because of arbitrary intangibles like classroom placement and the fickleness of students performing on the highly flawed CSAP test?

Of course, long term maybe that's the goal: the creation of a non-union, demoralized, low-wage, transient teacher corps. After all, if 'teachers' are going to be utilized primarily as test tutors, test-givers, data collectors and enforcers of 'zero tolerance' rules, well, then the best workforce for that kind of job will be financially stressed, indebted drudges who will do as they are told, no questions asked.

At this point I'll take my shot at the Colorado Education Association -- if they don't pull their support for every Democrat politician who voted for or supported this bill, then they will give-up a lot of credibility. Wouldn't the defeat of Chris Romer and Michael Johnston ... and Michael Bennett demonstrate some political "accountability" on education? (My prediction? The CEA doesn't have the guts.)

So, the "we know what's best for you" crowd has triumphed down at the state capitol building. Maybe Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will like Colorado's song and dance enough to give us some prize money with which to implement this teacher evaluation system. And, when CSAP scores remain stagnant, and community colleges report more students needing remedial reading and writing, and the drop-out rate goes up -- as they all will since few of these 'reforms' have anything to do with kids actually learning anything other than how to take a test -- then what?

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In this post today I'd also like to share a news report that talks about the "go to college' obsession of the testing/accountability/nationalization crowd.

I am absolutely a believer in getting as much education as you can ... it really has more to do with quality of life than just how much money you can make. The joy of learning can be a lifetime pursuit that adds depth and character to a person's existence.

However, the push by Bush/Spellings/Obama/Duncan-Romer/Owens/Ritter to get kids to go to college for the sake of going to college (in other words, it makes the politicians look good), is misdirected in my opinion. Better that young folks who would be happier in trades and crafts find ways to make a living in those occupations instead of being saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt.

The 'college obsession' of the current schooling elite isn't about acquiring skills and knowledge, it's about supporting the education-industrial complex. My personal advice to young people: if you want to go to college, go. If you don't, then resist the pressure from the educrats and politicians -- look for alternatives.

Doubters Say College Isn't for Everyone | Associated Press/NewsObserver.com

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- In a town dominated by the University of Missouri's flagship campus and two smaller colleges, higher education is practically a birthright for high school seniors like Kate Hodges.

She has a 3.5 grade-point average, a college savings account and a family tree teeming with advanced degrees. But in June, Hodges is headed to the Tulsa Welding School in Oklahoma, where she hopes to earn an associate's degree in welding technology in seven months.

"They fought me so hard," she said, referring to disappointed family members. "They still think I'm going to college."

The notion that a four-year degree is essential for real success is being challenged by a growing number of economists, policy analysts and academics. They say more Americans should consider other options such as technical training or two-year schools, which have been embraced in Europe for decades.

As evidence, experts cite rising student debt, stagnant graduation rates and a struggling job market flooded with overqualified degree-holders. They pose a fundamental question: Do too many students go to college?

"College is what every parent wants for their child," said Martin Scaglione, president and chief operating officer of work force development for ACT, the Iowa-based not-for-profit best known for its college entrance exam. "The reality is, they may not be ready for college."

President Barack Obama wants to restore the country's status as the world leader in the proportion of citizens with college degrees. The U.S. now ranks 10th among industrial nations.

But federal statistics show that just 36 percent of full-time students starting college in 2001 earned a four-year degree within that allotted time. Even with an extra two years to finish, that group's graduation rate increased only to 56 percent.

Spending more time in school also means greater overall student debt. The average student debt load in 2008 was $23,200 - a nearly $5,000 increase over five years. Two-thirds of students graduating from four-year schools owe money on student loans.

And while the unemployment rate for college graduates still trails the rate for high school graduates (4.9 percent versus 10.8 percent), the figure has more than doubled in less than two years.

From campus to mall

"A four-year degree in business - what's that get you?" asked Karl Christopher, a placement counselor at the Columbia Area Career Center vocational program. "A shift supervisor position at a store in the mall."

At Rock Bridge High School, one of Columbia's two high schools, 72 percent of the class of 2008 moved on to four-year colleges, with another 10 percent attending community college. That college attendance rate is consistent with national statistics.

Only 4 percent of Rock Bridge students chose technical training like the Oklahoma welding school where Hodges is headed.

Roughly 1,200 students from central Missouri take classes at the career center, supplementing their core high school courses with specialized training in automotive technology, culinary arts, animal science, robotics, landscape design, electrical wiring and more.

Hodges has been set on a welding career since she was 13. She craves independence and has little patience for fellow students who seem to wind up in college more from a sense of obligation than anything else.

"School is what they've been doing their whole lives," she said. "So they just want to continue. Because that's what they are used to."

Sue Popkes doesn't hide her disappointment over her younger daughter's decision. At the same time, she realizes that Hodges may achieve more financial security than a college degree could ever provide.

"It's sad to know she's going to miss that mind-opening effect of an undergraduate degree," Popkes said.

Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder blames the cultural notion of "credential inflation" for the stream of unqualified students into four-year colleges. His research has found that the number of new jobs requiring college degrees is less than number of college graduates.

Vedder's work also yielded something surprising: The more money states spend on higher education, the less the economy grows - the reverse of long-held assumptions.

"If people want to go out and get a master's degree in history and then cut down trees for a living, that's fine," he said, citing an example from a recent encounter with a worker. "But I don't think the public should be subsidizing it."

Margaret Spellings, former federal education secretary under George W. Bush, remains a strong proponent of increased college access. She points to research showing that college graduates will on average earn $1 million more over a lifetime than those with only high school degrees.

"It is crucial to the success of our country and to us as individuals to graduate more students from college," she said at a National Press Club forum earlier this year.

For many, the dream of earning a college degree - and the social acceptance that comes with it - trumps a more analytical, cost-benefits approach.

John Reynolds, a Florida State sociology professor, found that unrealized educational expectations do not lead to depression or other long-term emotional costs.

"Rich kids, poor kids, 'A' students, 'C' students - we really didn't find any lasting impact on not getting the degree," he said.

Scaglione suggested that nothing short of a new definition for educational success is needed to diminish the public bias toward four-year degrees. He advocates "certification as the new education currency - documentation of skills as opposed to mastering curriculum."

"Our national system is, 'Do you have a degree or not?'" he said. "That doesn't really measure if you have skills."

Who It Should Be All About: Students and Parents

The forgotten people in public education in Colorado? Students and parents.

The politicians and educrats in Washington, D.C. and at Colfax and Lincoln are very busy these days coming up with and competing in contests promising multimillion dollar prizes, concocting schemes to glean even more 'data' from students and teachers, and debating about how to use that 'data' to put students and teachers into pre-labeled boxes.

All of these so-called 'reforms' regard students and parents as irrelevant and incidental to the grand plans; the message seems to be "we know what is best for you, now shut-up and get a bake sale going so that the school can buy new playground equipment."

I don't remember ever getting a parent survey from the Jeffco school district or the Colorado education department, for instance, asking whether or not I thought three weeks of intensive testing every year for my kids was a good idea. I guess all of us parents and voters were supposed to make sure that our elected representatives knew what we were thinking -- while we were, you know, working and raising our kids and paying our taxes and getting a costly permit from the city government so that the water heater can be replace (daily life stuff), etc. Sure, we've all got plenty of time to engage our state senator in deep pedagogical discussions.

The point being that many parents with children now in the public school system do have thoughts and opinions about how their own students are and/or should be taught -- nevertheless the politicians and educrats have ideas of their own. And those ideas revolve primarily around money and more money and control and more control.

Notice that in the current controversy about teacher tenure and the perverse 'Race to the Top' contest, the issues are about money, testing, evaluations, data, tracking and money. No debate about new learning alternatives for those not bound for college (the educrats obsession with college-prep is getting weird); no talk about smaller high schools; no discussion about the possibility of ending compulsory attendance; no conversations about lessening the bureaucratic paperwork for teachers; no dialogue about inserting more 'real world' learning into the curriculum; so on and so forth.

The everyday educational concerns of parents are being ignored, as are the long term concerns (like how is my child going to pay-off her $30,000 college loan?) -- instead, the "know it all's" in Washington and Denver revel in their own world of testing and evaluation that they call 'accountability' -- but at the root, their program is devoid of meaningful, practical content.

So, it is gratifying to see in today's Denver Post a guest editorial written by a high school junior -- an actual student -- setting the politicians and educrats straight about the CSAP test. It is a small voice in the current wilderness of education reform ... let's hope it is part of a trend that finally leads to a rejection BY THE PEOPLE of the Bush/Spellings/Obama/Duncan-Romer/Owens/Ritter accountability/testing/standards/nationalization 'education' theory.

By the way, the reason I didn't including teachers as forgotten is because they seem to be regard increasingly as "the problem" by the politicians and educrats. In other words, right now teachers are far from forgotten, indeed they are the target, the scape goats for the fact that this whole top-down 'test them till they drop' scheme has been a failure.

Breathing Life Back Into Education | Kerry Martin/Denver Post

With his proud, cereal-box stature and determined countenance crafted with a few colored pencils, Lung Man was mighty.

I gave him life (like my own Frankenstein) for a fifth-grade science project. I cut open the front of an Apple Jacks cereal box to expose what would become the complex inner workings of the human respiratory system.

I could breathe in and out of a tube that connected to Lung Man's lungs from behind his paper head to expand and contract those paper sacks of life. Lung Man not only clarified and glorified the art of breathing, but probably influenced my choice years later to not try inhaling paint thinner as a hallucinogen.

Most of today's fifth-graders no longer have time for projects like this, because they need to prepare for the CSAPs.

Colorado is facing a budget crisis, with education taking the brunt of it. Gov. Bill Ritter plans on cutting $260 million from the education budget for the next 18 months, yet he still demands higher test scores. In order to spare the curriculums, sports programs and staff from being choked by the iron clasp of Ritter's budget cuts, Colorado and its schools should spend less time and money on CSAPs and reorganize school spending in general.

Inside and outside the classroom, students and faculty fear the real repercussions of the budget cuts. Yet the state would never consider cutting off funding for its beloved CSAP. At $14 million annually, CSAPs are the most expensive breathalyzer to date, and that's excluding hidden expenses like electricity, heating, janitorial staff, etc.

Cherry Creek High School's CSAP ritual is about as efficient as the Hummers in its parking lot: The entire four-building school is open for three days, during which the freshmen and sophomores take the test without attending their normal classes and the upper classmen stay at home watching "Jersey Shore."

I would spare my criticism of limited education funding going towards CSAPs if the tests weren't so pointless. Teachers cannot count them as a grade for the class, and colleges can't see the results. In all honesty, why should I apply myself on my eighth year of taking the test, answering the same dull, insipid essay questions such as "Is it important to challenge yourself every day?" (The answer: Not on CSAP days, it isn't.)

Furthermore, since CSAPs are only of interest to the school and are inconsequential to students, it is to the teachers' advantage to focus solely on CSAP material — and even to cheat. Indeed, earlier this year, Mark Huebner, a teacher at an Aurora charter school, was dismissed for telling his students the correct answers during CSAP testing. Parents of these students even believed that Huebner's actions were instructions that "came from other people within the school" as part of a scheme designed to increase the school's test scores.

Colorado could judge student achievement in another way. The state already requires 11th-graders to take the ACT. Why not require them to list their elementary and middle schools? That way, Colorado could use the test scores to evaluate how well each student's previous schools taught them.

Or, how about giving CSAPs only every three or four years? The state would still get a good idea of how well each school taught its students, each student's growth can be readily followed through their comparative test results, and there would be more state funding to spend on real education.

Furthermore, other funding decisions could be revised to preserve the staff and endangered programs.

Colorado education struggles to pay for the bare necessities and must choose some necessities over others rather than redistributing the funds. And the whole time, the massively wasteful CSAPs still drown everything that is actually educational in schools: science, history, art, sports teams, teachers.

Unless we can gasp a breath of real, appropriately funded education, Lung Man remains nothing more than a box of Apple Jacks.

More Failure for Colorado Educrats

Yet more evidence that the testing/accountability/standards education theory currently in vogue with national and Colorado educrats and politicians is failing.

Here are the damning first two paragraphs from today's Denver Post report, 'Colorado's third-graders hover at 70 percent mark in reading proficiency':

After a decade of testing, myriad school reforms and intense reading programs, 30 percent of Colorado's third-graders still are not reading at grade level.

Year after year, the number of proficient third-grade readers in Colorado stays mostly the same — hovering around the 70 percent mark — mirroring a trend occurring nationally.

Remember it was just this past February that the Denver Post reported 'Nearly One in Three Colo. Graduates Needs Remedial Courses in College', and last August this headline 'SAT Scores Dip for High School Class of 2009'.

So, the millions and millions of dollars spent every school year on three weeks of CSAP testing, and the hours and hours of test "prep" (cheating), and the rallies and the prizes ... well, it doesn't yield the promised results.

And the answer to failure? Why double down and give the same theorists even more of what they want -- as evidenced by yet another editorial in today's Denver Post advocating for a so-called tenure reform bill in the legislature that will make teachers even more slavish to the testing, testing, testing regimen.

What we are seeing is the once great American system of education plunging deeper and deeper into a black hole of standardization, nationalization, and corporatization.

This testing/accountability/standards theory treats students like manufactured consumer products to be weighed, measured, tracked and coded in the never-ending lust for more data that can be 'crunched' by administrators and politicians to justify the demand for more money and more control.

Once upon a time the United States educated a body of people who figured out how to put a man on the moon ... and it did that with local school districts run by local school boards who were elected by local parents and voters -- folks who had a personal and direct interest in the education of their own children. Once upon a time this nation was a technological and manufacturing powerhouse and it got that way without constantly testing its young people, and it got that way with tenured teachers who were free to instill a joy of learning to eager, aspiring minds.

It seems now that the goal is to crush students and teachers under the leaden weight of evaluations, testing, and a soulless 'one-size-fits-all' national curriculum.

As the evidence from their own tests indicates, the Bush/Spellings/Obama/Duncan-Romer/Owens/Ritter method isn't working. So, isn't it time to recognize the truth and tell the "we know what's best for your kids" gang of elitist educrats and politicians to take a hike?