Education 'reform' in Colorado is still a failure.
Last week the
Denver Post headlined this report:
More Colorado graduates than ever not ready for college. It is about as bottom-line as you can get ... after thirteen years of 'education reform' in public schools, almost a third of Colorado high school graduates are not even ready for college freshman English or math.
Yet despite evidence that the Bush-Spellings-Obama-Duncan-Romer-Owens-Ritter-Hickenlooper corporatized 'standards-based' accountability and charter education philosophy is such an obvious failure, you can still count on elite "we know what's best for you" representatives of the corporate governing class to defend the status quo. Here is a link to an opinion column published in yesterday's Denver Post:
Graduated, not educated | Van Schoales and Barbara O'Brien/Denver Post - February 12, 2012Too many students are graduating from Colorado high schools without the skills or knowledge to succeed in college.
We are coming up on two decades of the so-called "reform" movement being the prime directing policy in public education.
Fourteen years of CSAP testing, of 'accountability' and 'standards' and quasi-privatization through charter schools has gotten us this: FAILURE.
Van Schoales and Barbara O'Brien apparently cannot face-up to the abject failure of the educational policies they (with the help of billionaires like Gates and Broad) have pushed upon the citizens and students of Colorado. They pat themselves on their backs for having "developed nationally recognized data systems that track a student's academic growth over time" ... but that just highlights how clueless they are about what real learning is all about. Real education for individual students is not about data and testing and tracking.
The fact that high school graduates must go through remediation to be prepared for the freshman year at college is a bonfire of evidence that their formula is wrong. Their notions for fixing the problem are predictably to double-down on more of the same, as they say themselves "a renewed emphasis on higher standards and accountability." (Get ready for the "we need more money" pitch soon to follow.)
What we need is a genuine revolution in public education. We need to stop degrading the teacher, put them back in charge and allow them the freedom to teach in their classrooms. We need to empower neighborhood schools and local school boards to decide how to educate the children in their charge -- in other words, tell the federal and state government educrats to take a hike. We need to stop the maniacal obsession with the idea that ALL students must go to college -- there are many, many alternative avenues for our young people besides taking on thousands of dollars of debt to get a degree that may not even provide them with a marketable skill. We need to stem the flow of public and private dollars into charter schools that cherry-pick students and still do not adequately educate students -- all public schools should have access to the same resources.
The bottom-line is that twelve years of school ought to be enough time to prepare the vast majority of students to live in the real world and to be prepared for whatever next step they chose to take. The "reform" status quo as defended by Schoales and O'Brien in this editorial has failed miserably on this score. It is time to throw it out and start again with a program of common sense and focused on learning, learning, learning -- not on data, tracking and testing.