Debate is continuing to fly over a proposed bill to retain third-grade students who don’t pass state reading tests. It’s no wonder. The bill has the potential to have deep, lasting effects on children, teachers, and school budgets.
Like many education issues, this one involves competing ideologies, with each side arguing that its position is best for children and warning of dire consequences if another path is taken. Will third-graders who are promoted despite failing the reading test founder in higher grades as they struggle to read more advanced assignments, raising the odds they will drop out? Or does repeating a grade put them at higher risk of boredom, social isolation, and disengagement from school, also raising the odds they will drop out? Who wants to configure a path between those two scenarios? Both assume that the system expects some level of failure.
Those who favor a line-in-the-sand approach to reading by third grade argue that the threat of retention would encourage schools to work harder at prevention. There are lots of interventions schools can put in place to catch and remediate reading problems starting in the earliest grades when it is easiest to catch up, in hopes of averting a third-grade showdown altogether. Colorado already requires schools to monitor early literacy skills; I hope the new bill includes enough prevention measures to ensure that retention is a rare, last-resort response affecting as few students as possible.
The challenges of getting this legislation right are fresh in my mind because my organization wrote a policy brief on the topic a few months ago and we sorted through a lot of the big questions and related research then. Even the title, “Student Retention vs. Social Promotion: A False Dichotomy,” hints at how complex and nuanced we found the issues to be.
The deadline for Denver Public Schools’ new enrollment process is Tuesday but many families have yet to turn in their SchoolChoice forms
Updated – Statewide K-12 enrollment for 2011-12 is 854,265, an increase of 10,949, and Jeffco gets set for community budget meetings.
January 27, 2012 | Posted in
Daily Churn,
News |
0 comments |
Read More » 
An emotional hearing on the undocumented student tuition bill was the highlight of a busy day at the Capitol Thursday.
This article was submitted by Louise Smith, a longtime Denver-area teacher.
“I’ve been LEAPed,” said my friend the last day before Christmas break.
She was referring to the results of her trip through Leading Effective Academic Practice, Denver Public Schools’ new teacher evaluation process.
She was unhappy with the results, as everyone else has been, and promised me not to obsess about it so that we might have a decent, work-angst-free evening. I told her not to worry about it, because, though I longed for a decent-work-angst-free evening, I could see it wasn’t going to happen tonight.
She got 2s and 3s on a scale of 6, though not really, because the numbers have been deleted from the LEAP system. So although she was rated low, she actually wasn’t rated low, though everyone knows from the politically correct adverbs of time (sometimes, frequently, etc.) that she was rated low. (Are you beginning to see the effect of school-born-confusion, aka SBC, set in?)
This commentary was submitted by Democrat Jared Polis who represents Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. Congress.
With this week’s celebrations of school choice week all across America, I remain optimistic about the great promise and opportunity of offering effective public school options for parents and students.
Chief among these are quality charter schools, which are leading the way in student achievement in so many areas in Colorado and across the country. Online learning is another important public school choice opportunity to help students succeed, whether blended, supplementary or full-time. Districts also open focus schools or magnet schools that are open equally to families across the school district.
In Colorado, as in some other states, we wisely allow students and their families to choose schools outside of their neighborhood school and even their school district. Districts can take cues from parental demand to replicate and expand successful models with waiting lists and modify or close unsuccessful schools.
With Colorado legislators getting back to work and the State Board of Education passing important rules on charter and online school issues, it is essential that state policymakers focus on sustaining the innovations of school choice, while realizing positive student outcomes. Just in the past month, we have learned that charter schools boosted student achievement growth rates in Denver Public Schools by five percent, led by such outstanding schools as the Denver School for Science and Technology and West Denver Preparatory Charter School. These schools and others like them across the country underscore why charter schools are critical to our public education system.
They are a reminder to policymakers at all levels to ensure that laws, rules and other policies facilitate student choice.
School choice is a hot topic in Colorado, especially as our great state is viewed as a national leader in education reform. School choice is usually discussed in terms of policies that provide families with options, but we often overlook the fact that teachers are likewise given options for their profession. The fact is every educational setting is a choice. In creating a profession for the 21st century, teachers across the country, and here in Colorado, have begun to take advantage like never before of the possibilities offered by new school environments.
When I think of school choice I think of my own experience, growing up in a backwoods Louisiana town with limited options in high school for courses in advanced sciences or foreign languages. I wish I’d had the ability to access virtual classes that would have better prepared me for college. I think of my eventual choice to become a teacher, and being just a signature away from switching from a traditional school to teaching in a charter school in New Orleans before deciding instead to get involved with the non-union teacher movement. I sought out a charter school because I was attracted to the better pay, dedication to student success, and freedom to teach diagnostically without a mandated curriculum.
Some try and promulgate a myth that teachers are not in favor of choice policies, yet thousands of teachers across Colorado not only support this new direction, they are teaching in choice schools every day. According to the membership survey of PACE’s national partner the Association of American Educators (AAE), which is the largest national, nonunion teacher association, teachers polled in all 50 states agree with laws that are advancing parental and student choice.
Colorado’s attorney general agrees with Denver Public Schools in a lawsuit filed by the teachers’ union over the district’s approval of innovation schools
January 26, 2012 | Posted in
Daily Churn |
3 comments |
Read More » 
A new bill would require high school graduates to know CPR, and chatter has increased about the future of the BEST program.
Sometimes teachers shake their heads and say, “There must have been something in the water when these kids were born.” How else can you explain the hard-to-explain trends that evolve in our classrooms from one year to the next? The trend I see has to do with students’ reluctance to challenge themselves and to struggle through when faced with new content or while applying new skills or concepts.
In conversations with my colleagues, we have encountered more and more students – and parents – who want to switch from one class to another. Why? The reasons vary: Their teachers are being mean; the teacher’s style is counter to the student’s learning style (Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences gone haywire if you ask me); the teacher is too negative; the student just doesn’t “get it” in their classes.
Some students who are successful in my class want out, but a majority of the students who want out are not academically successful. Which isn’t to say they are struggling; rather they give up as soon as they encounter some academic dissonance. This dissonance is the characteristic that shows you are learning something.
But some students do not see this. They immediately raise a hand and say “I don’t get it!’ And if the teacher persists in encouraging the student to struggle, the student claims that the teacher isn’t helping them, or they are being mean, or that the teacher’s style is keeping them from getting “it.”
But it is the struggle that causes learning. And sometimes the student does not get it right away. It takes more time and resources. But as soon as a grade reflects a struggle, in other words they don’t have an “A” in class, fingers are pointed at the teacher. Some of this has to do with our overreliance on an imperfect system of reporting, in other words the letter grade system.
