CO-04 (Special Election)
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(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%↓
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
90%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
90%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
(R) Ron Hanks
40%
30%
20%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(R) Deborah Flora
(R) J. Sonnenberg
30%↑
15%↑
10%↓
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Dave Williams
(R) Jeff Crank
50%↓
50%↑
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
90%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) Brittany Pettersen
85%↑
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
(R) Janak Joshi
60%↑
35%↓
30%↑
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
December 20, 2009 06:07 PM UTC
22 Comments
They have no idea how the web impacts campaigns. That’s why I thought Josh Penry was a much more credible candidate against Ritter – he knows how to campaign in this millenium.
But hey, if they want to keep giving us Dems all statewide seats – I can live with that 🙂
Read more: http://www.denverpost.com/ci_1…
The Dems try to cast this as dated as if Ms. Bartels and tomorrow’s Pk-12 students should “move along, just move along, nothing to see here”.
The problem is the 30 year downfall of America’s public education system is tied to policies that among other things allowed Districts to abdicate core employer-employee and customer-provider responsibilities. Sure parents are part of the problem, but the we’re in the 3rd-4th generation of macro management abdication. Only calling out the data will drive us to take needed steps to correct this 1st class American failure.
As reported by the DenverPost….
Read more: http://www.denverpost.com/sear…
Sure maybe 25% of DPS freshman will make it to “college”, but only 15 of 100 freshman make it to college without remedial education requirements.
Just how the CEA-Ritter dismantling of the CSAP will cure these facts of failure are unclear.
Oh, that’s right, it’s not.
I know. Lately I can’t help myself either.
But you really need to admit that serious reform needs to begin and it will take decades to see the changes.
DC Accountability
I mean why close it? Look how well it worked for you!
Has the establishment of the Department of Education improved or harmed education in the US?
My sense is that education has regressed in the past 30 years.
n/t
While it might be true, it just as easily might not be true. I’m just curious to see what others think–if educational quality in the US has been improved or harmed by the DoE. My sense is that it has regressed on a qualitative basis, but that’s all it is–an overall sense not based on a serious study of whatever reliable data is available.
Sorry to have given the impression that I think correlation equals causation–I can see how someone could read it that way.
I’m quite confident that the kids who went to school the past 12 years got a better education than the kids who went to school from 1940- 1952, and 1960-1972
Do you know what the 12th grade curriculum was in 1960?
Math? Science? Access for everyone?
There is no way to really measure it. In some respects, education certainly has advanced. But in others, it appears to me to have regressed–basic mathematical skills, basic writing conventions like capitalization, spelling, and punctuation appear to have been almost abandoned.
In terms of access to some sort of education, I’d agree we are far ahead of where we were in 1960 (just to pick a year).
if you asked: Has the establishment of the Department of Defense improved or harmed the “defense” of the US?
You can make an argument either way, depending on the objectives you use to define “education” or “defense.”
As such, the issue is not the existence of the Department as such, but the objectives that Department administrators set, AND the tools that the Department is given to achieve those objectives (and here, human capital, political capital, and actual financial capital are all important).
So long as the DoEd is viewed as a school marm whose job it is to nudge/punish lagging ‘students’ (i.e., states and districts) for failure to perform, it will fail in it’s task, just as such a teacher fails in the classroom. Punishment is not “education.”
And to complete the analogy, so long as the Department of Defense sees it’s job as “attacking” America’s potential threats, it will fail in it’s primary task of “defending” the country.
Thus, calling for the elimination of DoEd (or DoD, for that matter) because the goals and objectives are misguided, reflects a very uneducated view of the problem.
First, argument by analogy is invalid. We’re talking about the Dept. of Education–let’s stay on point. Education has traditionally been a state function while defense has always been (under the Constititution) a national function.
Second, let’s discuss the question of whether education in the U.S. has improved as a result of the establishment (really, moving it out from HEW) of a separate Dept. of Education. From what I can see, the answer is partly yes and partly no. From a qualitative point of view, my anecdotal experience is that education has regressed; but from a quantitative point of view it has improved–meaning more kids have access to K-12. I think the problem is that too much of schools’ budgets have to go to administration to satisfy the enormous range of federal requirements. And I’m not sure how that can be practically remedied.
You’re correct that analogy is an invalid logical argument, but in politics we deal with enthymemes (arguments about opinions), not syllogisms (arguments about facts), and so analogy remains valid for what it evokes in the comparison (no less than Aristotle and Quintilian would agree).
That out of the way, the point to be made is that in both cases the context has shifted the meaning of the words that define the departments. Hence “partly yes, and partly no.” Education as a didactic endeavor (the transfer of existing, static knowledge) has regressed only because what it takes to count as educated has advanced more rapidly than 20th century institutions can deliver. As a result, the institutions have had to dumb down their own definitions of education in order to reach larger numbers willing to pay for less of a product (particularly a problem at the University level).
The logical conclusion here (and yes, at this point I would defend this as a syllogism) is that if the content to be delivered has out-paced the delivery system, then it’s time to rethink the strategy of delivery, rather than the objective. Education must cease being a consumer relationship in which the student is punished for failure to consume, and begin to be a political relationship in which the student is validated for adding to the community. People want to call this “leftist” indoctrination, but the simple fact the more you make this about what must be “given,” the more money will have to go to those who ad-minister. (Sorry, more analogies between the Greek and Latin.)
Finally, I would opine that the same is true of defense. If EVERYTHING is a threat that must be attacked, and we lack the means to attack everything, than defense can no longer be sustained by offense.
Our objectives should be constant. The strategies to achieve them will have to change to accommodate new realities.
Before a free-standing DOE, we had Health, Education and Welfare. Many people argued education had more clout as part of that colossus. Pat Schroeder, no right-wing ideologue, voted against forming DOE in part for that reason. Personally, I can cite many areas, like special education, where DOE mandates costs districts more than the feds give them. Give me expanded student loans and grants and I’d probably be willing to abolish the rest of the department. We could reform the grants and loans in a Bureau of Human Capital and stick it in with Labor, where it would seem to belong. I’m not losing sleep over it, but but lean to the notion that, grants and loans aside, DOE does more harm than good.
If only any other government had a comprehensive public education. Like our US system, but better.
too few days. I grew up on a farm and probably learned more on the back of a tractor, which I started driving at 10, than I would have learned in summer school. But we’re no longer an agrarian society. A 10 month school year K-9 would probably help education a lot, as well as easing child care in an age of working moms. We could leave 10-11-12 on a nine month system to allow for summer jobs, which do a lot of help kids grow up. of course, it means we’d have to pay teachers more, so the Right-wingers would never buy into it. But no other industrial nation clings to our agrarian concept of letting the kids go in May so they can bring in the harvest, as far as I know. There is ultimately no substitute for longer school days and more of them. As Lenin said, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
Or one of the other girls?
Cause I know you weren’t quoting John and no way you ‘re gonna quote Vladimir and try and sell the deal here.
I agree with you. ANd I also believe that while access should be universal K-7 or8, after that there should Baccalaureate track and vocational track.
ANd the Baccalaureate bound should mostly get there by 10th grade. So we pay more for the longer years and days, but less total years.
After all, Lenin crushed the free trade union movement in Russia.
They’ve done studies and found the poorest students regress over summer. As income level increases it moves from a negative, to even, to increasing.
What’s equally interesting is kids from upper middle class professional homes and above basically learn at close to the same rate over the summer as they do in K-12. In other words, for very well off families, school makes no difference.
That’s one interpretation.
My interpretation is that parents in middle to upper class families take steps to ensure that they’re children don’t regress.
After watching my son go from the front of the class to the back of the class over the summer one year (5th to 6th grade), I looked at the 5th grade curriculum and created worksheets for him to do over the summer (5/week). It was all practice/review of material he already had learned, nothing new. 15 minutes per day is really all it takes to retain that knowledge.
I also know of lots of families in our neighborhood (same neighborhood as David) who hire tutors in the summer for their kids.
But all that aside, I’d prefer to see kids in a schedule with 10 weeks on, 3 weeks off, over the course of the year. I think some downtime is a good thing, just not so much that you start to lose that learnin’.