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%
August 24, 2010 09:55 PM UTC
82 Comments
…pictures of Arne Duncan in a compromising position 🙂
This is why federal top down programs are so bad – they invite corrupt bribes and kickbacks.
you can move to somewhere where they aren’t if need be. With the federal gov’t you’re just screwed.
You can move to Somalia anytime you wish. It’s got the level of government and taxation you want to see here so you should be very happy there. You even get to exercise your 2nd amendment rights there hourly – good times!
Great example. /sarcasm Leaving the country and changing your citizenship, finding a job, etc. is a little bit more complicated than moving from one town to another.
If no government and no taxes are so great, why aren’t hordes of people moving to Somalia?
that must be utopia. I’ll bet everyone is rich, healthy, beautiful and happy.
Look up DSST in DPS. It’s a charter school that can hire and fire teachers just like in a real job. 100% placement in college, mostly because the unions haven’t fucked it up.
That’s not Somalia.
DSST has a quota system based on income levels. The theory is that minority/poor children need to be in a facility where there is a high proportion of children from middle and upper classes. Therefore, the the proportion of minority/FRL kids is less than in DPS as a whole and the proportion of rich kids is higher, as I understand it. Income level is a positive predictor of academic achievement and college enrollment.
It is not fair to teachers and kids to make up stuff. So, don’t do it.
Low income, and the majority of students are in fact minority.
Union involvement in education is a great indicator of failure, IMO. I was on a tour of that school with the CEO last night. I was blown away, and I’m just furious about the success I saw, if that makes any sense.
The percentage of minority students and low income students in DPS overall is much higher than 45%. Also, Asian students are the highest achievers in DPS. If they are included as minority students, that could distort the achievement levels. DSST has tons of private funding.
It does make sense to be furious to see that one school is very successful and that most are not. I understand that if a family lives in the Stapleton area, the kids can attend the school regardless of the quota system. I can understand how important choosing schools for your kids can be. Been there, done that. We went the parochial school system route. Cost a fortune. Excellent education, but we learned later that we had put our kids in situations where they had been taught by pedophiles. You never really recover from learning that…even though, our kids apparently were not involved.
Finally, do you know how many students who begin their freshman year at DSST continue on to graduate? I don’t know. It had been suggested that other highly successful charter schools have a high dropout rate. If there is a waiting list and kids drop out, they can be replaced.
I think DSST is a great school. But, I don’t think the lack of union teachers is the reason. I also don’t think it is a model which could not be duplicated in a neighborhood school because of the impact of the strict quota system and private financing.
There are great science public highschools back east…but students have to pass an achievement test to be admitted.
I think that is okay because such a system awards effort.
One of the problems I have with the successful public schools in Colorado (not just DPS) is that enrollment is limited and admittance is based on a lottery system….
Good luck.
My point was if you want no taxes and no regulation, move to Somalia. What you (and I) want is effective government. Big difference.
Nobody. That’s just a dumb thing to say, David, and represent it as though anyone who wants fewer taxes wants to live in total anarchy.
It’s called a red herring, David.
Have you read them all?
They’ve done nothing there except cut school days. It’s a total mess. I won’t claim that Colorado comes first, but it is way beyond Hawaii.
Bennet has correctly decided that David isn’t nearly as important as he thinks he is.
I found these criteria on the RttT site:
You mention sb 191–which seems to address a tiny part of the third item– but could you point us to the other items where CO stepped up to this challenge? I haven’t heard about those efforts and would be most interested in following them.
Thanks.
Colorado has a long way to go to improve our public education that has nothing to do with money.
1. They passed legislation this year implementing national standards across all districts.
2. They have been building for a couple of years a system to measure individual student improvement that can then go to the schools and teachers to help them improve.
I know there’s more but I couldn’t find it in a fast Google search.
Perhaps the money raised here for education should stay here?
Nah. That would conflict with our ColoradoPols theology that DC knows better that our buddies Obama and Bennet have been preaching.
That’s OK Obama will come back here soon to tell us that Bennet is a great help on education matters- in other states.
As this was a major argument as to why we should have passed it.
my thought exactly! Now that we didn’t get it, can we retroactively kill SB191?
You screwed over teachers, pissed off your base in an election year and Arne Duncan still thinks you suck.
Glad we went through all of that bullshit last session!
this was a way to get democratic legislatures to force through republican ideology for education.
Maybe we should actually listen to the educators about what they need instead of someone in DC.
these guys seem pretty willing to tell you how they felt.
Welcome back, Wade.
Even if there was never a Race to the Top SB-191 was still a very good thing. All RttT did was offer some extra bucks to help implement a good idea. And if SB-191 was a bad idea without RttT, then it would have been a bad idea with it too.
So I remain very appreciative of Michael Johnston and all the others who supported SB-191 (including every recent governor).
The Race to the Top was nothing more than throwing peanuts to monkeys. Our monkeys were not fast enough.
We have destroyed the security of teachers by subjecting their careers to an evaluation system which we have not yet developed, let alone normed. I suspect that money which should be in the classroom will go to legal fees defending the school districts all over the state from unfair termination.
Not perfect, but something that does effect significant improvement. I think key to that is focusing at first on make sure it is measuring the right things and doing so accurately. Then second using it to help teachers & schools improve.
It is set up to be phased in so that it can be reworked as needed before it is used to fire teachers who aren’t getting it done.
With that said, we won’t know until we try.
effect is a noun, you are using it as a verb
per:
http://www.merriam-webster.com…
In math we learn (attn: bjw) that stating the problem correctly is 50% of the solution. But, in debate, we learned that the most important clue to winning is to define your terms.
So: Define “the right things”
Define “measuring ….and doing so accurately.”
In math, a committee does not come to “consensus” on how to define a number set. In software development, you don’t have a facilitator that helps everyone come to “consensus” on writing code. In education, that is exactly how you do decide things. I believe that you cannot use a political process to design a technical concept.
An analogy: I have discovered the formula for an universal solvent, but I can’t develop it because I don’t have a container for it.
Also, this is exactly why I opposed 121. The biggest argument for it was that it would position us well for Race to the Top, but now here we are with no additional school funding AND with a huge unfunded mandate that will cripple school administrators with busywork instead of freeing them to actually evaluate teachers in the ways that work for each school.
…that they invented the phrase, “Epic Fail.”
Or maybe “Mission Accomplished” would be more apt?
That’s a funny image I can picture way too easily. 🙂
Johnston: “I don’t know.”
Evie: “SLAP, you right wing appeasing, school destroying little shit!”
(I can dream.)
With 30% of our children not even making proficient don’t you think we need to be working on finding was to significantly improve our schools?
I could write a ream or two on this subject as a graduate of a school that doesn’t test terribly well on CSAPs but does consistently produce exceptional people who are doing amazing things that contribute positively to the world–Ivy League scholars, Peace Corps volunteers, politicians, military officers, architects, artists, and much more. But I’ll limit myself to these key points:
* Stop defunding everything but “core academics” in the name of “student performance.” Students do not perform better if school is just memorization and busywork on the same three subjects, day in and day out. Teaching to the test does not engage learners and prepare them for the working world. Students need access to shop courses, the arts, internships, physical education, sports, extracurricular activities, and all those things that produce a strong and eager learner, not just a good test-taker. When good test-takers graduate into the working world, they don’t know how to apply their knowledge skills to make quick decisions that don’t have a single correct answer.
* Get serious about the achievement gap. If there’s one consistent thing about student performance, it’s that any student that comes out of an upper middle-class family with involved parents can be made to at least perform decently and many perform well above average, while students dealing with hunger, poverty, ESL, and uninvolved parents will perform poorly no matter how hard you try to hammer test answers into their little brains. We need to evaluate all current programs aimed toward alleviating the deleterious impacts of poverty and minority status on student performance, see if they’re working, and if so expand them–if not, replace them and keep that up until we have a robust and results-driven set of programs that help level the playing field for students who aren’t born with the advantages enjoyed by others.
* Make funding available for teacher development that is based on teaching tactics that are shown to be effective through broad case studies and peer-reviewed research. If we want teachers to be effective, burdening them with extra bureaucracy while cutting their compensation isn’t the way–that’s just a road to make teaching a career that really does match the old “Those who can’t do, teach,” saying, since nobody who can do anything else will want to be a teacher as more and more red tape is put in place for smaller and smaller rewards. Instead, we need to fund teacher mentoring programs and more comprehensive educator development.
* Get the “politics of fear” out of the classroom. SB 191 and similar measures are based on scaring schools and teachers into improving. I do think we need to make it easier to fire problem teachers (and most teachers I know agree) but threats and pressure to do the impossible just drive good teachers out of the profession. Instead of scoring political points by talking tough to underperforming schools and threatening closures, look for what IS working even in low performing schools and find ways to expand those programs enormously. Intimidating educators won’t motivate them to perform better if they still have no resources and a classroom full of students who can’t succeed without help that the teachers know isn’t coming. Fully funding IDEA would help.
If I had my druthers, I’d close a few prisons, let the people convicted of victimless crimes seek medical or psychological care rather than imprisoning them, and give the funding to schools to PREVENT people from ending up in prisons. The prison system constantly has its hands in the education system’s pockets–even last year, Ritter made noise about cutting prison budgets and instead pickpocketed schools.
Especially your first two points – YES!!!
My 1% is that if poor teachers can be fired then you will have some fear. Because you have a set of workers who have never faced that possibility and so suddenly having it exist, no matter how remote the possibility of being fired, will create fear in many.
But on everything else you wrote – yes, yes, yes!
I think there’s a better way to get poor teachers out of the classroom (starting with avoiding putting them in there to begin with) than to intimidate them in a quest to get people who are unsuited to teaching to perform well at something they just aren’t as cut out for as they originally thought they were. I read Alison Green’s blog, Ask a Manager, and she makes a lot of interesting points about positively transitioning employees out of a position where they aren’t performing well. Her philosophy is that many employees who need to be fired “are not incompetent, they’re just miscast.”
Genuinely BAD teachers who have no interest in anything but getting a steady paycheck and hiding behind a union–well, they should be afraid, and they should be out of schools ASAP. But I think there are probably many more teachers who are more miscast than incompetent.
Zappos has a policy of paying any employee $2,000 to quit their job at any time after their probationary period, including the first day of real work. Their justification is that it costs them much less to give a cash bonus to employees who aren’t happy and get them out the door in a pleasant way than to have a dissatisfied, low-performing employee hanging around because they are afraid of not being able to make rent if they quit.
I don’t think a direct cash bonus is appropriate in schools, especially when great teachers are buying classroom supplies out of pocket due to lack of funding, but I do think that there could be cooperation between the teachers’ unions and school administrators to find a program that transitions miscast teachers out of education and into another field quickly and painlessly, involving internship placement in another field and access to a service similar to vocational rehabilitation.
Teachers who underperform, know it, and choose to help their school transition them out instead of hanging around like parasites should have some options besides unemployment and debt spiraling out of control. They might even be suited to roles in things like curriculum design, but a poor fit for direct interaction with students. Overall there’d be a savings to the district if teachers were encouraged to self-evaluate and make the right decision on their own, rather than drawing salary and benefits without boosting student achievement. And a positive, gradual transition is easier on the school and students than the sudden disappearance of a fired teacher and then a few weeks of students learning from a parade of substitutes during the hiring process.
The drive to get bad teachers out is good, and it’s universally supported by parents, students, good teachers, school administrators, and politicians. But the message now is “If you are a bad teacher, we will find you and destroy your career.”
I think it could instead be, “If you don’t belong in the classroom, if you don’t want to be there, we don’t want you there, and we’re willing to work with you to get you into a place where you’re a better fit without disrupting your students’ education.”
The current plan is inefficient in two ways: It promotes fear, which encourages bad teachers to try to avoid getting “caught” rather than helping them out of a field they don’t belong in, and it keeps them in the classroom longer than they would be if they felt they could change careers safely. The best person to evaluate a teacher is often the teacher, and freeing them to give themselves a negative evaluation and move on more easily would get them out quicker, saving money and helping students.
But that’s the behaviorist in me speaking. My initial career choice was either psychology or animal behavior. Sorry for the wall of text!
When they start pulling together the system for SB191 please post this again. I think effective evaluation with numerous ideas like yours could make the schools much better for everyone.
In response to their publishing not one, not two, but THREE editorials by non-Millennials last Sunday about what’s wrong with Millennials. I figure there’s an outside chance they might give a few column inches to a reply from someone who’s actually part of the generation they’re accusing of lacking a work ethic.
So I guess now if they wind up printing it I’m outed here to at least one person, but so be it.
and advances my, at least, understanding and thought process about this thorny problem.
Thanks for taking the time to post it here.
(sorry MADCO)
Great stuff!
Your posts are thoughtful, rational, logical and well written.
You’re not from these parts, are you? (I can definitely tell you’re not a sock puppet of any regular at CO Pols.)
Seriously, marvelous set of posts. Nice summary of at least part of the problem and nice proposal of solutions. I want you on my team!
Wouldn’t want to be accused of “refusal to conform to the standards of the group,” as was my late grandfather in an angry letter from his alma mater that relatives found after his death.
But thank you, and anyone whose team is solution-oriented and interested in the rational and logical is someone whose team I’d want to be on.
I’m glad I gave up non-probationary protection for the no money we are getting. Great trade off. It makes Colorado an even worse state to be a teacher in. At least Evie saw that.
You gave up non-probationary protection to improve the schools. That still holds. Isn’t that a good enough reason?
So far the tradeoff has been something big for nothing. We hope the schools will improve, but that hasn’t happened yet. Be honest.
You are aware that it hasn’t been implemented yet I hope. It was legislation, not a magic wish…
That’s why I thought it was weird for you to claim we traded teacher job security for better schools.
At present teachers still have absolute job security. At present we’re still failing to get 30% of our children to proficient.
the other one is something you’re hoping for.
It always annoys me when you pretend to be unable to tell the difference.
Will we get effective evaluation of teachers from SB-191 – pretty good odds.
Will that evaluation effect improved teaching – reasonable odds.
Will the educational system use the results to fire really bad teachers – decent odds.
When it comes time to withdraw tenure the first time, that is going to be a gigantic fight. If it remains a major fight in each case, then it will be rarely used. On the flip side if it goes through with a reasonable review, but no more opposition, then it will occur.
Nothing is guaranteed to happen due to the legislation. After all, the CEA claims that poorly performing teachers can be fired under the present law. But we all know that in practice it is virtually impossible.
Another example of why people fear public speaking. LOL!
he wasn’t using a teleprompter for that line…
🙂
obviously.
I’m not sure how much actual improvement in education we would have seen in Colorado from this money — or how much improvement we’ll see anywhere else where they did score the dough.
Educating kids isn’t entirely about how much money you throw at the school system.
Your update is ridiculous. The reality is that SB-191 and Race to the Top were forever intertwined from the beginning. The fact that we lost out on this funding puts the complete onus on the proponents of that legislation. Saying it’s “total bullshit” doesn’t do jack shit to help our schools.
SB-191 is going to be even more heavily scrutinized than it was already going to be because of this all-too-predictable development.
For many others, like me, it was a very good idea irrespective of SB-191.
This is not a matter of opinion. Whether or not you thought it was a good idea in and of itself is irrelevant. The funds were used as a major carrot on the stick to get many people to support it who otherwise would have given it more thought.
Now that the funds have been denied, you can’t get away from it with ludicrous posts like that.
I rarely saw RttT brought up. Now granted, we may have read different sources. And I have no idea what was discussed on the floor of the legislature. But I saw it as something people thought would improved our K-12 system.
After all, it would be awful if people voted for something they thought would hurt the system, just to get some money…
I will show you how wrong you are. Just because YOU weren’t the one using it as justification, doesn’t mean that others weren’t doing it.
Also, you’re putting this black and white qualification for people who were on the fence to be supporting the legislation. Many were weighing the pros and cons, and it was the promise of getting the funding that pushed them towards supporting it.
But I wonder what the reasoning behind that was as the RttT money was to implement SB-191 so it still came down to was SB-191 a good idea.
It had ZERO effect on the category it was supposed to help Colorado with in the RttT scoring.
My only point in this whole conversation is that SB-191 will be put under even more of a microscope because of the failure to acquire the RttT money. If we hadn’t rushed to pass it so that it could be included in the second round of RttT, maybe there could have been more of a consensus reached among all of the stakeholders. Instead, it ended up being very one-sided.
Looking to the future, next year will bring back another “race”. The criteria is already apparent. Further restrict teachers unions and impose more Federal mandates. This first run showed how much the federal dog bone means to some people. Next year’s dog bone will do the same.
The Republicans will have control of at least one of the houses of Congress and they will not fund it. Education can be fought out at the state level instead of waiting for a federal offical to declare you worthy, or in the case of Colorado, not.