Schools for Tomorrow Blog

There always has to be someone who says it. I got to the bottom of the Rocky article on the Obama visit… Eureka!

While the speech - and the several questions afterward - generated applause, one area that Christina Eyre said Obama didn’t sufficiently address was vocational training.

The 39-year-old Denver resident and Obama supporter since the February caucus said it is a mistake to think every high school student is suited for college. She said more should be done to allow those teens to learn trades.

"We’re always going to need people that are auto mechanics or in other trades," she said. "When we think every kid should go and graduate from college, we set some of them up for failure."

Could we please get past this? Please? Please? There are somewhere around 800,000 auto mechanics in this country (.5% of the workforce) making about $16 an hour.  That’s what? Maybe $30,000/year? To top it off, if that would-be mechanic doesn’t go to college, his or her kids are less likely to go, regardless of their intelligence. I’m not the first to regurgitate the research that parents’ education level has more effect on children’s achievement and attainment than almost anything else.

Who’s setting who up for failure?

Back in the early days of this blog, I wrote a post blasting the state Board of Education for pressuring Denver Public Schools not to close the Life Skills Center, a low-performing charter school. The Denver school board had wanted to close the school, but bowed to the pressure and let it reopen for this school year.

Tonight, the board votes on whether to let Life Skills, and several other low-performing charters, stay open for another year. Having visited Life Skills, I’ve changed my mind on this one, and hope the board will let it keep operating.

My superficial impression of Life Skills is that it’s not a great school. It’s probably not even a particularly good school. Still, I find myself at odds with my own thinking from last August, when I wrote:

DPS did its homework on this one. Life Skills was failing its students. But here’s (state school board member Bob) Schaffer, as quoted in the Rocky Mountain News: “The bigger question is, how does the school compare to the street? Because that is the option being weighed and compared here.”

Of course the street is a lousy option. But if that false dichotomy is played out to its logical extreme, then we should just abandon all quality standards for schools serving at-risk kids. That’s not going to get us very far, and certainly Schaffer knows that.

Why the change of heart? Simple. Life Skills Center is a last-gasp chance for young people who have already dropped out of school to reengage and get a diploma. DPS wrote into the school’s charter contract that it could recruit only those prospective students who had dropped out of school, and had been out of school for at least 60 days.

That’s a tough crowd to engage. So one would expect a high rate of failure, low attendance, and a lot of attrition. And that’s exactly what happens at Life Skills.

But something else happens as well. At least some kids apparently learn a significant amount, and go on to graduate. Some 80 percent of the school’s 260 students are in line to graduate within a year.

And according to Measures of Academic Progress, a national assessment Life Skills uses,  students have been making over a year-and-a-half’s worth of growth in reading for each academic year. Since all Life Skills students read at far below grade level, they have to make these kinds of gains if they are ever to catch up.

Of course in math, students are making less than half a year’s progress each year, and in language just under a year. So the news is decidedly mixed.

Attendance rates of just over 50 percent also are nothing to brag about. But again, given who these kids are, the fact that many hold down multiple jobs, and that the attendance rate two years hovered around 40 percent, 50 percent looks like progress to me.

If DPS had a viable alternative for these kids, one that was being drained by the existence of Life Skills, I’d favor shutting down the school. But these are kids DPS has given up on, and vice-versa. What possible harm is there in giving them another chance, even if it’s less than ideal?

DPS needs to close a low-performing charter or two. After all, the school board has begun closing its own low-performing schools. There’s no reason to treat bad charters differently than bad district schools. But I now believe that Life Skills Center is a special case.

In Rona Wilensky’s article in the most recent HeadFirst e-newsletter, she makes a number of great points, warning us not to create an education system that shoehorns all kids into the expectations of a traditional four-year liberal arts education.  Our policy discussions seem to be swinging back and forth wildly, between a “college for all” focus and an emphasis on the differing needs and interests of kids who may or may not want to go to college. 

Guess what – everyone is right, to a point.  Our education system must guarantee that kids who want to go through a traditional college experience are prepared for it, and that includes those kids who are usually subject to the “soft bigotry of low expectations” (can’t believe I just quoted Geo. Bush) and those kids who decide as seniors that maybe college is the place for them after all. 

Yet our education system must also guarantee that there are many different and challenging pathways that accommodate the interests and dreams of kids who don’t want that four-year academic experience.

We can do this.  We know how – it’s just hard to implement, and it’s going to take time to figure out how to avoid the mistakes of the past.  Take a look at the report from UCD’s Center for Education Policy Analysis on career and technical education in Colorado for examples of schools that are combining academic rigor and real-world relevance and creating meaningful choices for students. 

Career and technical education should not be the only path either, but the field’s current reform efforts as it struggles to be both meaningful and rigorous are a useful example for education reform as a whole.

As Rona rather subtly points out, we have a lot of people looking at P-20 education reform right now:  the P-20 Council, whatever the governor’s plan turns out to be, the HB 1118 graduation guidelines council, CDE’s revision of standards, and so on.  It’s an embarrassment of riches that is starting to make a lot of people nervous about who’s leading the parade. 

What if we agreed on a simple guiding principle as everyone does their work:  the education system in Colorado needs to prepare students for successful futures using multiple pathways that are equally rigorous and have safeguards to ensure that students make intentional and positive decisions about their futures and don’t fall between the cracks. 

Anybody have any problems with that?

Ed Rooney’s bare-knuckled attack on the Fund for Colorado Future for its anti-Tough Choices issue brief just begs a response. The thumbnail sketch provided looks more like a caricature of the brief than anything.

I would agree that “Leaving the bottom 5% of children behind” is one of the weaker arguments presented, but Ed neglected more substantive critiques under the following headings (and speaking of weak arguments, I’m sure Ed can do better than appeals to authority):

- “Creating greater class stratification and limiting upward mobility”

- “Increasing bureaucracy”

- “Expanding the reach and power of unions”

- “Undermining local control”

- “Preserving & expanding the government monopoly on schools”

The NCEE report diagnoses the problems of our education system very well, but commits the fallacy of injecting more state authority as the remedy. Oh, and along the way, they threw in a few bones (e.g., contract schools, weighted student funding, portable retirement accounts), probably as a compromise to win some commission members’ support.

But a strong argument can be made that the proposed system will do most of the things the Fund says. Can you really argue those would be good developments, that they would really deliver on the lofty promises of Tough Choices without requiring a large tax increase to finance? I think it would be a good idea to break down these points in finer detail, to take the debate more in-depth to determine whether this would be good or not-so-good for Colorado.

Ed continues:

Let’s not pretend that the Fund is really furious that the Tucker commission is trying to turn the US education system into something you’d find in Germany, Netherlands, Denmark or, god-forbid, France.

This is a non sequitur, a veritable leap in logic, both to presume the author’s motives and to make a point about emulating certain European education systems. Following this path will lead us down the same unproductive debate about health care reform that posits a false dichotomy between our current broken system and a state-run European model. The real question vis a vis Tough Choices and Colorado is why the Tucker commission adamantly resists comparisons between their report and, say, schooling in Germany.

Most education policy wonks graduated from four-year colleges (and didn’t stop there in terms of academic degrees). As a result, many of these folks seem stuck on defining student success by those metrics — using the number of students going to four-year colleges as the barometer of a healthy education system.

Meanwhile, Colorado’s system of career and technical education (CTE) is transforming itself into the go-to resource for highly-skilled workforce preparation in the state. Colorado’s future economy will depend largely on its ability to staff science, technology, mathematics, and/or engineering jobs — the so-called STEM industries. Colorado’s CTE community is being proactive about meeting that challenge. Check out the Colorado State Plan website hosted by the Colorado Community College System at , and expand your definitions of student success.