By the time a child reaches his first day of first grade, his teacher ought to know his strengths in reading and whatever troubles he may be having with his arithmetic skills.
It is the 21st century, after all.
Gone are the days of musing about “how I spent my summer vacation” and getting to know a child’s skills over time.
Expectations are set early for today’s students, and Colorado needs a seamless system that tracks a student’s development and growth from pre-school through college.
State lawmakers last week passed Senate Bill 46, which would create a P-16 council to study the “creation and implementation of an integrated system of education” stretching from early childhood education to college.
We would urge Gov. Bill Owens to sign it.
Just last week, education officials released CSAP reading scores for Colorado third-graders, noting they had declined another point.
It’s certainly not too late, at third grade, to begin a triage of sorts to improve student proficiency. By why wait?
Under a P-16 system, educators could start filtering through data regarding their students’ strengths and weaknesses much earlier.
“We need to connect all of the fragmented segments, starting with pre-school,” said Jane Urschel with the Colorado Association of School Boards.
“It’s really about saying how can we use data to fuse connections between all of the levels.”
Colorado has the capability, thanks to a system of unique student identifier numbers, to track an individual student’s progress. But as it stands now, early childhood education, K-12 and higher education are often islands unto themselves, without the proper interaction and cooperation.
A K-16 council set up by Owens has been primarily focused on high school graduation requirements and college remediation courses. It’s time another public body examined the idea of creating a more seamless education system that makes sense and benefits students from the youngest to college seniors.
