Are Colorado’s schools adequately preparing our children for the 21st century?
Evidence suggests we have lacked the vision and investment necessary to prepare our students for a new, information-based global economy.
This critical issue has finally begun to get traction in the public debate. The recent national release of “Tough Choices or Tough Times,” from the National Center for Education and the Economy, has brought that issue to the fore, particularly in Colorado, where it is being highlighted by House Speaker Andrew Romanoff. The report contends, and rightly so, that our education system has not sufficiently adapted to the new realities of our global economy.
Here in Colorado, there is ready evidence of this lag. Our economy is information driven, and yet too many of our schools have dated technology and little or no access to distance learning. The workplace demands ever-increasing technical skills, yet vocational education opportunities are dwindling and much of that available is still in the 1950s model of wood shop. Our challenges are global, yet our foreign language model is French, German and/or Spanish starting at the ninth grade (long past the age when children most readily acquire languages).
There are two reasons for this lag: vision and resources. First, we have no common vision of what we want our educational system to accomplish. What do we hope for and expect from our future graduates as leaders, employees and citizens? Without first establishing those goals, it is impossible to effectively retool the system.
Happily, state leaders, including Romanoff, are calling for a statewide conversation about how to move Colorado’s education system into the 21st century. And so, for the first time in recent memory, it appears likely that Colorado will embark on a concerted effort to build an inclusive, statewide vision for our schools.
Right now, the “Tough Choices” report is the focus of the discussion, combining important principles, (e.g., the need for universal preschool, more intensive services for at-risk kids, broader measures of excellence, and better teacher compensation), with sweeping recommendations (e.g., reducing the role of local school boards, centralizing teacher hiring with the state, and dividing students between trade and college preparation at 10th grade).
The second reason Colorado schools are not yet tooled for the 21st century is the lack of adequate resources. For most of the past dozen years, per-pupil funding increases have failed to keep up with increased costs of health care, heating and transportation. As a result, our schools simply can’t afford to integrate cutting-edge technology into the classroom, pay competitive salaries, equip modern science labs, provide children with the attention they deserve, or maintain – much less increase – the availability of relevant vocational education, foreign languages and other critical curriculum.
The road of education reform is littered with well-intentioned, rigorous plans that failed, often because our state and nation had not implemented them with the proper level of public investment. The most recent example: Colorado’s standardized testing program and No Child Left Behind. We raised the bar for teachers, schools, districts and students, but provided scarce new resources to achieve 100 percent student proficiency, as is eventually required by the law.
The “Tough Choices” report suggests that, nationally, the recommended increases in investment for at-risk children, early childhood education and teacher pay can be gleaned from savings elsewhere in the report, such as graduating kids at 10th grade and centralizing administration at the state level.
Not so in Colorado. Because of our chronic under-funding (we remain 44th in the portion of our income we devote to schools), even if savings materialize, Colorado is starting from a deep deficit.
Our first priority must be implementing a system that meets the needs of our children. Investing in that system as wisely and efficiently as possible is paramount. But if “cost neutrality” or savings is a primary motivation for our efforts, we will shortchange our children, once again.
It is time for Colorado to meet its obligation to prepare our children for 21st century citizenship. The stage is set for a statewide conversation through which we can set the goals and design a public education system of the future. That system’s long-term success depends on whether we are willing, this time, to provide the resources necessary to get the job done.
Lisa Weil and Liane Morrison are the co-founders of Great Education Colorado, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, grassroots group of parents and other Colorado residents who are dedicated to improving education in Colorado. For more information on GEC, visit www.greateducation.org.
