One-third of Colorado’s public schoolchildren still aren’t proficient in reading – one of life’s most important skills. It’s an unacceptable figure.
Mostly flat statewide test scores, and some of the data-crunching done by the Colorado Department of Education, underscore the need for more – and better – early childhood education. They also indicate that just tinkering around the edges of education reform, as lawmakers and educators have done in recent years, just isn’t enough.
Colorado’s schoolchildren showed little or no progress in key academic areas, according to the latest Colorado Student Assessment Program scores.
Science scores were up, a cause for brief applause, and middle school teachers and students can celebrate slight gains in most subjects. But otherwise, reading, writing and math scores were down or flat across the state and across most grade levels.
The scores should spark discussions among local school boards and parents about the possibilities of more all-day kindergarten opportunities and increased access to high quality preschool programs.
For the first time, state education officials plotted students’ individual progress through “longitudinal tracking.” It revealed troubling information: Of the students who were unsatisfactory in reading in the third grade, two-thirds of them were still unsatisfactory in the fifth grade. And about half of the students who were advanced in reading in the third grade slid backward a bit by the fifth grade.
The first rule for schools, as new state education chief Dwight Jones points out, ought to be “do no harm.”
Schools now need to find ways to use this data to move more students from the unsatisfactory ranks to proficient each year. Set high expectations. Be unconventional.
CSAP results have always been a snapshot of a particular class. Each year, a new set of third-graders is tested, and compared to the previous year’s third-graders. Thanks to a Colorado law that gives each student a unique ID number, officials can track students as they pass through the system. Those numbers, however, indicate that “we’re not doing much with kids in three years’ time,” Jones said.
While the numbers may be disheartening, just having them and being able to evaluate them is a huge step forward.
As superintendent of the Fountain-Fort Carson school district, Jones was a proven performer, presiding over reform measures that caused test scores to rise.
We hope he uses his experience and energy to push for changes at the local level. He may not have the ability to legislate reforms for local districts, but his voice can carry tremendous weight. Test scores won’t magically jump with the status quo.
Gov. Bill Ritter on Tuesday suggested the flat results are a clarion call for change. We think his newly minted P-20 Council can be the impetus for some necessary changes if they’re willing to invest the political capital to make decisions that cut against the grain of conventional thinking.
