Colorado Springs – While most parts of the state’s education system need help, Gov. Bill Ritter said Monday that the root of the problem lies in a 30 percent dropout rate and a widening achievement gap between rich and poor students.
At the first meeting of his task force on education reform, Ritter and Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien said Monday they were going to tackle the most intractable problem facing the state: a sinking education system.
“This is the most important thing we do,” Ritter told about 200 state policy makers, lawmakers and K-12 and higher education leaders at the task force meeting at Pikes Peak Community College.
Ritter said his agenda includes tackling transportation and health care problems. But, he said, “I think they matter less if we don’t get this right.”
Only about half of high school graduates statewide finish college.
In the state’s colleges and universities, professors deal with students without the basic skills to take entry-level classes.
Teacher turnover is high. Overall test scores on state assessment tests are flat, despite years of energy and money poured into remedial reading, writing and math.
And those problems start in school districts, Ritter said.
“I think tackling the dropout rate in the ambitious way we’ve articulated it and tackling the achievement gap in the ambitious way we’ve articulated it is the biggest challenge,” he said in an interview after his speech.
“If we wait until high school to solve the dropout problem, it’s too late,” the governor said.
The official name of the governor’s council is “P-20” – meaning preschool through post-graduate school – but most of the discussions at the conference centered around K-12 education.
At a small work group looking at dropout rates, Tim Holt, an administrator from the Fountain-Fort Carson School District, said motivating students is about expectations.
“Kids go from seventh to eighth grade,” he said, “and they don’t have to write a special plan or anything to go into eighth grade.”
That same expectation that they’ll continue in school should carry them to 12th grade and even an associates’ degree, Holt said.
Among the issues the council’s work groups are focusing on are teacher retention and transitions into college.
The work groups have until Nov. 16 to come up with proposals for legislation that the governor can consider before the General Assembly meets in January.
Among possible proposals are mandatory kindergarten, more funding for preschool or changing the age of required school attendance from 16 to 18, O’Brien said.
Other solutions will have to come out of the school systems themselves.
“How many problems do we have? There are immense problems,” said Bruce Benson, an oil-industry executive and co-chair of the task force. “How do we choose which is the most important? They’re all important …
“You choose them all.”
Staff writer Allison Sherry can be reached at 303-954-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com.
