Education Secretary Arne Duncan clearly didn’t come to Denver to boost his popularity ratings with kids.
Standing at Bruce Randolph School, he told students school days should be longer — and school years should be extended as well.
“Six hours a day, nine months a year doesn’t make sense,” Duncan said.
No, it doesn’t make sense. In fact, there’s an awful lot that doesn’t make sense about an education system that has an unacceptably high dropout rate, leaves behind far too many ethnic minorities and low-income students, and, well, hasn’t changed significantly in generations.
Duncan, as the nation’s education chief, is bent on shaking things up. Besides the extended school calendar, he endorsed more autonomy for schools, innovation in teacher pay, and programs to attract only the best and brightest to our teacher corps.
Pleasant platitudes? We hope not — and Duncan did sound as if he meant them.
Unlike the top-down mandates of the Bush administration, the Obama administration is trying to “incentivize” education reform and innovation. Put bluntly, they’re trying to buy it by dangling billions of dollars in front of states, hoping they’ll act as incubators to produce a curriculum and system that works.
We liked much of what Duncan had to say while he was here, and we’re pleased the federal government is looking for ground-up solutions rather than slapping national cookie-cutter reforms on a collection of otherwise diverse states.
However, much of what Duncan talked about can’t be accomplished unless there’s a quality teacher in each classroom.
We know there are thousands of wonderful, hard-working teachers across the state. But we also know there are some very poor teachers, who are setting kids back and need to find another line of work.
Those teachers would be easier to identify if Colorado lawmakers pass House Bill 1065, better known as the teacher-tracking bill.
It would track educators to see what effect they have on their students’ academic growth. It eventually would be used to track teachers back to their education schools. Districts, or the state, could determine if there are certain college programs that turn out more top-notch teachers than others.
However, there is currently a clause in the bill that says information developed in teacher tracking can’t be used to “negatively sanction” individual teachers. That needs to change.
The state’s largest teachers union, the Colorado Education Association, supports the bill, but only if that clause remains.
“Teachers and principals need to know there isn’t someone back there with a hammer,” said Deborah Fallin of the CEA. “The whole purpose of the bill, besides looking at student achievement, is to look at teacher retention and recruitment and why so many teachers are leaving after five years.”
For most teachers, there would be no reason to use the hammer. But, as Duncan said when asked about the bill, “We can’t be scared of the truth.”
