Senator Michael Johnston successfully pushed through an education reform bill on the premise that bad teachers and administrative incompetence are the source of our education ills. Teachers’ evaluations will now be linked to an ambiguous idea of student growth as evidenced by yet-undetermined standardized tests. Whether anything will change remains to be seen.
Despite praise for Senator Johnston’s tenure as principal of Mapleton High School, the state’s accountability reports reveal both academic achievement and student growth remained low during his leadership. Nothing has improved, other than an increase in students applying to and being accepted to college. Even then, many students required and had to pay for remedial classes.
Anyone can go to college in the United States, though a significant percentage of students require remediation because they aren’t prepared. There’s no evidence those students will actually earn a degree, and statistics argue most won’t. Thus, as is the trend nationwide, Johnston’s leadership through a packaged curriculum called College Summit may simply have succeeded in saddling numerous students with debt for a degree they’ll never earn to work in respectable careers that don’t require college degrees anyway.
Interestingly, Senator Johnston’s co-sponsor of SB-191 is evidence that a college degree is not necessary to succeed in life. Nancy Spence attended CSU without actually earning a degree. That hasn’t prevented her from serving as a school board member, a state representative, and a state senator. In fact, many studies now argue that the value of a bachelor’s degree is overrated, and students would be better served by a system in tune with the needs of the market.
So, as Colorado begs for federal money and focuses on teacher tenure and evaluating schools on basic skills in standardized tests, other states are reviewing curriculum to meet the needs of a changing world. Bard High School Early College in New York City is taking the same kinds of kids struggling in DPS and offering them a curriculum where they finish high school by the end of tenth grade and spend their last two years doing rigorous college work that earns them an associates degree at eighteen. New Hampshire will soon allow students to graduate at sixteen to enter Career and Technical Education or associates programs.
Colorado would be better served by focusing on curriculum reviews and standards for achievement expanding dual credit and career education while investing in student accountability rather than focusing on revising CSAP and raising test scores. Students need a rigorous real world education that matters to them. Some people believe SB-191 could lead to this kind of innovation in schools. Having read the bill and listened to Sen. Johnston’s talking points, I don’t have great hope.
Of course, its possible Johnston is more of a self-promoter than a reformer and child advocate. Like 80 percent of Teach for America teachers, Johnston served two years in a struggling school, and then he left the teaching profession. Sadly, that was a year prior to when research shows a teacher reaches true effectiveness. After three years as a high school principal, he left the field again for an appointment to the State Senate.
In a few years, Senator Johnston will move on to other things, leaving the children behind as he’s done twice before. And the people who’ve devoted their lives to education, not political agendas, will be left to pick up the pieces. Perhaps then, the state can revisit curriculum and career education and bring about real change. Legislation that follows the tired agenda of raising test scores will bring about no more change than “No Child Left Behind.” In five or ten years, when conditions in urban schools haven’t changed, let’s hope we can try again and get it right.
I’ve never been a fan of the derogatory mantra of teacher haters who claim those who can’t, teach. Maybe that’s because it’s incomplete. Senate Bill 191 may be the origin of a new mantra Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t do or teach, write legislation.
Michael Mazenko (mmazenko@hotmail.com) of Greenwood Village is an English teacher at Cherry Creek High School. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
