Following the demise of Proposition 103, which would have raised state taxes to pay for K-12 education:
* Gov. John Hickenlooper has proposed $89 million less for schools;
* Douglas County has slashed about $10 million for next year; and
* Jefferson County Schools, my employer, has announced that it has to cut $70 million out of its budget over the next two years.
Ho-hum.
And in other news, American students scored behind students from 30 other countries in last year’s PISA math test.
I’ve been a teacher for 20 years, and this is about the 10th time I’ve been through a school funding crisis. It’s become a kind of ritual. But something’s different lately: the mood of the electorate. Lately, school funding issues on the ballot have had a slightly worse winning percentage than the Broncos did with Kyle Orton at quarterback.
I just don’t think the public at large is willing to pay more money for the same old schools. Why pay an extra $100 a year through an outdated funding mechanism to fund last century’s system, especially when it’s not doing the job any more?
When less than one-third of all 10th-graders in the state score “proficient” on the CSAP math test, you have to accept a certain sad reality. And even if you choose to dismiss the test, as many of my colleagues do, you’d have a tough time explaining away why colleges need to vastly expand their offerings of remedial classes, or why employers report that high school graduates’ workforce skills are embarrassingly lacking.
Of course, the usual suspects all offer their solutions. From the right you get “vouchers;” from the left you get “more money.” Of course, vouchers haven’t exactly saved Cleveland’s schools; and Washington, D.C., and New York spend vastly more per pupil and they’re educational cesspools.
Frankly, it seems like maybe we should stop arguing over ideas that don’t work. Instead, let’s get none of the usual suspects together, call in a few Big Brains, and look at this differently. Let’s come up with something new that the public might buy into.
Dear famously unorthodox governor: Hello! Think big! We have manufacturing, high-tech, agriculture, great colleges, diversity; if we can’t come up with something new, who can?
How about something that will feature accountability for teachers and schools and students and parents? How about something that will feature high expectations for academic performance and robust co-curricular offerings that allow students to explore the other 80 percent of their brains? How about something both inclusive and ideologically neutral?
And, more importantly, how about something that works? What do I mean? We know from research that long breaks cause knowledge loss, but we still have three-month summers; we know the brain absorbs languages best before age 9, but we don’t start foreign language classes until middle school; we know music activates the brain and physical activity helps concentration, but primary students get only 15 minutes a day; we know teachers perform better when they’re properly mentored, but for the most part they’re thrown in a classroom to sink or swim from day one. Why can’t we devise an education system that takes advantage of what we know? Then maybe it would be worth investing business and taxpayer money in.
Of course, all this means it will have to be entirely different. We cannot hope to educate a 21st century workforce with a 19th century model of public education. Students will need to read, to write comprehensibly, to compute and to analyze. But if we really want to contribute to the global community, we will also need dancers and musicians and philosophers and masters of all those disciplines that shape our innately American ingenuity.
So can we puh-leeze get to work using the 20 percent of our brains that are math and language to work out the logistics of the system that will come from the other 80 percent? Something more imaginative and modern. Something better.
Something a mile high.
Michael J. Alcorn (mjalcorn@comcast.net) of Arvada is a public school teacher, fitness instructor and father of three.
