Great Education Colorado wants to make 2013 Year of the Student

By Noah Hubbell Fri., Aug. 10 2012 at 12:29 PM

"I think there are some stars aligning," Weil says. "Education came up as a very high priority in TBD meetings" with civic leaders across Colorado. With the TBD campaign, Governor John Hickenlooper's administration has been conducting surveys across the state to determine what Colorado residents hope to accomplish in the coming years in areas ranging from tax reform to transportation. In Montrose, for example, more than 92 percent of respondents indicated that they were strongly in favor of "assessment and future modification of the Gallagher Amendment, TABOR and Amendment 23 and how they interact."

Weil also sees hope in the "Colorado School Finance Partnership "...where the business community and the education community had a handshake and said, 'We need reform and we need resources.'...Over the last ten to fifteen years we've done a lot of reforms to make sure all kids are being successful, that's what the law requires," she notes. "And at the same time that we've been increasing those mandates and really implementing some important reforms about teacher quality, we've been cutting the funding. So there's a complete mismatch." The Colorado School Finance Partnership just released "Financing Colorado's Future," a proposed redress of Colorado education finance in the face of budgetary woes, in which the group states, among other things, that "now is the time to create a system that is equitable, innovative and sufficiently funded."

The Year of the Student is less a map for change than a shot in the arm. There is no strict timetable and no rigid plan; Great Education Colorado does not back any specific politician or legislation, beyond the laws already on the books. The approach is to use both traditional and nontraditional (Twitter, Facebook) grassroots methods to raise public awareness about the problem and pressure the state legislature to take action.

"Let's create an expectation," Weil says. "Just like there's expectations created for schools, let's create an expectation that [politicians] are going to do their work, and this is what we believe their work should be.... We hope to use social media. We hope to use online tools. We're just going to keep pushing the information back through the folks who said they want to be a part of this and say, 'Here's who's doing it. Here's who's not.'

"This coalition is saying, 'Get in that room. [Education] is the priority for this legislative session. Get in that Capitol and work something out.' And each of our individual organizations can say where they stand on those particulars, but we're standing together in saying, 'The time is now.'"

greateducation.org

The first step, she says, is to build support -- by encouraging people to come to 2013forstudents.org and sign this Call to Action: "We, the undersigned Coloradans, respectfully demand that the General Assembly make 2013 the Year of the Student, using the legislative session to create and find funding for a P-20 public education finance system that matches reforms, mandates and accountability measures with the resources necessary to ensure that every student is successful."

After you sign, Great Education urges you to get your friends to sign. Signers don't have to be eighteen, so this is a way for young students to become politically active in a way that directly affects them.

The Year of the Student organizers hope to have enough momentum to make a presentation in front of Colorado legislators in January -- that is step two. Step three is keeping the support base informed, excited and involved: "Write letters to the editor," Weil says. "Write letters to the legislature. Call them and say, 'Hey, we expect this to be the Year of the Student and we're not seeing enough progress.'"

With enough support, Weil says, the Year of the Student will accomplish its goal and put itself out of business before 2014. "I think it is reasonable to expect our legislators to make this a priority," she concludes, "to recognize that these issues are not going to fix themselves.... We recognize that it's not easy. If it was easy, it would have been done by now. And so the people have to be a part of that, and that's why we're trying to bring as many organizations in, as many individuals together to say, 'If you have the courage to stand up and say, we're gonna do this, we've got your back. If you're gonna provide leadership, we're there for you.'"

Follow Great Education on Twitter at @2013YOS.

Get additional information from this Great Education Colorado video.

More from our Education archive: "Iraqi Student Project sending first student to Colorado."

Tags:

2013 Year of the Student, Great Education Colorado, Lisa Weil

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Juan_Leg topcommenter

Before they say or do a damn thing,

PASS THE $450,000,000 SCHOOL BOND ISSUE !!!

These children in the Denver School Dist. don't even

have air-conditioning !

The arts are ALL being cancelled !

Yet we all want to brag on how great it is here.

Compared to where,

Iraq ???

RobertChase topcommenter

1 Like

I support funding public education, as long as that is what it is accomplishing. "We, the undersigned Coloradans, respectfully demand that the General Assembly make 2013 the Year of the Student, using the legislative session to create and find funding for a P-20 public education finance system that matches reforms, mandates and accountability measures with the resources necessary to ensure that every student is successful." -- creating conditions that improve students' chance of success is not the same as ensuring that every student succeeds. Hyperbolic rhetoric such as that is challenged by data suggesting that the rate of competence of high school graduates in core subjects such as math and English may be less than 50% -- well before we could ever reach a point where every single student succeeds, it would become necessary to stop conferring diplomas on so very many who have not mastered those subjects at a twelfth-grade level. I do not blame teachers per se, but the educational establishment as a whole wants public education to be funded without taking responsibility for or even acknowledging its failures.

In my judgment, restoring academic integrity to our system of secondary education is of paramount importance, because the inflation of grades and graduation rates is making a nonsense of academic standards. It is contradictory to keep pumping the importance of graduation from high school when we a third of incoming freshment at Colorado colleges cannot function in introductory courses in math or English. Public secondary education in Colorado is in crisis, and any campaign for the improvement of education in Colorado which ignores this elephant in the room is doomed to failure.

Colorado cannot grasp the enormity of our failure to educate -- far fewer than half of all students graduate, and people refuse to take in the fact that probably most of those being graduated shouldn't be. We are paying much less than we should to educate kids, but lets demand accountability of everyone in the process, and facing up to the fact that only 10-20% of people who attend high school graduate with basic competencies is the very first step. Supposed educators not even addressing the catastrophe of secondary education in Colorado because of their own complicity in it and through a desire to pander to the public have rendered many ears deaf to their entreaties for more money.

If the teachers unions had any sense, they would have parted company with management a long time ago. Teachers' acceptance of the absurd new scheme for rewarding "teaching-performace" is proof of how flaccid their representatives are, allowing political opportunists to impute undue responsibility for political and administrative failures to teachers. Teachers and their unions should recast themselves in the guise of crusading whistleblowers -- expose more principals, by all means, but go after their supervisors and superintendents as well -- the public will not be happy to learn just how low students' competence really is, but it will be no great surprise, and the notion that some of the most likely people to blame first are those who have allowed academic standards to be degraded to the point that our colleges are now teaching high school courses should motivate teachers to speak up as fellow causalties -- instead, their acquiescense seem complicitous.

There is enough distrust in our educational system that barring a major improvement in our economy in the interim, the outcome of a statewide referendum on increased funding might be crushed almost as badly as Rollie Heath's Proposiiton 103 was last year. It remains to be seen whether the General Assembly would refer an initiative to raise taxes for education to the ballot, but given its political cowardice and prevalence of rabidly anti-tax Republicans, the odds may be poor. Given the regard that the electorate has for its putative representatives, their endorsement of an initiative for the ballot won't help. Start any effort to garner electoral support for more money for education with a crusade to restore academic integrity to our schools -- everyone will wonder, since there has been no daylight to be seen between the educational establishment and those who want to support education, but better to deal with reality late rather than not at all.