Education reform National plan echoes Colorado

Education reform
National plan echoes Colorado's

June 16, 2001

Despite its recent power shift to the left, the U.S. Senate has approved a broad education-reform plan that includes elements already in place in Colorado.

Student testing and school accountability are important components of the bill, which passed 91-8 in the Senate and now goes to conference committee. The House last month passed its version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provides most of the funding for primary and secondary education.

The measure brings several major changes to the federal system, foremost among them the requirement that schools annually test students in math and reading in grades three through eight and once in high school. If scores don’t improve, schools would be eligible for higher federal aid. But pupils at schools in which scores don’t improve could use some federal money for tutoring or transportation to another public school.

The bill also provides more money for charter schools and requires school districts to develop report cards that show a school’s test scores compared to others locally and statewide. It provides nearly $5 billion over five years to improve students’ reading skills, with a goal of making sure every youngster can read by third grade.

This legislation represents tacit acknowledgment of two realities.

First, money does make a difference in education. Salaries, buildings, computers, books, maps — none of that is free. In poor districts with committed educators and involved parents, more money to spend can translate into better-educated students. Anyone who points out how much cheaper it used to be to educate a child should stop and think about the cost of housing, gasoline and bread.

Second, Congress has recognized that the failure to educate our young people carries great expense of its own. Most employers have had the experience of interviewing high school graduates, only to find out they couldn’t read and write well enough to handle entry-level jobs. We must have some way of identifying students who are not learning what they’re being taught, and we need to do that early enough in their educational careers to have some hope of correcting the problem.

Remediation is expensive, but it grows more expensive as time goes on. One goal is that all third-graders should be able to read. Testing them at that point allows for the possibility of teaching them as fourth-graders and keeping at the process rather than discovering too late that something different should have taken place.

Colorado Gov. Bill Owens figured this out earlier than most, and while this state’s program of standardized testing has not been perfect, it has addressed needs common to schools across the nation. A national education-reform bill that provides money to implement improvements is a welcome bit of news. Now we can hope that the final version doesn’t mess up the good things Colorado already has going.