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| Subtract One Day? Subtract One School? Add Five Mills? Part Five |
| Glenn Walsh | 3/11/10 |
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| Back to the News Summaries |
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Read Part One
“Well, the surest way is to become upper-middle class, with sizeable numbers of Jews, Bengalis, Koreans and Chinese. If you can limit your poorer students to first-generation kids from Trinidad and Barbados, you can do wonders with your achievement gaps, too.”
I had just asked the smartest person I know, a school board member in Western Queens, for her advice about improving school performance.
Before beginning to earn a fortune as a top-cut actuary, and tripling her money by calling and investing in the real estate collapse (that’s how smart), my friend had spent five years as a test developer and evaluator for the New York City school system. “Assess for America,” if you will.
Her point, made with the good humor and matter-of-factness of a New York Korean, has been the most controversial subject in education debate for nearly fifty years, since the publication of James Coleman’s little read but often mis-summarized report on American education in 1966.
 Coleman’s chief argument was that the social and economic lives of students had more influence on educational performance than the level of spending in a school district. Coleman never advocated less spending for schools, only more intelligent and targeted spending which solved problems by creating real learning places, rather than spending which bloated budgets.
Coleman was as honest as he was brilliant. He should be the guardian angel hovering over every shoulder advocating more spending on schools.
Money spent on education, like money spent on homeland security, climate change remedies, or a new haircut, can be wasted. I accept that. But I also believe nothing is more wasteful than short-changing the potential and future accomplishments of our children.
Over the next few articles, I will try to make a case for more spending — much more spending — on Archuleta County schools. The challenges facing the future of this school district are much more formidable than is commonly realized, even within district administrative offices I’m afraid.
First, Pagosa Springs is a poor town. I invite the reader who suspects that to be true, to say it out loud three or four times. It is a very healthy exercise. Let’s stop dreaming about Pagosa becoming the next Aspen (even those who feared this were engaging in fearful dreaming). Pagosa is much more likely to become the next Trinidad if hard-headed and painful investments are not made right now in its future.
If the reader knows of investments in the future that do not require present sacrifice, please speak up. The Nobel Prize in economics pays $1.4 million.
Second, the state of Colorado has concocted a funding scheme which classes Pagosa as a wealthy town. Wealthier, in fiction, than Durango and Bayfield, to which it sends 200 percent and 300 percent more money per student, respectively, each year. I will try to detail the Victor Hugo-like bureaucratic decision-making which has created this scheme tomorrow.
Advocating more spending, of course, makes you popular with teachers and administrators. However, I don’t expect to be popular. Because the path to creating a superb school system in Archuleta County — which should become the economic ornament of this community — will require painful cuts in teacher and administrator salaries over the next two years if we hope to convince already grossly overtaxed property owners (more on this tomorrow) to fund a long-term plan to create excellent schools and fund the ‘higher than state average’ salaries those schools will pay teachers within seven years.
I am not playing Oscar Wilde’s “faithful friend” here. The last thing we need now is hollow rhetorical compliments for our teachers, principals, parents, and, of course, students.
Let’s look at some numbers. Rather startling results. I spent the better part of last weekend sharpening my dullish Excel skills on the comprehensive set of 2008-2009 CSAP scores located on the Education Department superb, if oh so politically correct, website. It is no news that Archuleta schools are somewhat better than average when compared to all districts statewide.
Yet, I wondered how our schools are answering the “Coleman Question.” Given that our average wage is $11 dollars per hour, our household income is forty percent lower than the US median, and over fifty percent of our students are enrolled in the Free and Reduced Lunch Program (and many families are simply too proud to enroll), how do our schools compare to other economically disadvantaged communities?
The charts listed below compare Archuleta schools with every remotely similar system in Colorado (with student counts between 500 and 5000) with 40-60 percent of students enrolled in the welfare lunch program. The scores are the average of every student in each district on every test administered by the state last year.
If statistics can be eloquent, these are:
Archuleta teachers, administrators, parents, students — and taxpayers — clearly pass the Coleman test with a near perfect score. Raising low-income student performance above the state average and above every similar district on every test is a big and critical first step. Money invested in district which is doing a poor job of educating poor students is a poor investment. Money invested in a district which has demonstrated it can teach poor students better than any comparable district statewide promises much richer dividends.
So, the next questions on the test for our local schools — and local taxpayers — is “Are we content with being the best teachers of poor students for the next twenty years? Or do we now aim for excellence, and become one of the best districts in our state, and the centerpiece of a plan for creating a broadly prosperous community?”
Read Part Six... |
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