U.S. Senate
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(D) J. Hickenlooper*
(R) Somebody
80%
20%
Governor
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(D) Joe Neguse
(D) Phil Weiser
(D) Jena Griswold
60%
60%
40%↓
Att. General
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(D) M. Dougherty
(D) Alexis King
(D) Brian Mason
40%
40%
30%
Sec. of State
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(D) George Stern
(D) A. Gonzalez
(R) Sheri Davis
40%
40%
30%
State Treasurer
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(D) Brianna Titone
(R) Kevin Grantham
(D) Jerry DiTullio
60%
30%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(R) Jeff Hurd*
(D) Somebody
80%
40%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert*
(D) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank*
(D) Somebody
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(R) Gabe Evans*
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(D) Joe Salazar
50%
40%
40%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
November 19, 2018 10:23 AM UTC
7 Comments
it's obviously fine and good for education activists to express their views and make their case to the new governor and to the media, but this seems to be a pretty petty and possibly self-defeating tactic. To get one's panties in a bunch over a transition team is to expend needless political capital and sow mistrust before any policies are on the table. To attack the governor elect for wanting to honor and hear a range of views is to attack him for precisely the thing that will lead him to being a successful and re-electable governor! I'm not disagreeing with their views, but if I were them I'd give a bit more credit to Polis and to the process of working with him. Burning bridges and crying wolf on your allies before the game has begun is a classic bad-faith move.
I don't agree with Bob Schaffer's political views, and I certainly did not vote for him in 2008, but he has proven to be a highly effective school leader at Liberty Common School and that institution is doing good work in Larimer County. Schaffer and his team do have some worthy ideas about how to educate kids. You or I may not agree with all of them, but they do deserve to be heard and considered. Some are quite possibly worth imitating.
Mike Johnston has been an amazing school leader in the past. His ideas, again, may not have universal appeal. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't be voiced in the governor-elect's working group. Besides, you caricature Johnston as being all about punishing teachers. That's not accurate. He has been an articulate voice for improving schools in many other ways, too.
Public education is a mess and it's not because there's choice and charters. It's because students and families have no incentive to care about outcomes on the standardized tests, a goodly number of students in some communities – like Denver, Aurora, Adams County, and some rural areas – lack motivation to work hard in school and some parents don't encourage education or emphasize its value, and bureaucracies regard the per-pupil funding as an incentive to keep passing kids along whether they learned what they should have or not because to do otherwise would cost the money that comes with the kid who takes the slot the next year.
We have terrible incentives in public education, our public education system has no idea what its mission is, and our society has confused age of child with academic progress. We have state academic standards, yes, but they are not consistently applied or taken seriously, and standardized tests cannot possibly give reliable data unless and until all students have a powerful incentive to prepare well and do their best. That has to involve using the test results to determine whether a child moves to the next grade or, at least, to the next level of schooling (elementary to middle to high) and definitely we need a high school competency exam as a prerequisite to graduation.
Right now most school basically warehouse kids. We also have huge problems with behavior in urban schools. Administrators and district bureaucrats don't like to address behavior because, if a record is kept, they can be held accountable later when the behavior worsens on grounds of having known and done nothing or not having known when they should have known. Moreover, administrators – or, at least, many of them – spend much of their time on paperwork and not so much on dealing directly with students. The bottom line is that it's hard for kids to learn in schools where the culture tolerates behavior problems from the students.
Visit any neighborhood middle or high school in Denver or Aurora or most of Adams County if you doubt this.
We need Schaffer's views and Johnston's experience on this panel. We need more opportunities to listen to each other and compromise, not less, and it would be a bad idea to exclude them because their ideas don't square with yours or mine.
This is an advisory position so Polis and crew are free to accept or reject as much or as little of Schaffer’s opinions as they wish to.
I certainly have never voted for Schaffer and it is extremely unlikely that I ever would but Polis is entitle to hear from anyone he wishes before making policy decisions.
Remember, even the broken clock is right twice each day.
One problem is there is no one on the education transition team who works in the trenches of public education today, either at the K-12 level or in community college or higher ed. Where are the teachers who can talk about the lack of resources, overwhelming mandates, the overuse and reliance on standardized tests (and the huge amount of time they take away from instructional time), stupid directives that treat kids like widgets and teachers like robots, etc etc
The media and others keep referring to charter and voucher advocates as "reformers" when they generally just call for stripping public money out of public schools and giving it to private, for profit actors. The folks in the public schools have ideas for reforms too but no one listens to them — case in point, the Polis transition team.
Gotta agree with your last paragraph, Open. What's most interesting to me is the way this transition committee perpetuates old debates that could have been easily resolved by appointing some of the leaders from Mesa 51, Greeley West, St. Vrain, or Thompson.
There are good things happening in public schools like these, but this committee won't likely be a forum for that. Instead, it is likely to just make a wedge issue out of education in order to drive the full-day kindergarten promise. Not a bad tactic, mind you, but a tactic nonetheless.
"first real controversy"
Seriously?!
How about we ask the "man in the street" what s/he thinks about this issue?
Don't even need to go that far. This is who Polis is. He supported 191, the bill Johnston is "hated" for– in fact, he tried to make it law at the federal level. He's long been aligned with DFER. He's a "reformer." It wasn't enough for me not to vote for him, but folks like me who don't like charter schools shouldn't be surprised by anything they read here; that’s the guy we picked.