U.S. Senate
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(D) J. Hickenlooper*
(R) Somebody
80%
20%
Governor
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(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
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(R) Sheri Davis
40%
40%
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State Treasurer
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(D) Brianna Titone
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(D) Jerry DiTullio
60%
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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*
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2%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(R) Jeff Hurd*
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80%
40%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert*
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90%
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CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank*
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CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
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CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen*
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CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(R) Gabe Evans*
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(D) Joe Salazar
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State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
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DEMOCRATS
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95%
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June 16, 2009 03:27 PM UTC
59 Comments
The enemy of your enemy is your friend?
“putative US allies President Jalal Talabani of Iraq and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan praised the alledged election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”
From Juan Coles site
Tell me again, why are we in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Now I didn’t keep a copy of the published paper and recall the headline being much more punitive.
To be honest, I know virtually nothing about education issues, but damn. 50% graduation rate? Half of the kids in DPS don’t finish high school?
I don’t have kids, but I do have a nephew rapidly approaching school age and living in a DPS-served neighborhood, and that’s just plain scary.
They plan to increase state assessment and English language proficiency by 3.5 to 5 percent annually , but somehow increase the graduation rate from 50% to 85% over 7 years? That seems a bit pie in the sky to me. Beginning at 50% and increasing year-over-year at 5% for six years yields 67% percent, not 85%.
Please understand, I’m not knocking teachers at all (a good friend is a DPS teacher, and works way harder then I do in my job), but wow- that 50% number just seems stunning to me.
Maybe I’ve just been living with my head in the sand.
“Beginning at 50% and increasing year-over-year at 5% for six years yields 67% percent, not 85%.”
Sheesh, that is really bad. And presumably whomever put that stat up is involved in education.
i.e., not increasing by 5% of the current pass percentage, but getting 5% more of the total students to graduate. And they’re counting 2007 to 2013 as seven years (including the endpoints).
It’s a common construction in journalism; the mathematically or financially minded are inclined to compute everything as compound interest, but politicians and journalists tend to think of percentages as absolute numbers.
I always compound, but IMHO if they mean 5 % out of 100 to be correct they should say “increase __ by 5 percentage points a year” instead of “increase __ by 5 % per year.” There is a minor difference.
but for DPS, not so much. Low expectations and a free hall pass for our friends.
but thanks for asking.
isn’t that annoying ?
I didn’t follow this Cleve self blogging thing closely, but did he really blog this comment ….?
“I’d take a bullet for Cleve Tidwell”
That is absolutely hilarious!
after he was caught doing a little astroturfing.
DPS has regressed from a low 50’s graduation rate to one that is at or below 50%
you’d be right. The outcomes cited above were reported in The Post. The leadership group that created these was driven by Superintendent come Senator Bennet’s gathering of internal and external leaders that spent 4 years during Bennet’s reign analyzing the problems.
You might want to rephrase that, Libertad. Or at least phrase it correctly, in a post slamming others for errors.
And nothing significant is beong done to improve it. They’ll always have great goals – and they’ll always accomplish nothing significant.
He lists 5-6 key strategies that I assume he and Bennet worked up – not one of them is focused on the outcomes of those being taught.
the Colorado Education Association said would happen if we didn’t pass Amendment 23?
Purely politically this isn’t going to help Senator Bennet’s efforts to be elected to his seat.
…we don’t give education every dollar they ask for. And whether or not we give it – nothing changes.
McInnis can not like the Western Colorado Congress (Bill Grant) endorsement this morning in the GJ Daily Sentinel.
http://www.gjsentinel.com/opin…
Guess McInnis will have to change his standard voice mail referring oil and gas industry support.
The Economist wrote a comparison of the American school calender and day to that of other developed (and developing) countries:
Lexington
I have long been a staunch advocate of switching to a year-round calender, for the reasons identified in the article. Adding in more instructional time would be good too, but the main issue is the distribution of the instructional time throughout the year.
I completely agree. Also switching to a year round school year would be a surefire way to increase teacher pay per year, hopefully attracting higher quality teachers. The other most understated benefit of year round school, I think, is that it would keep kids out of trouble (gangs, drugs, etc) if they had more mandatory school to keep them busy.
for the child and for decisions on their education everyone would be driven to a higher standard of expectations.
But no, we return to the victimology of low expectations and daddy government.
ps how’s that full year school working for the teachers, taxpayers, parents and consumers (kids) of Douglas County?
Are we racehorses now? Bred? Weird word choice. But I do think that parent’s should be more involved with their children’s education, but I don’t see how that is mutually exclusive with a year round school year.
And I don’t know what you’re talking about with Douglas county, feel free to enlighten me.
Are we racehorses now? Bred? Weird word choice. But I do think that parent’s should be more involved with their children’s education, but I don’t see how that is mutually exclusive with a year round school year.
And I don’t know what you’re talking about with Douglas county, feel free to enlighten me.
the argument that all social policies that address the fact that human beings do not, in reality, act with infinite responsibility and benevolence, can be solved by all people simply starting to act with infinite responsibility and benevolence. Decentralzed solutions, suggesting that if all of these disparate people simply thought or acted in a way differently from how they actually think and act, then all would be well, is an empty wish, not a serious or useful policy proposal.
We would not need either a market or a government, or even families and communities, if all people simply inherently acted in the common interest instead of their self or local interest. But, alas, that’s not the nature of the human animal. We have to work at creating institutions that lead to collectively intelligent outcomes, not simply insist that “if” people acted differently, all would be well. The challenge is either to create incentives such that people actually do act differently, or create alternative means to the ends that would be achieved were they to act differently.
to my above post: If one were to argue that taking responsibility for one’s children is in their self or local interest, and as such (and as observation demonstrates) is commensurate with how many people actually do behave, then you must read my argument more broadly.
Wishing that some group of people, in a decentralized sense (i.e., each making their own choice of action), act differently than they actually do is not a useful policy proposal, nor a useful response to an identified social challenge. The argument above remains relevant, whether or not the decentralized dysfunctional actions are or are not in the self or local interests of the decentralized actors making them.
We breed to extend ourselves and assure we have a line of our people into the future. The problem is they breed, then allow their great asset to fail at school. No other animal would do this and I find it abnormal.
that part of the challenge is designing institutions which actually cultivate personal responsibility, rather than try to replace it. I think that the kernal of truth underneath the mountain of falsity in your approach is that policies designed to address dysfunctional decentralized choices or individual inclinations must be carefully designed not to cultivate a decreased commitment to personal responsibility as a result. I do agree that this is one legitimate consideration. But, even once that legitimate consideration is brought in, it is not enough to then say, “therefore, we should do nothing.” That conclusion simply does not follow, and is exactly as dysfunctional as the original problem.
If you did, you’d know that everyone that doesn’t exhibit personal responsibility gets exactly what they deserve. It’s not the taxpayers’ responsibility to bail out the less virtuous among us, much less cultivate institutions that promote personal reponsibility.
human interdependence. Even if we threw over any notion of mutual responsibility for one another’s well-being, we are still stuck with the externalities of the irresponsibility of which we speak. My own interests, or the collective interests of all responsible people, would be sufficient to motivate the development of institutions that promote personal responsibility, and/or address the problems created by its absence, without needing to concern myself/ourselves with the interests of the irresponsible people creating the problems we are addressing.
It doesn’t matter what the taxpayers’ “responsibility” is; it only matters what is in their own collective (and individual) self-interest. Elephant or Donkey, we live in a systemically integrated world, in which people are not merely atomized purveyors and victims of their own fates, but are also intertwined purveyors and victims of one another’s fates. It is to the latter challenge that government is most appropriately directed, as the agent of the people whose shared interests requires such an agent.
As to the failure of DPS and within the public system we should examine that:
+The school start times have rolled back – DPS is now a 9a start and they are out by 3p
+There is no choice for a decision on their education involving a higher standard of expectations. Well there maybe some charter schools, but the CEA/NEA hate those amd Obama is tearing down D.C. voucher system to placate the union bosses.
+As usual many return to the victimology of low expectations and daddy government.
More choice, more charters, more vouchers, more control for decision making must be put on the parent.
The CEA-NEA policy has been 30 years of protecting the teachers from regulations they supported that burden the teacher.
I just recognize that it’s not a panacea, for many identifiable reasons. And as long as there are schools participating in such programs that can cherry pick students (i.e., are entitled to reject applicants), there are some serious downsides regarding the production of an even-more deeply entrenched underclass of the undereducated.
But well designed school choice programs can certainly be a part of a larger strategy for improving public education.
What is not a very useful contribution is the identification of villified agencies (always, of course, those who are not in ideological agreement with you) that are responsible for all evil and all social failure in the world. That’s just silly, and completely counterproductive.
What is troubling today is we are at a 50% dropout rate for the next generation of the undereducated – Colorado’s HS dropouts.
Now that’s a record the CEA/NEA cannot be proud of. Just think of the story Dateline could run if 50% of the Chevy cars dropped off the production line.
If you did, you would understand the nature of your fallacy. I am neither defending nor condemning the teachers’ unions, but rather merely pointing out that the existence of a systemic failure does not, ipso facto, mean that the one institutional actor you choose to blame is automatically and incontrovertably the culpable agent.
There are a multitude of factors involved in our educational woes. You simply assume that the agency you are ideologically repulsed by is the agency that is responsible, conveniently ignoring all other arguments, all other contributing factors, all other relevant concerns.
You’re right, I’m sure, that I’m only about “half way there,” since few people ever manage to get much farther. But, thank god, at least I’m some fraction of “the way there,” a degree of success you clearly cannot claim: You, my cro-magnum friend, are absolutely none of the way there, and are even some extra distance away from a simple absence of comprehension (choosing, instead, an affirmative deficit). “None of the way there” would be an improvement in your case.
I think you could never publish an article that says “Americans don’t work as hard as they think they do” in an American newspaper/magazine. People just refuse to read it.
This stood out to me:
It sounds like an underestimate to me.
I agree that our students spend too little time actually learning, but the biggest reason for that is that we still fill up their days with organized sports and other activities. It’s difficult to get a free ride into a good college if you just get As, since any decent college cares only about how “well-rounded” you are.
So everyone gets treated like learning is really difficult and not that worthwhile anyway, and so if you actually want to do that, you end up bored and unpopular. In other countries I think students end up knowing more and also more well-rounded, since they aren’t forced to have “fun” like ours are. They just have “fun” for fun. 🙂
But the differences in culture between the U.S. and other countries as far as education goes are really profound, and it seems impossible to change them without a genuine revolution.
And if there is a revolution in education, I call the guillotine.
Because I required 45 minutes of reading every day and reading a newspaper article every other morning during the summer. Oh, the incredible unfairness and suffering they went through. They are convinced they should be on Oprah to describe their horrible summers…
You set the bar so high, David. What do you require now that you’ve given up on newspapers, a dozen Tweets every other morning?
Actually I was just joking with some colleagues today that the only way to get students to like you is to go at them Oprah-style:
“You get an A! And you get an A! And you get an A! Everybody gets an A!”
The Russians had just put up Sputnik and we were all “doomed” to live under a Russian moon……not exactly….
The US went to the moon…..fueled by many of the scientists who came out of our “failed” school system….as well as a few choice ex-nazi scientists….oh well.
THe full dps report is at denverpost.com. It is general and full of jargon. The people who wrote it are politicans, lobbyists, community activitists, etc…..not that there is anything wrong with that…..but I felt the report lacked a certain “gravitas.”
I don’t like the idea of year-round schools…I think it institutionalizes kids too soon……I think our “free market” inclination and our democracy depends on kids growing up without being caged 24/7 or 12 months a year….
but then I am old….I like to see the kids run free for at least a little while…
were educated in Europe, since American colleges didn’t start producing good scientists until the 60s or so. And nobody could do rocket science with a high school education.
In other countries, you’ll see kids running around. You’ll also see democracy and even occasionally free market systems. You’ll just have better-educated kids, less underage drinking and gangs, and less giant SUVs driving kids all over town for soccer practice.
Besides, Americans are already among the most institutionalized people on earth. Where else would one party steal an election without any serious protest? In Europe and the middle east and Asia, people protest all the time, and often demand much more radical change than most of our protesters do.
Your source, for the above?? I have acknowledged the Nazi trained scientists…von braun…..but we went to the moon with home grown scientists…many of whom came out of the military…it was a technical feat…
You see, sxp 151, European was in pieces during the 40s…and early 50s…first, we rebuit Europe, then we went to the moon..
Now this quote:
Where did you get that?
perhaps a bit of debate might have been helpful….In high school debate, you have to source every fact.
Or, you lose points and your team/school could lose….
Especially not in extemporaneous speaking. It’s just that most students are nervous and sound like they might be making something up, which is why they get asked to back things up. If you’re confident, you can pretty much say whatever you want.
As for the scientists, certainly the older ones would have been educated in Europe. Oppenheimer, for example:
That was in the 30s. Oppenheimer’s the first one that comes to mind when rocket science is involved; if you have a counterexample, please feel free to mention it. As I recall you didn’t name any scientists, nor have you sourced your latest claims.
And regarding “among the most institutionalized,” I think I explained pretty clearly what I was referring to in the sentences immediately following. We have a culture of accepting the whims of the powerful rather than demanding change. People don’t trust government to help and feel their problems are their own fault. Elsewhere there’s more of a culture of forcing leaders to fix problems or get out of office. It’s hard to imagine any democracy where a political leader would have a 25% approval rating for over three years without any kind of election being called, but we accept it here.
Make fun of me if you like, but if that’s your idea of debate, it’s not going to be very illuminating for anyone else.
Debate is between two teams. One team can absolutely challenge the other’s facts or present counter references. It is one of the most important ways to gain points in high school debate. Extemporaneous speech is different from debate.
However, you are absolutely right to challenge my assertion about where the scientists who engineered the american moon effort were educated. I will have to research the facts to establish the team which sent the first men to the moon. I have already acknowledged that von braun came from Nazi Germany.
As for Oppenheimer….is that Frank or Robert? I believe that the former did not work on government projects. Wasn’t Robert Oppenheimer involved with the development of the atomic bomb? I was not aware that he continued at NASA.
And as for institutionalization:
I believe you have political systems all mixed up. In democracies which have a parliamentary system of government, the parties who win an election form a government, and chose a Prime Minister. If the Prime Minister loses a vote of confidence in the Parliament, then the government “falls” and a new election is held. Most
parliamentary government systems also call for periodic elections.
In the United States, we have a system where the government is divided into three equal branches at the federal level. So the Executive is chosen directly from a vote of the people and not the legislature. The Executive can only be removed from office, however, by action of the legislation via impeachment and then, only for high crimes and misdemeanors. So in the United States there is no provision in the Constitution to hold an election because the Executive or President has a low approval rating.
If you want to change that, then you should be working on a Constitutional amendment. In this county, since I graduated from college, we have incorporated civil rights legislation into our laws, got rid of the draft, made abortion legal and gave 18 year olds the right to vote.
That is a whole lot. And, those changes came about by by and large from people educated in the public school system..who had summers off.
(1972-1973) Resolved: That governmental financial support for all public and secondary education in the United States be provided exclusively by the federal government.
I remember it well. Still have our trophies and awards from that year on a shelf. Even have our written plan and research on it. Which although worked well for high school debate tournaments, would be embarrassing to advocate now.
You’ve brought back memories. In high school I joined the “extemporaneous speaking” category, in which I kicked a little ass. Apparently it just involves being able to bullshit well, a quality that’s served me well throughout my life (including here).
I ended up quitting formal debate after learning about a competition sponsored by some giant power company on the merits of “environmental externalities.” It was the first time I figured out, in any context, that the whole game might be rigged.
Seems that I always need a game plan. And when you do not know what will be thrown at you, as in extemp competition, you cannot rely on a map. Well, that and probably because I was a dirt poor country farm boy, attended a small school and could not keep up with the “city folk” in discussing issues off the top of my head.
I did participate in competitions in all the forensics categories, though. A requirement made by our great forensics team teacher. But debate was my first love, even above wrestling and football and is what I got my college scholarship for. I did do good at “interpretation of prose” and “duet acting” in H.S. And made it to national finals held at MSU, Mankato, in “interpretation of prose”, while in college. And those college years? Majored in comprehensive communications/LD certification/secondary education so that I could one day be a forensics team teacher myself. Too bad my teaching experience ended after my student teaching. Found less stressful ways to make money. But I have judged H.S. competitions and would encourage anyone to go and enjoy a meet at your local school. These kids are a real treat. And you might learn a thing or two!
(1958-1959_ Resolved: The United States should adopt the British Education system.
The elements of the british education system…were generally defined as: ability grouping; federal aid; and, the 11+
I loved debate….we went all over the state…Adams State was always the most fun…maybe because it was so hard to get to….
but, I digress
Love was the thing that drew me to debate. My H.S. girlfriend was on the team.:) And it smelled a whole lot better than the wrestling room. But I too digress.
Back in the day, the only co-ed high school club with overnight trips was the debate team….We may have looked like nerds..but…..
How else could a H.S. guy get all expenses paid, weekend motel trips to far away exotic places like Durango and Hayden, with his girlfriend?
My purpose in doing so is to point our what I believe to be the REAL evolving story in these “United” States. Iran isn’t the story, this is:
“Remember how all those right-wing pundits proclaimed the Minutemen as being just like a neighborhood watch? Michelle Malkin called it “the mother of all neighborhood watches.” Lou Dobbs labeled it “this country’s biggest neighborhood watch program”. Bill O’Reilly declared: “Talking Points applauds the Minutemen. They are in the great tradition of neighborhood watch groups.”
Boy, that sure is some neighborhood watch:
Accused ringleader Shawna Forde told her family in recent months that she had begun recruiting members of the Aryan Nations and that she planned to begin robbing drug-cartel leaders, her brother Merrill Metzger said Monday in a telephone interview from Redding, Calif.
“She was talking about starting a revolution against the United States government,” he said.
Here is a recording of the 911 call made by the victim who survived — the mother of 9-year-old Brisenia Flores, who was shot “two or three times” while her mother lay nearby. As she’s on the phone, you can hear the killers return and open fire on her again, and hear her return fire:
……….(snip)
The accused shooter, Jason Eugene Bush (no relation to GWB….my emphasis), was charged Friday in the 1997 murder of a sleeping, homeless Hispanic man in Wenatchee, Wash.
“Bush has had long-standing ties to the Aryan Nations,” Sgt. John Kruse of the Wenatchee police wrote in a statement filed in Chelan County Superior Court.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department arrested Forde, Bush and Arivaca resident Albert Robert Gaxiola on Friday and accused them of killing Raul Flores, 29, and his daughter Brisenia, 9, during a home invasion. Flores’ wife was injured during the attack and returned fire, wounding Bush, investigators said.
Forde, 41, who has lived primarily in Everett, Wash., was the executive director of Minutemen American Defense, and she had named Bush the “operations director” for the group’s border-watch activities along the Arizona-Mexico border.
… Forde’s brother, Metzger, worked for the organization at its inception years ago, but he quit, he said, “when it started to get too deep.”
He and other family members grew suspicious of Forde and started talking to police about her after her husband was shot in their Everett home in December.
That’s why, Metzger said, he had an audio recorder running when she visited his Northern California home in early May.
“She sat right here on my couch and told me that she was going to start an underground militia. This militia was going to start robbing drug-cartel dealers – rob them and steal their money or drugs,” Metzger said.
… Investigators think the May 30 robbery was intended to be the first in a series of such attacks intended to fund the border-watch group and a new venture, O’Connor said. Forde planned on starting a business of helping free kidnap victims in other countries, he said.
She also spoke of the venture to her brother, he said.
“She was telling me that they were going to start some sort of militia that was going to go overseas and aid and abet those who are kidnapped. She said she was going to go to Syria,” he said.
h/t C&L
The hate speech, ignorance, and cultural rot in this country needs to be addressed in a serious way. Free speech and gun rights are one thing….sedition, murderous violence, hate and evil are quite another.
If I were President, the FBI would be all over this threat to our national security.
What red blooded, mother loving, apple pie eating American would want such far right wing terrorists on American soil?
at Supermax in Florence, at least according to Doug Lamborn and the Republican legislators (and Buffie McFadyen, to be fair).