Seebach: Education 'report' reveals a tale of two Colorados

Published November 25, 2006 at midnight

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I just hate it when some think tank whose work I very much admire - that would be the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which is devoted to improving education - embarks on a silly exercise of a kind I very much dislike - that would be ranking the states according to some ad hoc grading scheme that assigns grades to each of a bunch of disparate indicators, computes the average and presents the results as if they mean something.

Alas, Fordham succumbed to this unfortunate temptation with The Fordham Report 2006: How Well are States Educating our Neediest Children? (at www.edexcellence.net)

Not at all well, the report concludes, not at all surprisingly. If by some chance you were previously unaware of the fact that poor children do less well in school than their better-off peers, or that black and Hispanic children do less well on average than white or Asian children, now you know.

But if you already knew that, you'll probably not find much here that's convincing. There are three main categories, one for current performance, one for trends over the last 15 years, and one catch-all category of education reforms. Indicators for current performance are percentages of black and Hispanic students proficient in fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade math and eighth-grade science, as well as graduation rates and the pass rate on Advanced Placement exams. The trend category looks for statistically significant changes for those two groups and separately for low-income students (which involves an unknown amount of double counting, likely to vary among states).

The press release notes that only eight states have made even moderate progress over the last 15 years in improving academic performance for these poor and minority students, and that five of those states are among the top 10 according to the grades Fordham awarded for education reform. Hardly enough data points to show "that solid standards, tough accountability, and greater school choice can yield better classroom results."

At most, it's a weak correlation. Florida is one of the eight, and it's tied with Colorado for 14th place, but Colorado is one of 13 "no progress" states. Go figure - though you might want to figure in that Colorado's student demographics have changed a lot since 1992.

On the other hand, Colorado is ranked eighth nationally in the achievement category (which isn't saying a lot, since D-plus was the highest grade given). So are we doing something wrong, or are we doing something right?

The state-by-state analysis makes me wonder whether there are two states of Colorado, theirs and the one I live in. In implementing standards-based reform, the report says, "Not much has changed since 1997, when Gov. Roy Romer, a Democrat, initiated it."

In "Heartland Blues," a piece they wrote for Fordham's weekly newsletter Education Gadfly, Mike Petrilli and Sarah Kim, who worked on the report along with many others, pointed out that almost all the "no progress" states were "clustered in the nation's center."

What is it about this region, they asked, that accounts for its lack of progress? They suggested a number of possible answers, which didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

• "Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Colorado have large African-American populations in urban centers. And Iowa, Nebraska, and Utah have plenty of poor and Hispanic students. (Colorado, too, has many Hispanic youngsters.)"

Erm, no. Blacks make up 4 percent of Colorado's population, and they are not particularly concentrated. Denver Public Schools has 13,331 blacks, 14,312 whites - and 41,581 Hispanics, of a total 72,312.

• "Maybe it's the economy. The Midwest and Great Plains have been plagued of late by unemployment and depopulation."

No, again. Colorado was hit hard by the dot-com bust for about three years, but there's not much overlap between the high-tech sector and the families of poor and minority students. As for depopulation, Colorado was the third fastest-growing state from 1990-2001, and has continued to grow. There are some counties, especially on the eastern plains, that are troubled by unemployment and depopulation, but those counties have few minority students.

• "It might also be the 'brain drain' effect - the flight of the best-educated families and the exit of promising college graduates have left behind the most challenging students."

Nope. Colorado is on the receiving end of the brain drain . . . we call it "The Colorado Paradox."

• "There's one more explanation, and it's the one we put the most credence in: policy. Simply put, the 'no progress' states, by and large, have refused to adopt the comprehensive education reforms that are showing results elsewhere."

Highly dubious. Colorado adopted its statewide tests starting in 1997, when George W. Bush was still in Texas.

Petrilli responded very graciously, "You're right that Colorado does not fit well into our larger 'heartland' thesis. (That's what we get for generalizing.) But Colorado's failure to make any statistically significant gains at the proficient level on NAEP for poor and minority kids is what's truly puzzling. We were surprised by that too."

It's a good question. But this report doesn't provide much of an answer.

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the News. She can be reached by telephone at (303) 954-2519 or by e-mail at seebach@RockyMountainNews.com.

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