Colorado schools earn C in nationwide report card

State ranks 38th in U.S.; low teacher pay hurts score

By Berny Morson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Colorado schools rank 38th among the states in a nationwide report card released Wednesday by the newspaper Education Week.

Colorado's overall grade was a C, matching the national average. But Colorado was 18th among the 19 states that also received C's.

Drawing down Colorado's score in the 12th annual "Quality Counts" report were low teacher salaries and a lack of coordination between public school programs and college admission requirements.

The state received a D-plus on the teacher issues and a D on the coordination issue.

Colorado education officials and Gov. Bill Ritter have targeted the same problems.

"We're not defensive about this. We find it interesting and rather helpful," said Jo O'Brien, assistant education commissioner for standards and assessment, of the report.

"When we saw we got a D (in one category), even though you want to cringe, we kind of want to say, 'You know what? This is helpful. This is a report that we think has integrity,' " O'Brien said.

"And we would agree it is commensurate with where state legislators and policymakers - and where the Department of Education and the state board (of education) - think we also need to get to work."

"Quality Counts" was prepared by Education Week, a national trade journal for school officials, along with the Maryland-based nonprofit Editorial Projects in Education and the Pew Charitable Trusts.

This year's report places more emphasis on factors involving teacher training and salary - the area in which Colorado received a D-plus - because "we have lots of research now indicating that high-quality teaching matters more to student achievement than anything else schools do," said Lynn Olson, the Education Week editor who headed the "Quality Counts" project.

Because so many categories were revised, this year's grades are not comparable to rankings on previous "Quality Counts" reports, Olson said.

New York, Massachusetts and Maryland led the nation, earning overall grades of B.

At the bottom with grades of D-plus were Nevada, Nebraska, Mississippi, Oregon, Idaho and the District of Columbia.

Colorado received a B - the state's highest grade - in a category called "Chance for Success."

The category includes data on family income, parent education and parent employment, as well as the availability of school programs such as preschool.

But the high rating in that category didn't translate into actual success in the next category - results on national achievement tests. Colorado received only a C-minus for its test results.

That was above the national average in the test results category, which was a dismal D-plus.

Colorado lost points because of the continued gap in test scores between white students and minorities. That problem, too, has been under discussion by state officials.

Colorado ranks 44th in teacher salaries as compared with 18 other professions that require similar levels of education, such as nurses, accountants and technical writers.

Teachers nationally earn 88 cents for every dollar earned by members of the other professions. In Colorado, the figure is 82.8 cents.

"That's not a surprise at all," said Beverly Ingle, president of the Colorado Education Association.

Amendment 23, passed in 2000, guarantees funding increases for education of inflation plus 1 percent. But other states are seeing higher increases, Ingle said.

In addition to salaries, the state's D-plus grade on teacher- related issues was based on a checklist of 50 items, including incentive pay and professional development for teachers already on the job.

Colorado was graded positively on only 18 of the 50 items.

The grade is a measure of state policies, not the competency of the teachers.

For Colorado schools to improve, professional development must be targeted to show teachers how to reach specific groups of students who are failing, Ingle said.

Development must also be specific to the teacher's subject and demonstrate how to use technology to get lessons across, she said.

morsonb@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5209

• January 9, 2008

  9:57 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  vudumom writes:

  You can't change a culture and home life of a student who is just in class not taking advantage of a free school system.It is the same for everyone.What one does with it is up to them. They have to have the will to learn and succeed,you can't throw money at a problem that money won't fix.
  For example, my children have 25 kids in their classes. Both are at the top and beyond their peers. Why? Because they have a strong support system and a culture of success and working hard in their home. They have been brought up that way.Alot of the kids that are in their classes are behind the grade they are in. The school system has a policy of passing children even though the are no where near the level the are passed to.These children have the same curriculum as the rest of the class. Do they have the support base at home? No.Can you change parents?No. Can you go into people's homes and tell them to start being a parent?No.Can you throw more money at the problem and fix it? No.So what do we do?That is the big question.You can't force a kid to learn. You can't expect a child to be at a high level when they have learning problems.You can't expect test scores to be higher than they are by throwing money at the problem.
  There are two kinds of teacher's . Teacher's who teach because they can make a difference or at least put all their effort into it and the teacher's who have been teaching a long time and are just counting the days until retirement.My child's 2nd grade teacher falls into the latter category. My 5th grader's teacher falls into the 1st category.
  Oh, there is one other kind of teacher ,the horrible ones. Every school has at least one. Every school has had complaint after complaint about the same teacher and yet the continue be allowed to teach and ruin our children's learning capabilities for a whole year.I support raising teacher's salaries,but not until the can get rid of the bad teachers and any parent will tell you who they are,because every year that teacher has complaints from parents and the administrationwill not do anything.

  One other thing that had me thinking. If a teacher for example is making $30,000 a year. If their salary is jumped to $45,000 a year ,does that make a teacher somehow magically a better teacher?
  No it does not.We need to recruit better teachers and lure people out of the private sector to teach their knowledge.My children's school has an Engineer 4th grade teacher. She has been teaching for at least 20 years.She could have easily made alot more money in the private sector.She chose to teach and she is such a great teacher if we had every teacher that was like her no one would be behind.She is an inspiration and we need more teachers like her.

• January 11, 2008

  9:35 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  tcool94 writes:

  To vudumom:

  I think you completely miss the point regarding teacher salaries. Does a salary increase result in increased productivity for existing teachers? Not necessarily. However, it will attract new talent to the profession who have deemed the old salary unacceptable. Suddenly you have competition for teaching positions. As a result, you can argue that teaching quality will improve as a result of higher salary offers.

  The example you use of your children's 4th grade teacher is an anomaly. It's just not fair to expect people to take such huge pay cuts from the private sector to be an inspirational teacher. It happens from time to time, but it's far from the norm. I know plenty of professionals who are strongly considering joining the teaching profession later in life after they've earned a lot more money in the private sector. A lot of these people don't necessarily enjoy their current positions, but they make too much money to walk away from them at this time. If teacher salaries were higher, I believe many would consider walking away now to begin their teaching careers. Offer competitive salaries and quality teachers will appear.

• January 25, 2008

  7:21 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  freethinker07 writes:

  Teacher's earn 88% of what other professions do. How many hours do teachers work a year compared to other professions? If you look at Collegeslate.com you will see that at CU, at least, the Education classes hand out better grades than science related classes. So that while the nominal level of education might be the same, the difficulty of the classes is significantly different. That is an interesting way to slant results.

  Considering that the drop out rate keeps on going up, if the medical profession had improved over the last century the same amount that the education profession has, life expectancy might be 50.

  It is also interesting that Washington D.C. which has been leading the nation in the amount spent on education per student, gets graded at the bottom overall.