Seeing how everybody I’ve ever met is an expert in public education, it’s mind boggling that so many students still do so poorly here in Colorado.
Who doesn’t have an opinion about how to improve the end result of our public schools system? Charter schools. Fire all the teachers. Give all the teachers raises. More testing. Less testing. Longer days. Shorter days.
See? If I were to call you right now and ask what you think would improve the public education system here in Aurora, you’d start talking.
There’s a new guy coming to run Aurora Public Schools, and he just might be listening right now. The school board there chose Rico Munn to take over the district of 36,000 students in July. For more about Munn, see reporter Adam Goldstein’s story on Page 9.
I listened to Munn and three other superintendent candidate finalists last week as they vied for the job to take the reigns of one of the most challenging, and challenged, school districts in the state.
These are without a doubt some of the best and brightest in Colorado when it comes to public education. But honestly, each one is hamstrung by trying to do the impossible: bring the metro area’s marginal and failing school systems up to par.
It’s not absolutely impossible to help hundreds of thousands of metro-area students reading below grade level to catch up with their peers, but it’s impossible to do it given the public school system we’ve created in Colorado, and the world we live in. It’s not for the lack of trying. If sheer will, determination and stamina counted for anything, outgoing APS Super John Barry, the school board and the dedicated teachers in that school district would have every kid in Aurora acing the ACT each year.
Good intentions and determination are not the problem. Money is the problem. Parents are the problem. Bureaucracy is the problem. The system is the problem.
We have a created a one-size-fits-all public education program in a world of endless sizes. The system was created to focus on middle-class and upper-class kids, because that’s what the state has pretty much been. Those parents previously did the best they could to instill the value of good reading and math skills, and the schools did the heavy lifting.
Now, Aurora deals with thousands of kids who don’t speak English as their first language — whose families almost never have a stay-at-home mom, and often not even a traditional family. The battle to teach kids, not an easy job under the best conditions, is insurmountable when the kids move from school to school several times a year, when their parents are unwilling or unable to instill the value of learning, when there are 30 or more apathetic or unqualified students in a class, five times a day, or when kids don’t even have a coat to make it to school. Yes, that really happens. A lot.
In a world that needs so much, the most important thing we can do here in Aurora, in Colorado, in this country, is do what it takes to bring the vast majority of kids up to snuff in school. Above all else, it is a shameful crime that so many kids can’t even read and write.
So forget all the rubrics and empowerment schemes and all of that edubabble. Send money. We honestly expect public schools to pick up the slack for parents who can’t or won’t do what it takes to make it so their kids can learn to read, so they want to learn to read. But then we don’t provide the resources for schools to become social service centers.
Can you just imagine the outrage if schools were to start having “parenting” programs, working with kids to find out what’s bothering them? Persuading them to get into Mary Shelley instead of Halo 4?
Even if we did get honest with ourselves and realize we want public schools to be health-care centers, dentists, clothing banks, food banks, caterers, recreation departments, baby sitters, travel agencies, mental health centers, second parents, social service departments, and, god forbid, learning centers, the price tag associated with all of this would push the state’s TABOR Tribe over the edge.
It’s not going to happen. And while out of sheer perseverance, school districts like Aurora will see small, incremental changes, tens of thousands of kids will leave APS far below where they need to be.
We don’t need a new rubric, folks. We need a miracle.
Reach editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com