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If you looked hard enough, you'd probably find someone who is pleased by the state of public education in Colorado. If you looked that hard though, you could also find someone who believes that the sun rises in the west or that Clear Creek canyon is a splendid site for a gargantuan reservoir.
Last Tuesday, voters in every school district except Denver elected new school boards -- the Denver election is May 16, in conjunction with the airport referendum.
To say voters
rather than a voter
is
almost stretching the facts. In several districts, such as
Mapleton, less than 1 percent of the registered voters went
to the polls. Jefferson County, the state's biggest
district, set a record with an 8-percent turnout. In Buena
Vista, where the former superintendent was recently
convicted of embezzlement, there was only one candidate for
each seat, so they didn't even hold an election.
These dismal figures have inspired state Rep. Bill Owens to propose that school elections be held with the general elections in November, so that more people will vote.
His argument, and it's a good one, is that in many districts, the only people who take an active interest in the election are the candidates, who have but one vote apiece, and the teachers' unions, whose ballots and campaign efforts appear to make the difference when so few other people vote.
Thus many school boards are dominated by people whose views are acceptable to the Colorado Education Association. The CEA has never cared a whit about whether kids learn anything, just as long as its members continue to get more pay for less work, more job protection and less responsibility.
Former state education commissioner Cal Frasier can't be the only person who concludes that our legislature will be reluctant to spend more on education when the money is allocated by boards that are dominated by one interest.
Besides moving the election day, is there a way out of this spiral? Well, parents are always being urged to get involved in the local schools. But the school systems take great pains to channel that involvement into meaningless and irrelevant areas. They'll tell you to join the PTA, and if you're truly concered, they'll let you be a room mother. They might even put you on the local accountability committee, which functions as a safety valve -- you're allowed to let off steam while nothing changes.
Other forms of parental involvement are energetically discouraged by our educational establishment. If the curriculum appalls you, you're dismissed as a right- or left-wing crank, meddling in matters best left to certified professionals. If the priorities dismay you, only an elitist pinko would dare suggest that math might be as important as football. If the school environment troubles you, you become an enemy of the true goal of modern public education -- which is to run schools as a social laboratory instead of as places to impart certain knowledge and skills.
Contending with these entrenched systems is not easy,
but it can be done. Four years ago, my friend Kirby
Perschbacher and I formed the Salida School Board
Monitoring Commission.
We attended almost every
meeting, asked pointed questions, collected contradictions,
and otherwise made nuisances of ourselves. We published
several jeremiads in the local press.
We might have contributed to the outcome of the Salida election last week: a near-record 35-percent turnout resulting in four new board members -- two incumbents were defeated. Moments after the new board was sworn in Tuesday night, the superintendent resigned.
Ed Letterman, a Denver board candidate, has promoted a
Parents' Union,
with the idea that in numbers there
might be enough strength to combat the teachers and
administrators who will come back at you with studies,
delays, evasions, jargon, threats and the other customary
weapons of professional educators.
The public schools take your money and your children. If either is important to you, then you should get involved. But make sure you get involved in your own way with your own issues, or you'll end up getting co-opted into baking cakes for the school carnival.
In which case, nothing will have changed in the century
since Mark Twain observed that God created idiots. That
was for practice. Then he made school boards.
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