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Last week, voters in Jefferson County, the state's largest school district, turned down a 4.77-mill increase, even though some buildings are in desperate need of repair.
I'm not privy to the reasoning of Jefferson County
voters, but if they're anything like people around here,
where an increase in school taxes was voted down a year
ago, the prevailing attitude is The schools may need the
money, but they don't deserve it.
What do school districts do with money? What does it buy?
The answers aren't easy to come by. In 1970, America spent $45.7 billion on the primary and secondary education of 36 million students, or about $1270 apiece. In 1986, the nation spent $161.8 billion on 40 million students, or $4060 apiece. However, a 1986 dollar is worth about 32 cents of a 1970 dollar; we spent about $1299 in 1970 dollars per student in 1986.
So spending has been fairly constant. If money had any connection with results, the 1986 results would be about the same as 1970's.
Therein lies another difficulty. How do you measure the results of education? Test scores? The average SAT score dropped by 5 percent, from 479 in 1970 to 453 in 1986. Another standard test, the ACT, showed a similar decline, from 19.9 in 1970 to 18.8 in 1986.
Those were also the years that the U.S. Army rewrote its
training manuals to a sixth-grade level, and cities
replaced walk
and don't walk
signals with
flashing symbols. No matter what the educators proclaimed
about their products, or how the results of standardized
tests for college-bound students didn't mean all that much,
mayors and drill sergeants knew what they had to work with,
and it wasn't an educated populace.
Now let us hear from an educator, one Dan Morris, who is on leave from his high-school math teaching position in Cherry Creek to serve as president of the Colorado Education Association, which has 27,000 members, mostly teachers.
In the Nov. 10 edition of the Colorado Statesman, the political weekly, Morris delivers the CEA's vision of the future of Colorado education.
At least, I think that's what he was supposed to be
doing. It's hard to tell. I know quite a few teachers, and
if you ask one of them how the schools might be improved,
you get specific answers: The day is so chopped up with
announcements and bus schedules and lunch money that
there's never any time for sustained attention.
They're mainstreaming a lot of disturbed kids who
shouldn't be in a regular classroom. All I do is pay
attention to two or three troubled children, and the other
25 students in my room don't get the education they
deserve.
The textbooks are too old; how can you
expect kids to take science seriously when their book says
Someday men will walk upon the moon
and that happened 20
years ago?
If you took those specific problems to the public and explained how you might solve them if you had more money, then voters would be more willing to raise taxes.
In contrast to the real concerns of working teachers are
the vague things Morris says about schools: Just as the
work methods of the industrial age are no longer relevant,
the traditional education system may no longer be
appropriate.
May? Is it or isn't it? If professionals
like him don't know, who does?
Or we must determine our vision for public education
so that we can evaluate the appropriateness of suggested
solutions and the success of the reforms being
instituted.
How do you determine a vision
? What
is appropriateness
-- does it mean
suitability
? If so, why not use the right word? If
not, what does it mean?
Singling out Morris isn't really fair; any compendium of CEA wisdom will contain the same preponderance of meaningless polysyllables and the same lack of anything specific which voters might buy. Until that changes, school-tax increases will be voted down. That's a curious way for the CEA to advance education.
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