The college attainment PARADOX
Colorado must invest in education if it is to remain competitive
Spend just five minutes talking to business leaders around Colorado, and you can sense the anxiety that pulses just below the surface: Will we be able to find the Colorado talent we need to fill all the jobs we are creating here in one of America’s fastest growing economies?
For decades, migration from other states has allowed us to thrive in spite of “The Colorado Paradox” — we have one of the most educated adult populations in the country with one of the nation’s lowest college completion rates among our own Colorado K-12 educated students. That trade deficit of talent has fueled our growth for decades. But in a world where competition for talent is becoming more intense, we will not be able to sustain our pace of economic growth by relying on talent imports. We have to grow our own.
Last week test scores for the 550,000 students who took the Colorado Measures of Academic Success were released, giving us a glimpse at not only how well our students are mastering math and reading skills, but how they are growing year after year. The good news is students improved their performance in every grade level in language arts, and significantly in 7th grade. The bad news is that the majority of students in Colorado are still not meeting expectations on the English language arts exam.
The nation’s most reliable scorecard on academic performance is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. It is administered all over the country and provides a common ruler to evaluate our K-12 system performance over the last two years, and compare Colorado to the competition..
The release of the latest NAEP scores in April, from tests taken in 2017, offer clear answers to Colorado’s most compelling education questions: Are Colorado’s innovations working? Is inadequate funding stalling Colorado’s educational progress? Do we have persistent achievement gaps between white students and students of color?
Colorado is widely recognized as a national leader for our ambitious reforms on standards, assessments, evaluations and school choice. In 2009, I joined the State Senate and, with Gov. Bill Ritter worked with both political parties and teachers, principals and school boards to improve Colorado’s education system. Since then, the share of 8th graders proficient in reading has increased from 32 percent to 41 percent and our 4-year high school graduation rate has grown from 72 to 79 percent.
The aggressive reforms Colorado has implemented are working, particularly in the places where they have been embraced by our terrific teachers and school leaders. Denver, for example, has collaborative-
ly and courageously implemented state-level reforms over the last decade, and made dramatic improvements in student achievement, graduation rates, and college attainment, with the district graduating its largest class in its history this year.
At the same time, Colorado continues to have one of the lowest funded school systems in the country. I led efforts to try and restore funding to our schools through Amendment 66 and the Student Success act to solve this problem but the NAEP scores expose the long-term crippling threat of our lack of adequate investment toward continued improvement. The percentage of our 4th graders who scored proficient or above on both math and reading on the NAEP was flat in the last two years. Colorado regularly punches above its weight on the NAEP tests, ranking no lower than 9th nationally in scoring on any of the tests even though we rank 39th in the nation on total spending per student. Some states that perform better than Colorado, like Massachusetts and New York, spend two to three times more per student.
Our teachers and school leaders have shown that they can do great work with limited resources but it appears we have reached the limit of what we can accomplish without making the kind of investment in our children that the top performing states in the country are making.
We are now awaiting a decision from Amazon on whether they will locate their next headquarters here. The company itself offers a critical lesson for Colorado about how to achieve long-term educational success. Throughout 13 years of historic growth, Amazon has amassed enormous profit, but never issued a dividend to shareholders. Instead, they used that massive growth to drive investment in their own people, in research and development and in positioning for the future. When you are growing is precisely the time to make investments in the resources you need to sustain that growth. There is no resource more crucial to maintaining Colorado’s growth than its K-12 students, which is why that is the most important investment we can make right now.
But we need to make those investments wisely. The achievement gaps that persist in the NAEP data show us that the current Colorado formula does not ensure both excellence and equity for Colorado students. Black, Latino and low-income students still score 15 percent to 20 percent lower than their white and non low income peers on 4th-grade reading. A recent Georgetown University report, “Rocky Mountain Divide,” found that Colorado has the largest gap between white and Latino students for college attainment of any state with a large Latino population.
To fix that we have to re-examine not only how Colorado spends money but where it spends money.
Our school finance act, which annually divides up the money through the legislature and sends it out to the districts, hasn’t been updated in 25 years and its current iteration fails to prioritize adequate funding for rural and high poverty districts where students struggle the most.
Like all good report cards, NAEP paints a picture of the strong progress we have made, and the steps Colorado will have to pursue if we want to become the best in the country. We need to stay the course on reforms, we need to raise key revenue to fund schools, and we need to re-envision where those funds go by prioritizing the investments we know make the biggest difference for closing the achievement gaps, like full-day kindergarten, extended school days and school years and incentives to attract and keep great teachers in all parts of the state.
Colorado’s path to greatness is dependent on our ability to build an education system that matches the ingenuity of our bustling economy. To do that requires the courage to hold ourselves accountable for results, the commitment to increase funding to drive us to the next level, and the integrity to make sure every child in Colorado has a fair shot.