LET’S TALK ABOUT IT…
Do Kids Deserve Bright Futures?

What is the proper role of our public schools? What should we expect them to provide in exchange for the hundreds of millions of dollars of tax-payer funds?

Based on how our local districts prioritize their resources, it seems they believe we expect schools to feed our children, diagnose and treat any and all mental health issues our children may exhibit, and inculcate our children with values, building them to become ‘better humans.’ While a child’s physical, mental, and spiritual needs are all important, tending to those needs is the proper role for parents. The proper role of a public school is to provide a basic education to students—the famous reading, writing and ‘rithmatic. To best serve students schools should provide kids with the necessary education needed to ensure students can successfully live as free members of a free society when they reach adulthood.

A solid education is critical to a child’s future success, so we were excited to see the recent headlines which declared Poudre School District to be a ‘top district’ 'continuing a long tradition of high performance’ on the most recent Colorado Measures of Academic Success benchmarks. We were glad to hear district Superintendent Brian Kingsley declare PSD to be one of the top school districts “in the nation.” But as we moved away from the celebratory headlines and looked into the publicly available data ourselves, we quickly realized the celebration was premature. What we discovered made us concerned for our community’s kids.

PSD’s trumpeted achievement isn’t an impressive demonstration of academic achievement after all. In fact, if Kingsley actually is correct and PSD is one of the top school districts in the country, then everyone who cares about kids should probably start asking some tough and pointed questions to the entire education industry. Because, as it turns out, PSD’s entire celebration is not the result of incredible academic results, but is instead based on PSD’s academic results being bad, but not as bad as the state average test scores. That is it. And the state scores are abysmal.

Much like the camper being chased by the bear, whose sole goal is to just be faster than the very slowest camper, PSD seems to declare success because our kids are slightly better than the rest in the state.

Is this the best we may expect from local education leaders?

Are You Satisfied with These Results?

Thousands of Colorado’s public school students are subjected each spring to hours and hours of state-mandated testing through a program called the Colorado Measure of Academic Success. The tests are used to determine how well each student and school is performing academically relative to the state-determined benchmark skills. According to the CMAS website, “The met and exceeded expectations levels are considered on track to being college and career ready.” Using the state’s description, then any student not meeting or exceeding expectations can be understood to not be college and career ready. If that is true, then we wonder if our community should be much more worried about the effectiveness of our local schools.

Here why we think that concern is warranted:

• Roughly 40% of PSD’s 3-8th graders are below expectations in English Language Arts. Forty percent of students being below grade level at reading seems like a three-alarm fire to us, but the district touts it as a success because it is not as bad as the abysmal state average of around 55%.

But wait.

Math scores are worse.

• 50% of our local 3rd-8th graders are below expectations in math, but we are assured that is an excellent result because that is not as terrible as the state’s average of 66% below grade level for math.

• Most PSD middle school students are below grade level according to the math standards. Two of our area middle schools have nearly 75% of students as below grade level on math.

Are There Bright Spots?

While the overall academic results are embarrassing, these are certainly some outliers in the district which may provide hope and a possible direction for district-wide improvement.

One perennial district outlier has been Zach Elementary School. Zach is a neighborhood school which uses the Core Knowledge curriculum and has been consistently recognized as a top-performing school in the state for CMAS performance on both math and English language exams.

Schools with reading scores above 80% meeting or exceeding expectations include:

• Kinard Core Knowledge Middle School-80% of their 6th-8th graders meet or exceed

• Liberty Common School-85% of their 3rd-8th graders meet or exceed expectations

• Traut Core Elementary School-80% of their 3rd-5th graders meet or exceed

• Zach Elementary School-83% of their 3rd-5th graders meet or exceed

  • For Zach, this is actually a decrease from previous years in which they had 90% of their students on track for college and career-readiness.

Is it a coincidence that these demonstrably successful schools are all schools which use a classical or Core Knowledge curriculum?

Math scores exhibit a similar trend.

• CMAS math results show Zach and Traut elementary schools with scores which are significantly better than the other district elementary schools. At Zach, 86% of students are college and career ready in math, while Traut has 80% of its students prepared. This is in stark contrast with the rest of the district schools at which a majority of students are not college-ready according to the CMAS results.

• Kinard Middle School is the only district middle school in which more kids meet grade level expectations than not. Kinard, a choice-in school which uses the Core Knowledge curriculum, has only 29% of its students as below expectations, which is vastly better than the district’s average of 60% of middle school students lacking college and career-readiness in math.

Why No Conversation?

Our purpose here is not to trash particular schools and certainly not to find fault in any particular teachers or students. We simply wonder, if the CMAS tests are a valuable use of academic time (reminder, these tests take HOURS away from school time each spring), and the district believes the CMAS results are meaningful, then why are district leaders not up in arms, obviously concerned with the academic results from our district?

• Why does PSD have a strategic plan with no mention of math or academics?

• Why doesn’t PSD publicly recognize Zach Elementary for being a top school in the state?

• Why have PSD leaders not created a task force to investigate how the successful schools are educating kids? Shouldn’t other district students benefit from what is working for the successful schools?

• Why did PSD spend millions of dollars on a new literacy curriculum and force it on Zach Elementary School, which already had a track record of successful reading scores? Is it significant that Zach’s reading scores, while still excellent relative to the rest of the district, have decreased since the implementation of the new curriculum?

• Have district leaders addressed district teachers’ expressed concerns that the new $5,000,000 reading curriculum doesn’t teach students the foundation of reading-phonograms?

• Why did the PSD Board of Education nearly vote against approving Liberty Common School’s recent charter renewal, when Liberty has some of the best academic results in the district? Have PSD’s leaders been curious to understand how Liberty is perennially one of the top four schools in the state for SAT scores?

We believe our community wants all the children to be properly educated so to realize their full-potentials and live their lives as productively as possible. Should our community be content with a district that seems disinterested in focused academic improvements and who seems to pay more attention to using its communications department to spin poor academic results into something positive? Are we content to have a district that is happy with our students merely being better than the poor state academic results? Doesn’t that seem to be a low bar? We think our local kids deserve better.

TRENDING CONVERSATIONS
Medical Interventions for the Healthy

Local school districts provide psychological interventions on children in the form of social transitions. Data demonstrates that the overwhelming number of children who socially transition eventually participate in medical interventions.

Are our schools pushing physically healthy children toward negative medical impacts to those children’s skeletons, brains, and cardiovascular systems?

Should we at least have a public conversation about these practices in our schools?

IS THIS A GOOD IDEA?
Should Public Schools Register Kids to Vote?

How many districts have policies such as this one from Poudre School District which allows high school principals to register students to vote? Thompson School District has a nearly identical policy—HERE. Earlier this week, parents in Louden County, Virginia raised the alarm of teachers actively recruiting students as young as 16 to register to vote. Could that be happening in our local school districts?

WHY WAS I NEVER TOLD?
The Civil War’s Amazing Grace

In Franklin, Tennessee, just south of Nashville, Americans can visit a Civil War battlefield and peer through holes made by Civil War bullets at the Carter House. The battlefield site offers a variety of tours, including the unique “Amazing Grace” tour, which provides a Christian theological perspective on the Civil War. The tour is based on the slave trader, turned abolitionist John Newton’s legendary hymn Amazing Grace.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION:

☑️ ATTEND the Thompson School District Board of Education’s Meeting on Wednesday, September 18th at 6:00pm. Meeting details HERE.

☑️ BUY tickets to a conversation which will evaluate the relationship between faith, reason, and the pursuit of knowledge. Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss will speak with Stephen Hicks, a distinguished philosopher known for his work on postmodernism and the philosophy of religion. More information HERE.

☑️ SING patriotic songs and learn to better understand the U.S. Constitution during the Blessings of Liberty’s Constitution Week event. Buy tickets HERE.

☑️ SHARE this newsletter with anyone who believes in asking good questions and having curious conversations! Subscribe HERE.