I was called out of town unexpectedly for a chunk of time last week, so I had no time to put together my weekly column. If I’d had the time, here are a couple of topics I might have looked into. I hope to examine them soon in more detail.

The incredible disappearing resolution: Denver school board member Arturo Jimenez submitted a resolution last week to put a one-year moratorium on DPS’ request-for-proposals process for new schools. Then he left town on other business. The resolution at first blush seemed to call for at least a one-year halt to approval of new schools in Denver.

But when people got up in arms and began protesting, Jimenez phoned in to tell his colleagues and a restive public that they had all misread his resolution, and that what it really called for was a moratorium on a process, not the new schools themselves.

As reported on Education News Colorado, Jimenez said charter schools and other types of new schools could still apply to the district, but that the district would not proactively engage in an RFP process. Jimenez’s reasoning was that the RFP system takes up a disproportionate amount of board and staff time that should and could instead go toward improving existing schools.

If I were writing an entire column about this, I would wonder aloud whether having no process in place wouldn’t actually require the board and staff to spend more time on applications, since the process to winnow them and score them would no longer be in place. But then I’d probably be considered a dunderhead, just like everyone else who misread Jimenez’s confusing and vague resolution. By the way, Jimenez promised to make significant changes to the resolution before the board votes on it April 22.

The incredible interest-rate swap flap: The issue of DPS’ 2008 refinancing of its pension debt has generated some news coverage and a lot of heat on the school board – and in the Michael Bennet-Andrew Romanoff internecine war. Did DPS do well on the deal? Did the district get skinned alive?

Three DPS board members issued a news release a couple of weeks ago on this issue (which they neglected to send to anyone associated with EdNews), questioning whether it was a bad deal for DPS. At least a couple of these board members are avid Romanoff supporters and have no love for Bennet. Were they trying to tarnish Bennet, raise legitimate concerns, or both? Good questions all. The board members have been more circumspect as they try to gather facts. This story will continue to develop, I suspect.

To date, we have been silent on this issue for one reason: When we report on it, we want to shed light, not more heat. Interest rate swaps, certificates of participation, etc. are complex concepts and transactions. We will at some point publish a piece by a journalist with expertise in this area, that will help people understand what has transpired.

If ever there is a lull in the action around here, things don’t stay quiet for long, do they? I look forward to reentering the fray fully next week.

Popularity: 38% [?]

I spent part of the last two weekends reading Diane Ravitch’s new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” It’s part polemic and part confessional.

Ravitch, once an ardent supporter of charter schools, accountability and other market-based reforms, has done a dramatic, highly public 180-degree turn. She now says these approaches will destroy public education if allowed to continue unfettered.

A former federal education official (under Bush I and Clinton) and an influential writer and thinker on education, Ravitch’s change of heart is attracting national notice, and with good reason.

Her book, while exhibiting some of the new convert’s zeal and bombast, contains thought-provoking stuff. Even though I don’t agree with some of her conclusions, and though she paints some people as villains who don’t deserve the abuse, she also makes some compelling arguments that those of us pushing some of the reforms she now abhors would be wise to ponder.

In a nutshell, Ravitch believes that U.S. education went seriously off the rails in the early 1990s and has been heading down an increasingly destructive path ever since.

It was in the early ‘90s, she says, when a concerted effort to write national content standards fell victim to ideological bickering over history standards and their allegedly liberal/progressive bias. An interesting footnote: The person who led the charge against the standards was none other than Lynne Cheney, wife of our former vice president.

Once the standards movement stalled, and standards writing was turned over to states, Ravitch says, states responded by writing vague, meaningless standards that remain in effect to this day.

“The states seemed to understand that avoiding specifics was the best policy; that standards were best if they were completely non-controversial; and that standards would survive scrutiny only if they said nothing and changed nothing,” she writes.

Into this vacuum rode George W. Bush and No Child Left Behind. The revamped federal education law, Ravitch says, made test scores in reading and math the Holy Grail and left everything else in ruins. She contrasts NCLB to the seminal “A Nation at Risk” and finds NCLB wanting:

“A Nation at Risk envisioned a public school system that offered a rich, well-balanced and coherent curriculum, similar to what was available to students on the academic track in successful school districts. No Child Left Behind, by contrast, was bereft of any educational ideas.”

Once test-based accountability became the nation’s obsession, a new generation of market-based reformers arrived on the scene to further the agenda, Ravitch says. She heaps particular scorn on Alan Bersin, a former federal prosecutor (and now the nation’s border czar), a non-traditional superintendent who ran the San Diego schools from 1998 to 2005, and Joel Klein, New York City schools chancellor, and his boss Mayor Michael Bloomberg. She also takes some swipes at Arne Duncan for his stewardship of Chicago schools.

Ravitch raises red flags about charter schools and the foundations that promote them. While it might not be these foundations’ intentional agenda to destroy American public education, she says, their pushing of charters, choice and accountability are doing just that.

Echoing many of the arguments of teachers’ unions across the country, Ravitch says that charters drain the best, most motivated students from regular public schools, leaving those schools in a death spiral, for which they are then blamed.

“As currently configured, charter schools are havens for the motivated,” Ravitch writes. “As more charter schools open, the dilemma of educating all students will grow sharper. The resolution of this dilemma will determine the fate of public education.”

The problem with this argument, of course, is that it implies that ‘motivated’ students from low-income families should be denied the opportunity for a better education so that the institution of public education, which has served them badly, survives to fail another day.

Here I side with Howard Fuller, who on a recent Denver visit proclaimed: “I am from the Harriet Tubman school of education reform.” Every kid who escapes a bad educational environment is one more kid with a better chance at a fulfilling life.

Ravitch excoriates the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation for being unelected policy-making monoliths, utterly unaccountable, that are shaping the direction (or as she would argue, dismantling) of public education.

“There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people,” she writes. “…The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one. If their plans fail, no sanctions are levied against them. They are bastions of unaccountable power.”

I ask Ravitch: To whom, then, should we cede control over public education? An answer as banal as “the people” won’t cut it. Elected school boards? Their failures, especially in big cities, are the stuff of legends.

Ravitch argues, in compelling if vague fashion, that the way to “fix” public schooling is not to look for a single answer, but rather to unite in common purpose, to eschew test-driven stripped-down education, to develop a broad and deep national curriculum (she favors something along the lines of Core Knowledge, with top-notch art and music education added to the mix), to find great teachers and support them with training and good pay, to get more parents to read to their kids, and to expect kids to behave in a civil manner when in school.

It’s hard to disagree with any of Ravitch’s suggested cures, even if her description of the disease is off base. But it’s almost impossible to see how we get there from here. While she lays out some of the problems forcefully, in blunt, plain English, she goes fuzzy on us just when we need her most.

Still, this book is a must read for anyone who cares about public education reform. In Ravitch’s arguments you will hear echoes of some of the ideological battles taking place right here, right now.

The fact that her book’s release coincides almost perfectly with announcements about first-round Race to the Top winners suggests that the battle over public education’s future has been joined on a grand scale. Its outcome will not be decided anytime soon.

Popularity: 85% [?]

If there is an acid test for K-12 education, it is whether high school graduates are prepared to take college classes without needing remediation.

Aurora fails that test in a big way. So does Denver. More than half the college-bound students in both big urban districts need remedial help in at least one basic subject area – reading, writing or math.

And the state as a whole has nothing to brag about: Its remediation rate stands at 32 percent. That’s right: Nearly one out of every three Colorado high school graduates enrolled in a Colorado college or university in the fall of 2008 had to take at least one remedial class last year. Statewide, the remediation rate has held steady for the past five years. (See the numbers for yourself in our new data center.)

Students enrolling in community colleges need a lot more remedial help than those going to four-year schools. Some 53 percent of community college enrollees needed remediation, compared to 20 percent entering four-year schools. Since community college students tend to be disproportionately low-income kids of color, it’s easy to see where the biggest problem resides.

The numbers are sobering, the trend depressing. Despite the state’s avowed focus on improving K-12 education, nothing anyone has tried has moved this most important needle.

Looking at a list of the state’s large districts, one is hard-pressed to find rays of sunshine. One exception might be Jefferson County – the state’s largest district – where the remediation rate has dropped by 4.7 percentage points over the past five years. Still, better than one in four Jeffco graduates needs remediation.

Elsewhere, though, the rate has stayed flat or has climbed. Aurora? Up 11 percentage points in five years. Denver? Up 5.7 percentage points. Cherry Creek? Up 3.6 percentage points. Douglas County? Flat.

Are these districts enrolling higher percentages of low-income kids? Yes. Does this explain the flat or increasing remediation rates? No one can say with certainty.

Some districts point out that significant innovations in the past couple of years don’t show up in this data. What is called 2009 data actually comes from the fall of 2008. This may be true. But name a school district that doesn’t, at any given point in time, claim to be in the midst of significant new reforms. I’ll look for next year’s results to be better. But I won’t hold my breath.

Where have we gone wrong? Are the steps we are now taking – Colorado Achievement Plan for Kids, new state standards, new assessments – finally going to make a difference? How long will it take for the results to appear in the form of lower remediation rates?

Anyone who tells you he or she knows the answer to any of those questions is deluded. All we can do is hope. Well, actually, we can do more than hope. We can hold ourselves to a higher standard – literally and figuratively.

A first step would be to stop the practice of boasting about increased high school graduation rates unless and until remediation rates drop. Pawning the problem off on someone else and then claiming to have solved it is the worst sort of cynical, statistical sleight of hand.

Jettisoning jargon and vague platitudes, and getting clear about what we expect would also help. Diane Ravitch, in her new book (“The Death and Life of the Great American School System”) traces the malaise in our school systems to the abandonment of meaningful content standard development; this in the wake of a political controversy over history standards in the mid-1990s. Following the controversy, Ravitch writes,

“…with a few honorable exceptions, the states wrote and published vague documents and called them standards. Teachers continued to rely on textbooks to determine what to teach and test…Business leaders continued to grouse that they had to spend large amounts of money to train new workers; the media continued to highlight the mediocre performance of American students on international tests; and colleges continued to report that about a third of their freshman needed remediation in the basic skills of reading, writing and mathematics.”

Will setting the bar higher – and being specific about what clearing the bar entails – make a difference? In our fractured and dysfunctional political climate, is such an achievement even possible, on either a statewide or national basis? Color me skeptical.

But we have to keep trying – and to demonstrate the courage to make hard and unpopular choices. The alternative is to continue living with remediation rates like these:

West High School, Denver: 87 percent

North High School, Denver: 75 percent

Montbello High School, Denver: 73 percent

Aurora Central High School, Aurora: 71 percent

Abraham Lincoln High School, Denver: 69 percent

McLain Community High School, Jefferson County: 67 percent.

You get the picture.

Popularity: 49% [?]

I read a sobering New York Times Magazine article Sunday evening about the Texas State Board of Education and how a number of its members want to use the public education system (to the extent they believe in it) to transform the United States into an overtly Christian nation. Then I wrote a blog post about why I found the article so scary.

Because the Texas state board has disproportionate influence over textbook publishers, this near-majority of religious extremists could succeed. They may not transform the nation, at least in the short term. But they are patient people, and they could soon transform some of what kids are taught into outright religious propaganda and pseudo-science.

My brother David wrote an incisive comment under the blog post:

I know that Christian fundamentalism has had increasing influence over the last couple of decades, but the increasing individual liberties championed by Western societies arouses the ire of religious fundamentalists of all stripes. They see the hegemony of the individual as a decadent and dangerous distraction from the service of the Divine, which must be upheld by an entire society in order to receive the Divine’s protection and blessing.

They also tend to want the state to serve as a mechanism for promoting and coordinating religious activity. All our ills are, in this view, the result of a kind of idol worship, of placing ourselves above God. They don’t have to look far to find developments that look like evidence to support their view.

The question is: Does a society that sees individual liberties as sacred, and in which everyone can do as they please as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, have the backbone to confront this development? The devotion of religious extremism to the cause of indoctrination makes education the main battlefield.

David crystallized (as usual, far more articulately than I could) why this article stayed with me through the night and into this bright holiday Monday.

I also recommend the thoughtful comment from EdNews blogger Ben DeGrow, a conservative Christian. Ben places the issue in a different context. His argument is characteristically well-reasoned.

And then, Denver school board member Andrea Merida, with whom I have taken issue on several occasions, added this comment to the blog:

I couldn’t agree with you more, Alan. What a great initiative for us to rally behind, huh?

Andrea’s comment reminded me of an old mantra of mine, that I have forsaken in recent times. Public education (and, for that matter, freedom) has plenty of powerful enemies. So why do those of us who believe in this bedrock institution spend so much time fighting one another tooth and claw? We only weaken ourselves, while our real adversaries patiently build their strength.

Most often, I have bemoaned this infighting during labor disputes. School district officials and teachers’ union leaders savage one another as they squabble over steps, lanes and COLAs. Meanwhile, people who would like to see public education die lick their lips and chortle with glee.

These days, however, the battleground has shifted. Among public education advocates, there are those of us who believe that the underpinnings of the public education system have weakened to the point where fundamental change is essential. There are others who argue that schools are under-funded and hideously managed, and that more competent stewardship of this public trust, combined with a lot more money, would cure what ails public education.

Both sides have legitimate points. Rather than acknowledging this, however, leading voices on both sides go out of their way to heap scorn upon those with whom they disagree.

After reading the Times Magazine article, I have to ask myself: How stupid are we? Or is it naïve? Do we believe that public education in some form is guaranteed to survive into the endless future?

If so, we had better wake up.

Don’t get me wrong. Family squabbles are healthy. It’s good to disagree, frequently and vigorously. Debate helps push new and better ideas. But when the debate gets personal and nasty, when people assume ill-intent on the part of their adversaries, then it becomes unhealthy and counter-productive.

I fear we have reached this point in the education debate, locally and nationally. So let’s not forget: There are people out there who do have ill intent, who want to transform our country into a Christian version of what the Taliban made Afghanistan in the late 1990s. As Ben points out, only a small faction of conservative Christians endorse this agenda.

But no, Ben, I don’t think I’m overstating the case when I raise the specter of the Taliban.

This faction may appear to be on the fringe. But it is a well organized fringe, with powerful allies inside and outside of our government.

If we keep focusing all our energies on fighting people with whom we should be allied, then we do so at our peril.

Popularity: 29% [?]