Quality Counts subtext: Time to implement reforms Accelerated Learning Resources

Quality Counts subtext: Time to implement reforms

Every year Education Week gathers data on all 50 states and compares them along various dimensions in the publication’s Quality Counts report.

As always, this year’s data are interesting and worth more than a glance (due to data lags, most of the data actually come from 2008).

While I usually use this data to show how badly funded Colorado is compared to other states (we appear to be 39^th in cost-of-living adjusted per pupil spending), this year I want to discuss it, in aggregate, in a somewhat different way.

Quality Counts provides four databases for states, with scores incorporating multiple data comparisons. Colorado’s rank among the 50 states (and letter grades) are as follows: school finance 44^th (D+), K12 achievement 21^st (D+), chance for success 11^th (B), and transitions and alignment 29^th (C). Overall, Ed Week ranks Colorado 39^th, with a grade of C.

While one can quibble with the indicators used and how they are aggregated, it is important to note that, unlike state level interest groups here in Colorado, Ed Week has absolutely no stake whatsoever in where Colorado is ranked.

When we lost the Race to the Top last year, there was a widespread local feeling that we were robbed, because of our active reform agenda. And maybe we were. But R2T included lots of emphasis on proven results, not just on future promises, and no matter how you slice it, aggregate Colorado performance to-date is simply not impressive. Indeed, R2T winning states were ranked #1, #2, #3, #5, #8, #11, #19, #20, #22, #23, and #31 by Ed Week – all the winning R2T states (except for DC, a special political case I think), were ranked substantially ahead of Colorado (at #39).

As one engaged in the processes of ed reform in Colorado, I do feel the state has done a great deal of legislating, and now needs to focus on implementation, which if done well can have a good payoff.

Policy scholars like to paraphrase some version of Yogi Berra on pitching when discussing the topic of implementation, noting that it is 90 percent of half of the game. That is, the legislative fight over SB 191 was exciting, controversial, and well-engaged on all sides, but now that it is passed, the group that is, even today, meeting to implement the details of the legislation, in a context where there is considerable statutory contradiction and ambiguity, may be more important in terms of getting it done.

In my view, we have greatly underdone successful implementation in Colorado, partly because it takes resources we don’t have. We typically have to beg one of the four or five friendly local foundations for the couple of hundred thousands of dollars to do state level studies of new reforms. Then we expect the districts to implement the reforms with no new resources, indeed at a time when their resources are being reduced significantly. I think that if Republicans and conservatives didn’t support most of these reforms they would tend to call them “unfunded mandates.”

So, “reform with resources,” or “resources and reform” seem like good rallying cries for the near future in Colorado.

I’ll end with a couple of specific Ed Week data points, which I think help make my point:

Colorado is ranked:

46th in eligible children enrolled in kindergarten programs (2009)
49th in the change in the scale score reading-gap for 4th grade NAEP (change from 2003-2009)
50^th in the actual reading gap for 4th grade NAEP scale score (2009)

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