| So, what does this have to do with Denver corporatist education reformers? Well, until very recently, Van Schoales was the executive director of Education Reform Now, based here in Denver. Van has now gone on to lead everyone's favorite faux community outreach group, A Plus Denver. And what do you know? Old Van is also a member of Democrats for Education Reform -CO's advisory committee.
A strange outcropping from all this is this hokey One Chance Colorado campaign that has magically appeared out of nowhere. As the spoof site OneChanceColorado.info tells us, the partners in this pull-the-wool campaign are Stand for Children (led nationally by Jonah "It's Not Really About the Kids" Edelman) Colorado, Colorado Children's Campaign, Colorado Succeeds/BizCARES, Democrats for Education Reform-Colorado, Get Smart Schools, Education Reform Now (Murdoch money!), and A+ Denver. Wow.
So what exactly is the problem here? One only has to understand what the agenda for corporatist education reform has been all about: kill-and-drill, narrowed standardized test focus on curriculum, busting teacher's unions, closing schools or forcing in charters that segregate and weed out "hard to serve" kids, faux school choice that makes middle-class families trek across cities to for the promise of a "better" school, and the list goes on and on. These are the folks that brought us No Child Left Behind, propped up by sycophant "Democrats" that prop up these failed Bush policies, desperate to find any way to stay afloat politically that doesn't actually require them to keep promises made to their constituents.
This "education reform" has resulted in flat CSAP scores in Colorado for yet another year. Even Obama basketball buddy and Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is warning that up to 82% of all schools will fail adequate yearly progress this year. By Duncan's own corporatist measure, this brand of education reform is not working. And yet, these people ignore the solid evidence of failure and are so desperate, they'll even take money from Rupert "Tapping Your Phone" Murdoch.
According to One Chance Colorado, the solution for providing Colorado kids the chance to succeed is "(e)very child in every neighborhood deserves a school with great teachers and leaders who will renew focus on the fundamentals of reading, writing and math - today, not tomorrow."
So, in other words, you can kiss your whole-child curriculum good-bye. No foreign languages. No calculus or trigonometry. No physical education. No arts or music. In short, if One Chance Colorado has their way, there will be nothing that colleges actually look for in entrance applications or nothing that scholarship review committees want to see. DPS is 70% low income (free and reduced lunch). So DPS kids largely won't even have a shot at a great college education or even a scholarship because One Chance Colorado wants to only focus on what's on a standardized test.
Is that the kind of education you want for your kids? As Diane Ravitch said at the Save Our Schools march,
Regardless of their origin or neighborhood, all kids deserve the same kind of education that children get at Sidwell Friends (where the President's children attend).
The good news is that One Chance Colorado, and their buddies over at Democrats for Education Reform - Colorado have released their endorsement of the slate of rubber-stamping, anti-family candidates whose only concern is keeping Tom Boasberg's job, even though he has a 51.8% graduation rate and a nearly 60% college remediation rate under his fingernails. They've done us public school supporters a favor by telling us who NOT to vote for. Be sure to read the endorsement questionnaire to see how desperately these people prefer cronyism over education reform that works. Tom Boasberg gets three whole questions devoted just to him.
More concern for a mergers-and-acquisitions attorney than for Denver's kids? Heckuva job, One Chance Colorado!
Read more about Democrats for Education Reform at DFER Watch. For more fun, read the comments and watch Van Schoales desperately cling to his failed rhetoric.
Read more about what DeFENSE believes, and what evidence shows, actually works.
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