Earlier this week the Colorado General Assembly opened for business and already there are a dozen bills that related to classroom matters.
No doubt, testing and funding will be the headline-grabbing issues. But there are plenty of other ed-related topic on the agenda and we wanted to know from our readers what mattered to them.
On Twitter, Terry Kimber held the line and said lawmakers shouldn’t think of passing any new bills or mandates until school funding is restored to pre-recession levels.
But Margarita Bianco, associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver who runs a teacher prep program, said that legislators need to incentivize districts to hire more teachers of color. A report requested last year by lawmakers and released earlier this week showed there is a huge disparity between the number of teachers of color and students of color.
In emails, two readers suggested that lawmakers should actually scale back previously passed reforms.
Penny Hodges emailed:
The hot issue must be the education reform. I believe parents are starting to vote for the legislators that are against the common core standards. It is pulling our children behind and if we want to compete in a global level we need to advance our children with smaller class sizes teach traditional math then once they have mastered the traditional way of thinking introduce the common core way to show children different ways of processing answers.
Noelle Green suggested that just scaling back the number of tests isn’t enough:
Real reform would have reduced class sizes, added enrichment classes, and improved teacher professional development and teacher retention. The fact that education reform does not consider any of these proven solutions, but focuses on destroying unions, bashing teachers, and parking kids in front of a computer to self-learn because it’s cheaper, indicates another ideological purpose that does not put children first. This, plus charter school/virtual school accountability (a huge problem in Colorado), need to be addressed by the legislature immediately.
As always, we invite you to join the conversation on our website, Facebook page, or on Twitter.