Yesterday was how much we pay for education, today is what we get for our money. CO House Dems kill construction defects reform.
How much are we putting into education and what are we getting for it?
This is the second part of a two-parts series (the previous part being yesterday). If you didn't catch part 1, I suggest you go back and give it a look.
I will briefly hit the high spots for us here, however. Screenshot 4 attached is from the report linked first below (same paper from yesterday). In that earlier post, I pointed out two important things:
--There is a BIG discrepancy between how much money schools actually take in and how much money the School Finance Formula says that we are giving them. That is, the School Finance Formula, the one that is often debated in the public and in the press, greatly undercounts the amount of money our schools get in Colorado.
--The amount of money we are giving schools is growing MUCH faster than the number of pupils. Fiscal years 2014-15 to 2021-22 saw an increase in students of about 6% while the actual per-pupil money increased by 48%.
What are we getting for this extra money? I think, after seeing the numbers you will agree with me (see a much earlier op-ed I did on this subject linked second below) that the answer is "not a lot".
And, sadly, this is particularly the case if you are a minority student.
Before diving in, I want to repeat what I noted yesterday about the paper I am leaning on for his post. It came from a reader who had prepared it for Colorado House Republicans. I would not have used this report as a source were it not for the fact that the author used government numbers and then gave his sources. Please read up on where this author gets his information and follow back.
Two other quick notes.
--There is a fair bit of social commentary in this paper which I will stay away from because that is not my purpose here. The numbers are solid and I use this report for those numbers. I do not necessarily agree with everything the report author notes.
--Second, as a teacher, I would be remiss if I didn't mention my own thoughts here on standardized tests. As a broad measure of student learning, I think they are useful. I say this especially in the case of measuring students across the whole of Colorado where you might want to compare the educational outcomes of students in, say, a rural area on the Western Slope with an urban child in the middle of Aurora. I am not one who holds to the idea that somehow these tests are biased against one group or race, but I also recognize (and thus want to point out) that one test, done on one day, is not necessarily the best or only measure of one individual student's learning.
Let's dig in.
Screenshot 1 shows the data for the Colorado standardized tests given to students across the state (CMAS--Colorado Measures of Academic Success). You will see table 7 and 10 from the report (I skipped over the other tables), and these give data from 2019 and 2023.
Take note as you read the tables that these are the percentages of students who "met or exceeded expectations" in terms of their learning as evidenced by the CMAS tests; if, for example, 32.7% of students in 8th grade math in 2023 were meeting or exceeding standards, 67.3% were not!
These numbers, whether they go up 2019 - 23 or down in that same period, are bleak. They are also bleak if you look at the last three columns in each table. Those are some of the most vulnerable students and the outcomes shown here are terrible.
Again, looking at this as a broad measure, our state is not doing a good job educating our young. All this too, while we are spending more and more. For a comparison, while most scores on the CMAS jump around a low number by 1 - 5%, our state is upping the spending in the School Finance Formula by 30%.
College-readiness is no better. Screenshot 2 shows table 14 from the report and it gives the most recent data from the state's PSAT and SAT scores.**
NOTE: what the author is calling the percentage of students who "met or exceeded expectations" is shorthand and is defined by the author as, to quote the paper, "... someone that meets or exceeds expectations has a 75% or greater likelihood of earning a ‘C’ or higher in a first semester, credit bearing college course in that area of study."
That is, the author here uses the correlation between standardized test scores from college entrance exams and first-semester grades in college courses to define whether a student has met expectations to be ready for college.
While this correlation is there, I would caution against too strong an interpretation as to what this means. There are multiple factors that determine eventual success. Motivation to complete education, emotional maturity, access to help all play a role.
Still, it is as decent a proxy as any. If the overall average of 64.8% of students who don't meet expectations in math are not doomed to fail out of college, I believe it is fair to say that they are going to at least struggle mightily and not feel as though their high school careers were adequate preparation. It is also fair to say that those that struggle mightily tend to not finish college.
What is the overall point? We taxpayers pay, and pay, and pay some more and every year we're asked to pay more based on the notion that we're somehow not paying as much as others do.
As we've seen the idea that we're not paying as much as other states is complicated. It's not as simple as advocates would make us think.
And even if you buy into the idea that we are woefully underfunding education in this state, we don't seem to get much for what we're putting in and there doesn't seem to be a tight connection between our spending and our results.
If we were underfunding education, it would make sense that we have a ways to go to catch up, but it would also be reasonable to expect that more money ought to be producing better results and this is clearly not happening.
**Note that this data is not for the entirety of students in Colorado. This data is from students who presumably intend to go on to college. This is a subset of the larger population of students in Colorado, and likely one that is selective. There are some schools that make everyone take the PSAT and SAT as substitutes for the CMAS tests, but this is not a universal practice.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QKonOPR7Uc0uG1j1Yd-5gIQGZZnh7UPD/view?usp=sharing
Edit 5/20/24 Per a reader comment.
The comment below I received from a reader is correct. I was mistaken.
“Colorado now requires all juniors to take the SAT as a requirement to graduate. As far as I have been able to see, it is the one state test you cannot opt out of.”
Another bill House Democrats killed, this one about housing affordability: another year, another run at construction defects law, and another failure.
I have written before about how lawsuits related to construction defects are a big impediment to developers building condominiums, the first rung on the home ownership ladder for many. Developers don't really want to touch condominiums because the risk is too great: risk drives insurance which eats into profits which makes them unattractive.
See esp the first link below where I shared a report from the conservative-leaning Common Sense Institute.
Reform to Colorado's construction defects law has been attempted more than once in the last few years and has failed every time. This legislative session's bill (see the second link below) seemed to have a better chance.
As you can read in the Sum and Substance article linked third below, it managed to make it out of its first Senate committee, and as you can see in the attached screenshot, it did eventually make it out of the Senate.
And then it hit the House. And as the red X marking the end of its progress shows, it got killed.
Another one to throw on the pile I suppose, and yet another example showing that, for the House Democrats at least, the solution to problems is not to get the government out of the way.
It's rather to have the government insinuate itself right into the middle, take from one group, and give to another.
https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/prop-117-means-we-get-a-vote-on-new?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb24-106
https://tsscolorado.com/construction-defects-reform-bill-passes-out-of-key-committee/
Colorado now requires all juniors to take the SAT as a requirement to graduate. As far as I have been able to see, it is the one state test you cannot opt out of.