Edge-Ucation

The following is a guest blog written by Cherry Creek High School Junior Kerry Martin.  It is his original, unedited submission to the Denver Post that was published as “Breathing Life Back into Education“  Click on the link to see the Denver Post Article.  We intend to include other “Teen Voices” on this blog in the future.  Well done Kerry!  Thanks for being the first contributor!

With his proud, cereal-box stature and determined countenance crafted with a few colored pencils, Lung Man was mighty. I gave him life, like my own Frankenstein monster for a fifth grade science project: students were to go home; chow down on all the Apple Jacks they could handle until the box was vacant; cut open the front of the box to expose what would be the complex inter-working of the human respiratory system; add all necessary appendages to make the box much more than just a box; and finally…the lungs. I could breathe in and out of a tube that connected to Lung Man’s lungs from behind his paper head to expand and contract those paper sacks of life. Lung Man not only clarified and glorified the art of breathing, but probably influenced my choice years later to not try inhaling paint thinner as a hallucinogen.

Fifth graders no longer have time for this project, because they need to prepare for the CSAPs.

That is a crime, a suffocation of knowledge and opportunity from unsuspecting ten-year-olds. Who knows what these kids will be inhaling next for a wild trip? But people like Governor Bill Ritter claim that the students must be tripping on something if they would rather create informative projects like Lung Man than practice how to bubble in properly on standardized tests.

Colorado is facing a budget crisis, with education taking the brunt of it. Ritter plans on cutting $260 million from the education budget for the next eighteen months, yet he still demands higher test scores from high school seniors and hardly-started schoolers alike. In order to spare the curriculums, sports, and staff from being choked by the iron clasp of Ritter’s budget cuts, Colorado and its schools should spend less time and money on CSAPs and reorganize school spending in general.

Inside and outside the classroom, students and faculty fear the real repercussions of the budget cuts that might look useful on a piece of paper on good ol’ Governor Bill’s desk. Yet the state would never consider cutting off funding for their beloved CSAPs, their breathalyzer to see which schools are too far under the influence of arts and sciences and are neglecting the three R’s. At $14 million annually, CSAPs are the most expensive breathalyzer to date, and that’s excluding hidden expenses like electricity, heating, janitorial staff, and all the extra cash that it takes to simply keep a school open for a day. Cherry Creek High School’s CSAP ritual is about as efficient as the Hummers in its parking lot: the entire four-building school is open for three days, during which the freshmen and sophomores take the test without attending their normal classes, and the upper classmen stay at home watching Jersey Shore. Educational, ain’t it?

I would spare my criticism of education funding going towards CSAPs if the tests weren’t so pointless. Teachers cannot count them as a grade for the class, and colleges can’t see test results, so in all honesty, why should I apply myself on my eighth year taking the test, answering the same dull, insipid essay questions such as “Is it important to challenge yourself every day?” Not on CSAP days, it isn’t. Furthermore, since CSAPs are only in the school and their staff’s interest and are inconsequential to students, it is to the teachers’ advantage to teach solely CSAP material and even to cheat. Indeed, earlier this year, Mark Huebner, a teacher at an Aurora charter school, was dismissed for telling his students the correct answers during CSAP testing. Parents of these students even believed that Huebner’s actions were instructions “came from other people within the school” as part of a scheme designed to increase the school’s test scores. Overall, the CSAP program isn’t exactly airtight. Ritter could spend the CSAP money on something much more useful, like braces for dogs or an oxygen bar.

Rather than stress out third graders with a timed, standardized test, Colorado could judge student achievement in another way. The state already requires 11th graders to take the ACT, so the test could start requiring test-takers to list their elementary and middle schools. Colorado could use the test scores to evaluate how well each student’s previous schools taught them. If this is not enough, then how difficult would it be to make the CSAP only every three or four years? Students take it in second grade, fifth grade, and eighth grade, the state still gets a great impression of how well each school taught its students, each student’s growth can be readily followed through their comparative test results, and there is more state funding to spend on real education.

Furthermore, other fundamental funding decisions made by schools are wasteful and could be revised to preserve the staff and programs being cut. I worked at Campus Middle School basketball games for several months, keeping score along with my friend. Middle school sports are at risk of being cut altogether due to lack of funds, but my friend and I were getting paid $30 each for sitting down for ninety minutes and laughing at the chubbier players. We in no way deserved that money; I would have scored the games for minimum wage. The students, coaches, and parents are all passionate about their sport, so since Bargainin’ Bill still won’t spare a dime from the CSAP coffers to save middle school sports, funding for school sports in general must be redistributed to preserve programs like Campus basketball. Just a few years ago, Cherry Creek High spent hundreds of thousands of dollars renovating their football stadium and baseball field, and now Campus Middle School, from which Cherry Creek gets many of its athletes, might not have sports at all.

Teachers are at risk too, with classes already being expanded and faculty reduced. Schools are cramming thirty students or more into classrooms and expecting one teacher to teach them all well and maintain order with the kids, which is almost as easy as breathing on the Moon. Be it in sports, testing, textbooks, anything at all, funding must be reorganized.

Taiwanese schools have found more extreme means of saving money: they make the students clean the school and maintain the grounds. The schools don’t have to pay for janitors, the students keep their school cleaner for their own sakes, and the Bill Ritters of Taiwan become infuriated to see the students actually learning useful skills. They mop the floor with bubbles of air instead of mope evermore about bubbles of No. 2 pencil.

But until we embrace the Taiwanese strategy, Colorado education struggles to pay for the bare necessities and must choose some necessities over others rather than redistributing the funds. And the whole time, the massively wasteful CSAPs still drown everything that is actually educational in schools: science, history, art, sports teams, teachers. Unless we can gasp a breath of real, appropriately-funded education, Lung Man remains nothing more than a box of Apple Jacks.  – Kerry Martin – Cherry Creek High School

Filed under: Activities, Budgets, Edge-Ucation, High School, School Reform, Sports Tagged: | Bill Ritter, cheating, Colorado, CSAP, Funding, Standardized Tests