My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.
2008-03-30
Democrats Are Coming For Your Kids
I am, for whatever reason, on the mailing list of my state Senator, Sue Windels. Today, she sent out a missive on education reform, which reads in part:
CAP4K stands for Colorado Achievement Plan for Kids and is moving forward through the legislature as SB212.
What does CAP4K propose? In a nutshell, it does two main things:
#1 -- It defines “school readiness” and offers an Individualized Readiness Plan for every child who chooses to go to public preschool or kindergarten. Too often, kids start school without the skills needed to succeed in 1st grade and when you’re behind before you’ve even begun, it’s hard to catch up. Research shows the best way to close the achievement gap is to make sure every child begins school equally prepared.
An IRP for EVERY kid? Are you kidding me? And tell me, Sen. Windels and Gov. Ritter, exactly what are we going to do when we discover (mon DIEU!) that certain segments of the population are consistently and significantly behind? And what, exactly, does "Readiness Remediation" look like? Do we deny kids access to Kindergarten until they're ready? Or do we use this to creat a MASSIVE new government program that takes thos e"unready" 5-yr olds and brings them up to speed? And just how expensive will this program be?
And, really, once we establish this, how long is it until we decide that the state will assume responsibility for all students in "at-risk" groups and takes over custody of them at age 3? After all, that's really the only way to guarantee that children will be equally prepared.
That is, equally POORLY prepared.
Further:
One of the amendments added during the Senate Education Committee hearing was to require a cost study by a neutral third party expert to assure local school districts, the Department of Education and the Department of Higher Education that the state realizes the cost to accomplish this project and will not place a huge unfunded mandate in state law.
SB212 – or CAP4K – requires us to hit the “refresh” button, updating our current system of public education. This is something we simply must do so that students graduate with 21st century skills needed to compete in this global economy.
God Bless whichever Senator (I'm sure it was a Republican) got that cost study put in there. Between this and the Health Care proposal, I think we'll see that we need another state just to provide the revenues necessary for what Dems want to do in this state.
It's expensive to educate and medicate--i.e. raise--hundreds of thousands of children. | |
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