Montana #1, Colorado #2 when it comes to educating children challenged by poverty and other social barriers

Colorado Schools rank No. 2 at tackling barriers

Study: Colo. is doing better than expected

Only Montana outperforms Colorado when it comes to educating children challenged by poverty and other social barriers, according to a think tank that encourages economic choice and individual responsibility.

By Holly Yettick, Rocky Mountain News

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/education/article/0,1299,DRMN_957_3167188,00.html

"Colorado has students with pretty high levels of challenges, yet it produces outcomes that are better than you’d expect," said Jay Greene, who co-authored a new study for the Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan Institute in New York http://www.manhattan-institute.org/ .

For the full report: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ewp_06.htm

The study calculated how well each state’s schools overcome social problems.

Its authors determined how tough it is to teach each state’s students by looking at rates of poverty, teen pregnancy and 14 other measures.

It then looked at each state’s graduation rates and performance on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress tests in eighth- grade reading and math.

Because of an embargo lifted today, the study has not yet been widely read or critiqued by academics.

Colorado Education Commissioner William Moloney said the No. 2 ranking was "something we can feel fairly good about." But he questioned the study’s "efficiency index," which measured which states get good value for their education dollars by looking at which ones achieved the most with the least amount of money.

Colorado got the 10th-best value. Such indexes, Moloney said, can over-reward states for spending little even if their results, like Mississippi’s, are poor.

The study also found that today’s students are a little easier to teach than students 30 years ago for reasons including more preschool enrollment, less crime and lower poverty rates. School spending also has increased, adjusted for inflation. Yet National Assessment of Educational Progress scores have remained flat.

"Too often the economic and ethnic background of kids is used as an excuse," said Lawrence Hernandez, co-founder of Cesar Chavez Academy charter school in Pueblo and a former assistant professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. "We have massive bureaucracies now that absorb a lot of the costs, and there are so many competing interests."

But Principal Mark Hernandez, of Smedley Elementary in Denver, said today’s students are harder to teach.

"A lot of it has to do with parents," he said. "A lot of them are having to work two jobs. A lot of them are single parents. A lot of them can’t leave their job to come support their child’s education."

The study did find that more children are living with single parents.