Schools the focus in last mayoral debate
The two candidates for Denver mayor Denver pitched their education credentials in their final debate Tuesday. Story & audio
Colorado Rockies lose again, slide continues
Nothing new to say. The Colorado Rockies wrote the same story with their bats that they have written all month long.On Tuesday, the Rockies scored two runs, and once again, got obliterated by the hapless Dodgers, who are now one game away from sweeping…
Ohio State: Runaway Train
Today marks a new beginning of sorts. I join the great folks over at Universal UClick as they take over the distribution of my national sports cartoons. I look forward to blazing new trails with Universal and want to thank them for taking me on. My cartoons are distributed 2 times a week to newspapers [...]
FNE update: Teacher jobs, student waits
One in five teachers in schools affected by the dramatic turnaround underway in Far Northeast Denver are without district jobs for the coming school year
From the publisher: “Juking the stats” in DPS
“Juking the stats. Making robberies into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the stats and majors become colonels. I’ve been here before.” – a cop-turned-teacher in HBO’s series “The Wire,” when asked to boost test scores.
Last week’s article in Westword about abuses in Denver North High School’s “credit recovery” program touched a nerve, and for good reason. It’s a textbook example of kids being used to make adults look better.
There’s no reason to believe the problems detailed in Melanie Asmar’s story are limited to North. In fact I’ve received emails from people at other Denver high schools alleging similarly questionable practices. And the New York Times wrote a national story about credit recovery abuses in April.
I’m sure most of the adults involved – heck, probably all of them – allowed and in some cases encouraged kids to cheat on credit recovery homework and exams thinking it was in the best interest of those kids. So many studies, after all, have shown that young people’s prospects improve significantly with a high school diploma.
If the diploma has been watered down to the extent that the credential becomes meaningless, though, then every graduate of North High School is hurt by this extreme manifestation of the “pobrecito syndrome” (as in “oh, these poor babies’ lives are so hard we can’t expect too much of them.”)
There’s also an element here of gaming the system for less altruistic reasons. Juking the stats doesn’t just happen in “The Wire.” It’s exactly what happened in North High’s credit recovery program.
For those of you who haven’t read it, here are the main points from Asmar’s story.
Denver 2nd lowest for housing declines
“Denver’s boom wasn’t as big, and its bust wasn’t as painful,” Jeff [...]
