Friday, March 28, 2008

Colorado High School Graduation Requirements Wiki

The Colorado Graduation Guidelines Development Council is tasked with making recommendations to the State Board of Education regarding high school graduation requirements. They've setup an informational wiki, have an online survey you might want to take a look at, as well as a few public forums you can attend in person.

I'm glad they have this information out there, although I'm not sure how well they've advertised it (I stumbled across it due to a tweet from Bud). I also find the membership of the Council of interest. The ones I know of are all thoughtful people, and I would assume the others are as well, but it seems to me that there are a few categories of folks missing. Anyone else see the same gaps?

Update 3-29-08: In the comments Rick linked to his earlier post about this. It's worth reading.

6 comments:

  1. Naw. Who'd want a teacher on a nothing council like that? :)

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  2. That's one group, but I can think of at least four more . . .

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  3. I'm a fellow Colorado educator and I wrote about this on March 5 http://tinyurl.com/27ylze. CDE has a Communicator link at http://tinyurl.com/yvjlxn where you can view and subscribe to their communications via email. No RSS ;( I guess we should do as they say not as they do. It's no wonder the advertising isn't getting across.

    One of the members is from our district and is absolutely brilliant, able to represent groups from teachers to administrators with an appropriate perspective. -Rick

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  4. @rick - nice post. Kind of telling, isn't it, that no one from CDE or the commission has commented on your post?

    I had similar concerns about the questions, and indicated some of those in my comments on the survey as well. I chose not to share those in my post for internal district political reasons, but I may revisit that eventually.

    I'm glad to hear that the member from your district is awesome, but I would still suggest they need about five more categories of folks. And a whole lot more communication - I hadn't heard of any of the forums either.

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  5. Sure there are more categories of folks missing, but having been married to a teacher for 42 years I tend to focus on that one first. :)

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  6. I'd encourgage folks to answer the survey SOON! The report is due to State Board on May 1 - which means they are writing it as we blog. As an FYI, four board members from LPS have been to different information gathering sessions. I'd agree - communication could have been better. As for the size of the group, they were trying to keep it managable. And they want comments from everyone. About a month ago they had 1,600 responses to the survey. It's a thoughtful group.

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