The Colorado State Auditor hired the Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO) to perform an audit on the state’s “K-12 Accountability System.” The audit covers five years of testing data from 2014-2015 to 2018-2019. The data is in the “past due” category because of COVID-related impacts on education delivery during the pandemic.

To be clear, HumRRO is not an education research enterprise. Its main interest is in human resources management for government agencies, non-profits, foundations and corporations. As HumRRO says, it works with clients to “help resolve their people issues and improve their human capital management.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but if we place Colorado’s K-12 students into a “human capital” box, we’re not delivering the right kind of research package.

The company is also committed to “understanding and meeting our clients’ needs and expectations, and developing a lasting partnership with them.” Given this description, it’s certainly within the realm of the probable that the company isn’t going to go out of its box to assess whether underlying state assessment policy makes sense. It will stay inside the lines to determine whether the researched entity has met its “mission” without being too fussy as to whether the mission itself is worthy. And that’s exactly how HumRRO proceeded.

Not many pay attention to bibliographies, that’s true. But in the case of the HumRRO report and its 139 pages, the bibliography is illustrative of the lack of depth of understanding of the weak and controversial principles underlying the state’s K-12 accountability system. There are ten resources cited, mostly articles not texts, with only one in this decade. The rest range from 1992 to 2019. An academic study of this nature requires many more references to ensure a balanced perspective. Just saying.

It’s also curious as to how HumRRO gathered information from its “listening sessions.” On the district level, HumRRO asked 20 districts to participate in listening sessions, but only nine showed up with no explanation as to why the remaining 11 took a pass. Of high schools, only six of the 26 “targeted schools” participated.

Even more perplexing, HumRRO invited stakeholders to their “listening sessions” that will benefit most from a positive audit: Democrats for Education Reform, Colorado Succeeds and Ready Colorado. These entities represent interests that pushed SB10-191 that tied teacher compensation to state testing and performance accountability under former State Sen. Mike Johnston’s sponsorship. To say they have a stake in ensuring this report confirms the Colorado Department of Education’s (CDE) compliance with their chosen policy is to understate how non-objective their viewpoint is on the state’s accountability system. No teacher organization participated in the “listening sessions” and it’s unstated whether they were asked.

The findings are no surprise. The CDE has done an “accurate and reasonable” job of administering bad policy. Up to 2019, students took the state’s standardized tests, test results were reported to the CDE and CDE presented them as performance framework results. Schools were rated from “performance,” meaning they scored enough points on assessments and other criteria to keep CDE off their backs, to “turnaround,” meaning CDE and the State Board of Education would bring down the hammer.

Five years on turnaround status, with COVID years as a break, put Adams 14 school district into the ultimate CDE and State Board of Education doghouse, meaning it temporarily had its accreditation withdrawn and then reinstated when CDE and the State Board realized the district couldn’t hire teachers with the right experience without accreditation.

Of course, Adams 14 School District is one of the poorest and most challenged in the state due to its large population of English Language Learners (ELL). Back in the day, the state legislature interfered in how ELL students could be taught, removing bilingual education as an option. We’ll never know whether students would have benefited in the long-run from bilingual schooling. As it is, 34% of Colorado’s students are Hispanic, and in Adams 14, 50% are ELL students, meaning at the end of the trail, they will be bilingual in Spanish and English. But along that trail, their lack of English fluency greatly affects their performance on standardized tests and thus the overall performance of Adams 14 in the state’s performance framework.

The HumRRO audit acknowledges that non-English speaking students, free and reduced lunch students,and Hispanic and Black minority students score at significantly lower levels than other students. This gap occurs even in affluent school districts with many resources available. According to the audit, other factors than the schools themselves may affect these results. That’s an insight no one would have imagined.

Bottom line, the state’s accountability system has only marginally or not at all improved results for the kids for whom the system was designed to support. Obviously, we don’t know if putting the time and money expended on over-testing to other efforts would have produced better outcomes.

But that’s not to say this system wasn’t implemented correctly. It’s just that when an agency must implement by law a prejudicial system put in place by legislators supporting defective legislation, don’t be surprised if the results disappoint.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.