The best that Colorado’s education establishment can say about the lackluster student-achievement scores released Thursday is that, overall, the state’s K-12 public schoolers are within reach of pre-pandemic scores.

That doesn’t offer much hope.

While some of the state’s 178 school districts posted marginal improvements over last year’s results – and some districts did even better – overall student performance continued to lag that of the last full academic year before schools were shuttered amid COVID. Indeed, the  number of fourth and eighth graders who can read and write at or above grade level is still 4 percentage points lower than the number who could do so in 2019.

But the real news is even worse than that. As we observed here last year after the release of similarly underwhelming scores for the annual Colorado Measures of Academic Success, or CMAS, tests – even Colorado’s pre-COVID scores were abysmal.

In 2019, only 44.5% of Colorado students met or exceeded expectations in English, and 32.7% did so in math. That’s below an F.

And yet, as The Gazette reported this week, educators now regard 2019’s scores as a benchmark against which to judge current performance. It’s as if the public is being told to don rose-colored glasses in hindsight – and look back with fondness upon failure.

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“This is probably our new normal,” said Joyce Zurkowski, chief assessment officer at the Colorado Department of Education. As noted in The Gazette’s report, Zurkowski called it “good news” that this year’s statewide math and English scores on average were roughly on par with last year’s.

How depressing.

As we also observed here after the release of last year’s CMAS scores, such accountability metrics can be enlightening – only if Coloradans, from parents to policymakers, read them the right way. Not in a feeble, glass-half-full kind of way that applauds incremental improvement over an earlier benchmark that was dismal to begin with.

Rather, in a big-picture sort of way – as in, what’s wrong with this picture?

What’s wrong is that Colorado’s political leaders and top policymakers, from the governor on down, aren’t publicly demanding that our schools account for their floundering student achievement year after year. What’s wrong is that our leaders aren’t in fact declaring it a crisis.

The state’s political elite regards the climate to be in crisis. Affordable housing, too. Last month, Denver’s new mayor officially declared the city’s growing homeless population on the streets to be an emergency. Arguably, it is.

How about an education emergency? Gov. Jared Polis, a committed and groundbreaking education reform advocate who helped found two charter schools, would be ideal to lead the crusade.

He could call on the Legislature to make education reform Priority No. 1 when it convenes in January. He could urge lawmakers to pull out all the stops and tear up the old playbook.

How about an aggressive, new statewide push for more charter schools? Or – gasp – school vouchers for a private education for our poorest kids, now that the U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way? Maybe a new fund to attract and retain the best and brightest teachers from around the country and to reward the strongest performers.

No more business as usual in passing the annual School Finance Act; tie funding to bold innovations, instead.

This is no time to be timid; no crisis is more pressing than our children’s academic decline. Especially for our neediest, most at-risk kids. Their entire future is at stake.

How about it, Governor? Will you lead the way?

Denver Gazette Editorial Board