paula noonan
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Noonan: State required tests risk religious, citizenship discrimination in higher ed
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Student data privacy and standardized testing have floated around the Capitol as hot issues for several years. In this legislative session, religious and citizenship discrimination has been added to this boiling stew through SB17-102, a bill concerned with demographic information collected by the College Board testing service through its Preliminary Scholastic Assessment Test (PSAT) and…
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Noonan: Red meat bill strategy wastes time and money at the Legislature
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Patrick Neville, House minority leader from Castle Rock, said at the state GOP’s Capitol Club gathering that, “We’re going to make sure we push some good red meat bills.” For those confused by the term, those are school choice, religious freedom, Second Amendment rights and abortion. News stories outlining Neville’s assurances were published in this very publication.…
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Noonan: In politics, a principled person is hard to find
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Huey Long, the legendary populist from Louisiana, said “The time has come for all good men to rise above principle.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th century transcendentalist, said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Both aphorisms are much in play lately. Republican Sen. Tim Neville, R-Littleton, is sponsoring a bill, SB17-062, on free…
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Noonan: Fate of fracking initiatives raise question about need for Raise the Bar
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Oil and gas companies are happy in Colorado right now, following Secretary of State Wayne Williams’s declaration that two anti-fracking initiatives, Nos. 75 and 78, didn’t collect enough signatures to meet the 98,000-plus threshold to get on the ballot. The industry, which had already spent over $15 million to defeat the proposed constitutional amendments, was…
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Noonan: New voters give political parties existential challenges
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Colorado’s Republican and Democratic parties face enormous challenges integrating an increase since 2012 of 315,000 active voters into their networks. Current July data show Democrats and Republicans almost even in active voter registration, at 980,352 for Democrats and 988,410 for Republicans. Unaffiliated voters remain the largest group at 1,003,628 active voters. Democrats gained the most…
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Noonan: Seven years with the negative factor and no end in sight
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Doug Bruce, the convicted tax-avoider, detested jail food and lost weight while incarcerated. His TABOR is another kind of toxic problem, causing Colorado’s public school children to lose potential and opportunity. State Reps. Millie Hamner, D-Dillon, and Bob Rankin, R-Carbondale, have taken up the task of educating lawmakers on school finance, holding three sessions with…
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Noonan: Buildings can make us stupid, or not, depending
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Energy-tight buildings reduce our thinking capacity unless they’re properly ventilated, according to a Harvard University and Syracuse University double-blind study conducted recently. Who knew? After spending decades making our buildings more energy efficient, it turns out that the CO2 and volatile organic compounds trapped in these “tight” buildings can make us dumb. The Harvard School…
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Noonan: Neighborhood public schools stage a comeback in school elections
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Colorado’s Independence Institute and the local branch of Americans for Prosperity didn’t get anything for the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on school board elections in Jeffco and Dougco. The winners in Jeffco fought off the conservative PACs with their own hundreds of thousands of dollars, including PAC money from unions. But the Dougco…
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Noonan: PARCC test results a no-show before school board elections
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Heads up, teachers and citizens of Colorado! You may get the results of the state’s standardized CMAS/PARCC tests, the annual tests taken in winter and spring of last school year, as soon as early ski season of this school year. PARCC, the standardized testing consortium to which Colorado belongs, didn’t even set its “cut scores”…
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Noonan: Womb-to-tomb surveillance by Dept. of Ed?
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Surveillance is the business model of the Internet, according to computer security analyst Bruce Schneier in a recent New York Times article on European data privacy. Surveillance is also, apparently, the business model of our own Colorado Department of Education. CDE prefers to call its work “longitudinal analysis.” It started when the state decided to…
