Colorado Council for the Social Studies
Colorado Council for the Social Studies Legislative and CDE Update
The Colorado Senate passed the Education Reform Package outlined in Senate Bill 212 on April 18 with a vote of 31 in favor and none against. The amended bill includes some of the changes recommended by the Colorado Council for the Social Studies and the Center for Education in Law and Democracy. These changes can be found on:
Pages 5 and 6 beginning on line 26
Page 7 line 8
Page 8 line 13
Page 17 line 23
Page 26 line 20
The Bill will now go on to the House. The next update will provide information about the House process and how you can get involved.
The House has passed Senate Bill 212. The House version revised the Senate’s amendment, which called for replacing the high school CSAP tests with the ACT EPAS system, with a pilot program in which districts may volunteer to give EPAS along with CSAP in 2008-09, after which the State Board and CDE will evaluate the pilot results. It will then be possible for EPAS to replace CSAP in grades 9-10. EPAS includes the EXPLORE assessment in grades 8-9, PLAN assessment in grade 10, and the ACT which all Colorado high school juniors must already take.
The House Version of the bill includes graduation endorsements for history and civics (see p.31 lines 1-4) but overall the bill does not provide any new emphasis concerning social studies, beyond the page 5 reminder that any reform should include the mission of education for active participation in democracy.
Social Studies leaders in the state asked for an amendment that would have explicitly included Social Studies in the standards review. This amendment was not added, so now we will need to wait and see if CDE will honor the commitment they made in March to include social studies in the review
As a result of this legislation, we expect the Colorado Department of Education to reveal a revised time line concerning the review of the current standards and the assessment system. CDE was planning to present revised standards in Dec 2008. It’s likely that six months to a year will be added to this time line. Committee work is likely to begin in the fall of 2008.
CDE has agreed to produce a social studies review of research and literature. This work is currently underway and will be completed at the end of June. The document should be ready for social studies leaders and teachers by summers end and will be used to inform the standards review process.
The legislature approved funding for the hiring of new content specialists at CDE. Postings for these positions should occur very soon.
We’ll have another update next week as the legislature concludes their session and more news comes out of CDE.
