Too many tests in Colorado schools harm Latino students

The excessive use of academic exams in Colorado’s public schools puts Hispanic students at a disadvantage, because they’re not sufficiently in context for the growing Latino student body, Denver educators told Efe.

“Our kids are not only tested again and again, but are also tested in a way that doesn’t represent them,” said Nita Gonzales, director of the Escuela Tlatelolco school in Denver.

“Colorado’s standardized exams don’t include either the language or culture of a student body that gets more diverse all the time,” she said.

According to the Colorado Education Department, some 877,000 students attend the state’s elementary schools and high schools. Of those, at least 30 percent are Hispanic.

But in Denver the biggest school district in the state with 87,000 students 58 percent are Latinos, while in the Adams 14 School District in Commerce City north of Denver, 83 percent of the 7,300 students are Hispanic.

And in elementary schools of the Denver metropolitan area, the number of Hispanics frequently ranges between 60 and 90 percent of the students.

However, Gonzales said, there is still no “educational agenda” that reflects or respects this new demographic reality in Colorado schools, nor a “strategy” to force educational authorities to take responsibility for making the needed changes.

Arturo Jimenez, a member of Denver Public Schools’ board of directors, says the excessive use of tests “from January to May, 16 hours a week” is the result of confusing “innovation with blindly following all the trends imposed by Washington D.C.”

“We’re returning to the past. We’re seeing a new segregation in the schools and the end of bilingualism,” Jimenez said.

According to the Colorado Education Department, 58 percent of Hispanic students who completed the 2014 TCAP achievement test in mathematics got an “adequate” score, compared with 82 percent of whites at the same level, while the scores in reading were similar. In writing, the number of acceptable scores were achieved by 33 percent and 50 percent, respectively.

“In Colorado we have the worst educational disparity in the country,” said Luis Torres, deputy provost for academic and student affairs at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

“I don’t see how the situation will change. They’re violating our rights and we’re never there when they take those decisions. They don’t listen to us,” he said.