Senator Obama didn’t spend a whole to of time during last Wednesday night’s infomercial on education policy, but in the few seconds he did talk about it, he managed to send a chill down the spine of at least one Denver-area teacher when he held up as an example of positive change the Mapleton School District in Thornton, Colorado. Regrettably, Obama’s staff doesn’t seem to have done much fact-checking on this District’s recent history beyond the talking points fed to them by District officials and politically ambitious administrators.
While it is indeed a fantastic success story that all 44 of this year’s Mapleton Expeditionary School for the Arts’ senior class have been accepted to college, the other numbers, not to mention the seamy history of the district restructuring project itself, paint a far bleaker picture of the effectiveness of “small school reform” measures – and gives at least one voter cause for concern about the educational company Senator Obama is choosing to keep.