When the Colorado Department of Education released its latest round of standardized test results on August 19, the agency’s press release led with a hopeful headline: “Colorado student achievement and growth results show continued progress, with mathematics and elementary literacy leading gains.”
One retired Colorado teacher isn’t buying it. Writing for American Thinker, Mike McDaniel — who spent his career in classrooms alongside his wife before the couple retired at the end of the 2020 school year — argues that the headlines coming out of Colorado this fall are a case study in how education bureaucracies dress up bad news.
“Competent, professional teaching had given way to expensive, destructive fads,” McDaniel writes, describing a career that ended, in his telling, “just in time.”
The numbers behind the spin
The core of McDaniel’s complaint is arithmetic, not ideology. He cites the share of Colorado students in grades three through eight who met or exceeded expectations on the state’s CMAS exams and notes that in every grade, the English language arts figure sits below half: 40.8% in third grade, 47% in fourth, 49.9% in fifth, 41.6% in sixth, 46.6% in seventh and 42.2% in eighth.
Math looks worse. Third grade comes in at 41.5%, fourth at 39%, fifth at 39.3%, sixth at 32.7%, seventh at 32.9% and eighth at 37.8% — meaning that in most grades, roughly six in ten students fell short of the standard the state has set.
The gaps widen sharply when the data is broken out by race. According to the figures McDaniel cites, Black students meeting or exceeding expectations in English ranged from 25.6% in third grade to 34% in seventh, while Hispanic students ranged from 22.5% to 31.7% depending on grade level. Math results for both groups, he writes, were “equally bad.”
McDaniel’s point is not that the underlying tests are flawless. It’s that the state’s messaging doesn’t match the scale of the shortfall — and that the gap between the two is itself a problem.
Denver’s own headline
He singles out Denver Public Schools for particular criticism. Superintendent Alex Marrero’s August 29 release carried the headline “Celebrating Districtwide Academic Gains in 2025–26,” opening with a line about sharing the district’s “strong year-end academic performance gains” with “great joy.”
The release touted math proficiency gains, noting that 35% of overall math scores met or exceeded expectations — a two-percentage-point improvement over the prior year. McDaniel’s rejoinder is blunt: does that mean the roughly 65% of students who didn’t meet expectations are cause for celebration?
He also accuses the district of conflating different kinds of assessment. Marrero’s reference to READ Act results, McDaniel argues, points to tests that screen for dyslexia and other reading difficulties rather than overall language competency — a distinction that, in his view, amounts to deception when folded into a broader claim about academic gains.
What ‘meets expectations’ actually means
Part of McDaniel’s argument targets the benchmarks themselves. Colorado, he notes, treats a 480 SAT score as meeting expectations. Since a student who answers every question wrong still receives a 200, and 480 sits around the 41st percentile while 600 sits near the 79th, the label does a lot of work. The College Board, which produces the exam, has noted that students scoring 480 have roughly a 75% chance of earning a C in a first-semester college course — a projection McDaniel, who taught freshman English at the college level, calls “a bit optimistic.”
His broader critique of standardized testing is not that it’s too hard on students, but that it distorts instruction. High-stakes exams, he writes, “tend to drive, rather than measure, instruction,” pushing teachers to spend months teaching to the test while districts — under pressure from funding formulas and reputations tied to scores — either spin the results or, in some cases, cheat to improve them.
That dynamic, he contends, falls hardest on minority students in blue states, where poor results become an impetus to “gaslight” the public rather than confront underlying causes. He frames the debate as a partisan one, arguing that blue states are far likelier to keep spinning than to admit that what he calls DEI, political and sexual indoctrination policies have failed.
A familiar fight, with new numbers
McDaniel’s essay lands in a long-running argument over how much standardized testing tells us — and how much of the story gets lost in the framing. For parents trying to read the tea leaves of a press release, the practical question is straightforward: if a majority of students in most grades aren’t hitting the mark, what does it mean when the state calls that progress?
Supporters of the current approach would note that year-over-year gains in math, however modest, are still gains, and that proficiency rates reflect a bar set deliberately high. McDaniel’s response, essentially, is that a bar set so high that 40 percent clears it while the headline celebrates improvement is a bar that has stopped doing useful work.
He closes by invoking a line usually attributed to Mark Twain — lies, damned lies and statistics — and suggests Colorado and other blue states are proving the quip prescient.
Whether or not readers share his politics, the numbers he marshals are on the public record, and they raise an uncomfortable question for any state agency: when most students are behind, is calling it “continued progress” a communications strategy or a verdict on the system itself?
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/colorado-spins-education-failure/