Colorado Course Mandates Prompt Debate

As Colorado’s public universities move to boost their admissions requirements, the state’s rural districts worry they will have to sacrifice local priorities, such as arts and vocational education, to provide the extra math and foreign-language courses students will need to get into four-year public institutions.

Paula R. Stephenson, the executive director of the Colorado Rural Schools Caucus, a Denver-based organization, criticized the new requirements at a meeting of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education on March 2. She contended that, coupled with a lack of funding for rural districts, the requirements amount to an encroachment on the state’s local-control law, which allows communities to decide how best to educate their children. She said rural schools will have to divert scarce dollars from other programs to attract qualified math and foreign-language teachers.

“The problem is, once you accept there’s a shortage of resources, school boards are faced with making decisions about whose interests they need to serve,” Ms. Stephenson said in an interview. She said local administrators must choose between “serving the values of special interests who believe we have to have much more rigorous math and science classes” or the values of the community, which “would like to see vocational education play a part in our high schools,” since many students will not...