Better Data Tracking, Expanded Pre-K at Core of Colorado School Proposal

Drawing on ideas recently laid out by a state “P-20 education” council, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. is proposing to expand early-childhood education, provide more counselors in secondary schools, and create a data-collection system that tracks individual students from the time they start preschool until they enter the workforce.

The governor, a Democrat, pointed to Florida as the only other state that has such a system to comprehensively track academic and related information on individual youths over an extended period of time.

But with a tight budget situation, the governor, even with Democrats in control of the legislature, may have trouble getting all his plans enacted. Further complicating matters is a likely legal challenge to the mechanism the governor is using to free up state dollars to help...