Gary Rubinstein knows Michael Johnston from his days in Teach for America. He wishes Mike would stop telling tall tales about the school he briefly ran.

Mike said that the school he ran had a 100% graduation rate and college acceptance rate. Gary points out that 44 seniors graduated and got accepted to college, but there were 73 students in tenth grade two years earlier. That’s a 60% graduation rate, not 100%.

Now Mike Johnston is running for Governor of Colorado. He has built a reputation in the state as an education “reformer.” After graduating from Yale, he taught in Mississippi as a member of Teach for America, earned a degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, then a law degree, then was principal of a small school in Colorado where he claimed the school had a graduation rate of 100% and all were accepted into college. Based on this record, he ran for and was elected to the State Senate at the age of 35.

I met Mike Johnston in 2010, when I visited Denver to talk about my then-new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” I was scheduled to debate Johnston at a luncheon before about 100 of Denver’s civic leaders. At the very moment I was in Denver, the Legislature was debating Johnston’s legislation to evaluate teachers and principals by the test scores of their students. Johnston called his law, SB 10-191, the “Great Teachers, Great Principals Act.” It required that test scores would count for 50% of every teacher and principal’s evaluation.

On the day we were to debate, Johnston was late. I spoke. Minutes later, Johnston arrived, not having heard anything I said about choice and testing. He spoke with great excitement about how his new legislation would weed out all the bad and ineffective teachers in the state and would lead to a new era of great teachers, great principals, and great schools.

Johnston, as Gary Rubinstein points out, is very much an Obama Democrat. Arne Duncan, whose Race to the Top squandered $5 Billion, has endorsed Johnston’s candidacy for governor.

Seven years later, even Colorado reformers acknowledge that Mike Johnston’s grandiose promises fell flat. In an article in Education Week, Colorado reformer Van Schoales admitted that the punitive SB 10-191 didn’t have much, if any effect.

He wrote:

“Implementation did not live up to the promises.

“Colorado Department of Education data released in February show that the distribution of teacher effectiveness in the state looks much as it did before passage of the bill. Eighty-eight percent of Colorado teachers were rated effective or highly effective, 4 percent were partially effective, 7.8 percent of teachers were not rated, and less than 1 percent were deemed ineffective. In other words, we leveraged everything we could and not only didn’t advance teacher effectiveness, we created a massive bureaucracy and alienated many in the field.

“What happened?

“It was wrong to force everyone in a state to have one ‘best’ evaluation system.”

“First, the data. We built a policy on growth data that only partially existed. The majority of teachers teach in states’ untested subject areas. This meant processes for measuring student growth outside of literacy or math were often thoughtlessly slapped together to meet the new evaluation law. For example, some elementary school art-teacher evaluations were linked to student performance on multiple-choice district art tests, while Spanish-teacher evaluations were tied to how the school did on the state’s math and literacy tests. Even for those who teach the grades and subjects with state tests, some debate remains on how much growth should be weighted for high-stakes decisions on teacher ratings. And we knew that few teachers accepted having their evaluations heavily weighted on student growth.

“Second, there has been little embrace of the state’s new teacher-evaluation system even from administrators frustrated with the former system. There were exceptions, namely the districts of Denver and Harrison, which had far fewer highly effective teachers than elsewhere in the state. Both districts invested time and resources in the development of a system that more accurately reflects a teacher’s impact on student learning. Yet most Colorado districts were forced to create new evaluation systems in alignment with the new law or adopt the state system, and most did the latter. This meant that these districts focused on compliance (and checking off evaluation boxes), rather than using the law to support teacher improvement.

“Third, we continue to have a leadership problem. Research shows that teacher evaluators are still not likely to give direct and honest feedback to teachers. A Brown University study on teacher evaluators in these new systems shows that the evaluators are three times more likely to rate teachers higher than they should be rated. This is a problem of school and district culture, not a fault with the evaluation rubric.

“Fourth, all of Colorado’s 238 charter schools waived out of the system.

“We wanted a new system to help professionalize teaching and address the real disparities in teacher quality. Instead, we got an 18-page state rubric and 345-page user guide for teacher evaluation.

“We didn’t understand how most school systems would respond to these teacher-evaluation laws. We failed to track implementation and didn’t check our assumptions along the way.”

Unfortunately, when the time came to change the law, Sen. Mike Johnston joined with five Republicans on the State Senate Education Committee to defeat a proposal to fix his failed law.

The rejected proposal, “originally introduced with bipartisan sponsorship, would have allowed school districts to drop the use of student academic growth data in teacher evaluations. It also would have eliminated the annual evaluation requirement for effective and highly effective teachers.”

But Johnston preferred to keep his law in place, despite its failure. It remains today as the most regressive teacher evaluation law in the nation. And it has had seven years to demonstrate its ineffectiveness.

Gary Rubinstein calls on Mike Johnston to stop making the false claim in his campaign literature that his high school’s graduation rate was 100%.

I call on him to renounce and denounce SB 10-191.

Make a clean break of it, Mike. Set things right. Show you are man enough to admit you were wrong.