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INDEPENDENT GOVERNOR CANDIDATE PROPOSES TO END $100 MILLION-A-YEAR STANDARDIZED TESTING RACKET — AND PUT THE MONEY BACK IN CLASSROOMS

Komor's "Colorado Learns" plan would recover 9 million lost student-hours a year, redirect $60–80 million to teachers and counselors, and dismantle a 25-year data-farming operation both parties have protected

FRUITA, COLORADO — Dr. Christian Komor, the Independent write-in candidate for Colorado Governor 2026, today released Deliverable 12 of his 22-deliverable platform: Colorado Learns — Real-World Educational Assessment, a plan to end Colorado's dependence on out-of-state standardized-testing vendors and return more than $60 million a year to Colorado classrooms.

"Colorado is spending more than $100 million a year to buy a single number from Pearson, Cambium, and ETS," said Komor. "That number arrives four to six months after the school year is over, in a format no teacher can use to change tomorrow's lesson. We are paying billion-dollar vendors to harvest 9 million hours of instructional time from our kids every year — and after 25 years of it, achievement gaps have not closed, teacher attrition has risen, and the number of at-risk Colorado students has more than doubled. That is not accountability. That is data farming. And it is time to stop."

The plan: end the racket, keep what works, pay for itself

Colorado Learns is built on a federally approved, peer-reviewed model that has been running for a decade in New Hampshire — the PACE system (Performance Assessment of Competency Education), operating under a federal ESSA Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority (IADA) waiver since 2015.

Under a Komor administration:

  • Colorado will file a federal IADA waiver to replicate the PACE model.

  • Statewide standardized testing (CMAS) will be reduced to the federal minimum required by law — one reading, one math, and one science test at the grade bands federal law requires, and nothing more.

  • Colorado will build the Colorado Assessment Bank — a state-supported library of teacher-designed performance tasks (writing portfolios, laboratory investigations, mathematical modeling, capstone defenses) that any district can use.

  • Colorado will use the assessment data teachers already produce every day — exit tickets, unit quizzes, i-Ready, NWEA MAP, Acadience, DIBELS — as the primary evidence of learning, moderated across districts for statewide comparability.

  • Every dollar saved — $60 to $80 million per year — will be redirected directly to classrooms: reduced student-teacher ratios in Title I schools, teacher-designed curriculum time, and expanded paraprofessional and counseling support.

Why this is not an experiment

"The reform lobby's only objection to teacher-embedded assessment has been psychometric — that it isn't reliable across contexts," Komor said. "At this point that objection is empirically wrong. New Hampshire has published the reliability data for a decade. Inter-rater reliability after cross-district moderation lands at 0.85 or higher — meeting or exceeding standardized-test reliability. The federal government has approved this model under ESSA. It has been peer-reviewed by the National Academy of Education, WestEd, and Stanford's SCALE center. Colorado's own preferred psychometric firm — the Center for Assessment — is the same firm that validated the New Hampshire model. This is a decade-proven, federally approved replacement. Colorado is being asked whether it wants to be the second state to import a working model — or the tenth."

What Colorado gets back

  • 9 million student-hours a year returned to instruction — the equivalent of weeks of teaching added back to every Colorado classroom without hiring a single new administrator.

  • 150 to 250 new positions in the Colorado Assessment Bank — task authoring, moderation coordination, psychometric audit — filled predominantly by Colorado teachers.

  • 1,500 to 2,500 new paraprofessional, counseling, and small-group instructional positions funded by testing savings.

  • Cross-district moderation stipends for classroom teachers reaching several thousand teachers per year on a rotating basis.

  • A permanent Colorado Education Association seat at the Assessment Bank governance table — teachers, not vendors, at the center of assessment design.

Who this beats — and who has protected them

The plan directly challenges the billion-dollar standardized-testing industry: Pearson, Cambium, ETS, and Curriculum Associates, all of whom hold Colorado contracts that depend on the current model. It also challenges the compliance-consulting apparatus that has grown around CMAS, and the reform-lobby framing that treats teachers as data-suspects rather than the professionals actually generating evidence of learning.

"Both parties have protected this arrangement for 25 years, because neither wanted to cross the testing vendors or the compliance apparatus," Komor said. "I am not taking money from those donors. Phil Weiser will not commit to ending the CMAS testing model. Every Republican in the primary supports test-based accountability in some form. I am the only candidate on the ballot proposing to end it — and I have the receipts to prove it can be done, because another state already did it."

Zero new taxes. Net positive to the general fund.

Colorado Learns is net positive to the state general fund. The $60 to $80 million per year saved by reducing standardized testing to the federal minimum fully funds the Colorado Assessment Bank, the moderation infrastructure, and the redirected classroom investment — with surplus. No property tax increase. No sales tax increase. No new revenue instrument.

"This is the rare policy that pays for itself by ending a wasteful practice," Komor said. "Every candidate in this race is telling Coloradans they need to spend more on education. I am telling Coloradans they need to spend the money they are already spending on education — instead of on out-of-state vendors."

About the candidate

Dr. Christian Komor is running as an Independent write-in candidate for Colorado Governor in the 2026 general election. He is a licensed clinical psychologist and the first and only self-defined Earth Systems Science Advisor — a role he built drawing on independent expertise in climate, carbon removal, and wildfire. He lives in Fruita, Colorado. His full 22-deliverable, 100-page platform is available at k4gov.com.

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