You'd hope that state Sen. Chris Romer's proposal requiring English competency for high school graduates would provoke no more reaction than mandating dairy products in cheese.

You'd think his bill might even be derided for stating the obvious, and dismissed as unnecessary. But Romer is evidently onto something, because the line of attack against his bill is the opposite. Critics suggest it's draconian.

"We need to have realistic expectations," complained the president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, who went on to cite the old chestnut about schools needing "five to seven years" to get children up to speed in English. Maybe she's forgotten that her own district went to war with the federal government a decade ago in part because Denver rejected such worst-case claims of how long it took to learn English.

In any event, as Romer, a Denver Democrat, pointed out to me, English competency isn't the same as being "proficient" on the state standardized tests. Competency means the ability to fill out application forms, for example, and to have conversations in English - to function in the larger world.

Even the hard cases who come to school in 11th or 12th grade as monolingual immigrants shouldn't be handed a diploma without demonstrating English skills. If that means subjecting them to intense language immersion, so be it. If it means holding some of them back for another year, so be it, too.

"A student who graduates from high school without achieving competency in English will be severely hindered in his or her ability to be an active, productive, fully contributing member of the community, economically, socially and politically," Senate Bill 73 says in justifying its purpose.

Who can doubt it?

Ethanol's hidden costs

In my column this week on Gov. Bill Ritter's promotion of new E-85 fueling stations - 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline - I neglected to mention that the state will spend $900,000 to help gas stations add the necessary equipment.

That's a fairly modest sum on a scale of government subsidies. But when it comes to ethanol, $900,000 is also but a single strand of hair on a very woolly beast. For perspective on the ethanol subsidy monster, let's turn to Ronald Steen- blik, with the International Institute for Sustainable Development based in Geneva, Switzerland, who e-mailed me after my column appeared.

"We have estimated," he wrote, "that the cost to the U.S. Treasury alone of keeping a Chevy Tahoe - a typical \[flex-fuel vehicle] - running on E85 over the course of a year at more than $500 (i.e., about the annual per capita income of a person living in a least-developed country). Over the 10-year life of a vehicle, that's over $5,000. State-level incentives can increase taxpayer costs by another 20 percent. For what? For a fuel that yields little if any improvement in CO2 emissions (especially not if the ethanol was produced in a plant fueled by coal), and an only modest net energy yield."

Lest you ethanol devotees assume that Steenblik's estimates are merely more propaganda from "Big Oil," whose executives allegedly spend their waking hours conspiring to torpedo the prospects of renewable energy, please note the funding sources for his institute: three governments (The Netherlands, New Zealand and Sweden) and a foundation.

Not a single oil industry rogue in the gallery.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.