Colorado Should Expand Its School Choice
A great school isn’t great for every student.
I was fortunate. Columbine High School was a great school for me. My senior year, I was making good grades, was an editor on the school newspaper staff, and competed on the speech and debate team.
Most of my friends were like me: involved, excelling — in a word, thriving at a public school. I had other friends, however, who were lost in a building with 1,600 students (and Columbine is by no means the largest public school in the state).
One friend had been passed along year after year in math and arrived in high school without basic arithmetic skills. She struggled thereafter to gain confidence. Another friend, also smart and gifted in music, dropped out. In a sea of young people, he fell through the cracks. Both would have likely flourished in another environment.
A great school isn’t great for every student because one size does not fit all. Every child has unique gifts and challenges, and finding the right school is what school choice is all about. During National School Choice Week (Jan. 27 to Feb. 3), students, community leaders and activists from across the country celebrate how policies that put parents and students in control are creating better opportunities for children.
In Colorado, there’s a lot to celebrate. At present, through school choice programs, Colorado students may attend any of the state’s 1,500-plus traditional public schools or 187 public charter schools, space permitting. Additionally, thousands of families home-school their students independently or with support from an online public school.
The state has seen the steady growth of charter schools over the past 20 years. These public schools are managed independently of their school districts, but still have to adhere to state standards, assessments, and civil rights laws.
Few charter schools are alike. There are schools that embrace back-to-basics or project-based curricula; foreign language immersion; an arts or science and technology focus; dropout recovery; Montessori philosophy; expeditionary learning format; or online presentation.
Even though a handful of new charter schools open each year, many students have not found a space to achieve or a place to belong. Some of the most effective charter schools have long waiting lists. Students languish in schools where they continue to struggle. Test scores show too many students falling behind.
On the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, less than half of all Colorado’s fourth- and eighth-graders score at grade level in math and reading and a quarter (26 percent) of Colorado students do not graduate on time, if at all.
While there are nearly 600 private schools in the state, only those families who can afford tuition can access this option. Colorado is not one of the 20 states that support lower- and middle-class families with private school tuition either through a voucher or tax deduction/credit.
The Douglas County School District deserves recognition for piloting a local voucher program, but it has been tied up in court. The district’s board and leaders are some of the most innovative and insightful in the country. They understand the value of offering access to as many good schools as possible, even in a district where most of the public schools are performing well.
It isn’t about the schools, after all; it is about the students. By providing a small voucher, the district would not only save money, it also would open more schoolhouse doors to more families.
There are a lot of students who are making the grade at their comprehensive public school. Even so, there are still those students who would do better in a different environment. Maybe they need a smaller school where they can get personalized attention. Maybe they need specialized help for a learning disability. Perhaps they need more challenging curricula, more guidance or even a fresh start with a different group of peers.
Whatever the case may be, these students would benefit from a range of choices from traditional public schools to charter schools to home schools to independent private schools. It’s time for Colorado to take another step in expanding school choice.
Krista Kafer is director of the Colorado’s Future Project.
Public education dollars must not be directed towards institutions which might discriminate against students of different religions, races, or disability statuses. I agree with the author in the sense that choice in education is a good thing; HOWEVER, only private — not public — funds should be used to support educational facilities which can deny admittance to any academically eligible child who would otherwise be granted admission to public schools. The one exception I could see is public support of private schools that provide specialized care for students with certain disabilities.
“might”????
Charter schools are public schools that already have to meet the discrimination standards. They are, however at funding disadvantage so do have difficulties appropriately meeting the needs of special care students.
The problem is that there is not enough choice where parents, especially low-income and minority parents, can have an alternative to the failing and poor performing neighborhood schools that their children are imprisoned in.
This is an excellent article, with one glaring omission. Teachers have asserted for years that smaller classes make for better learning. The “powers that be” cite research that says class size doesn’t matter. They must be researching universities because class size does matter. Any teacher can give more individual attention to 20 students than he/she can to 30. Additionally, why was that student passed along in math without knowing the basics? Did the parents insist or did policy makers insist? I’m sure it wasn’t the teachers. Middle schools are notorious for moving kids along whether they pass or not. The bottom line is that kids from homes that value education will do well. Our former principal claimed that education is a three legged stool; one leg is parents who prepare their children for school by reading to them, talking to them, listening to them, and emphasizing good manners and respect for learning. The second leg is kids who attend regularly and do the work, and the third is teachers who truly know their stuff. Without any one of the legs, the stool will wobble.
Most of the better performing charter schools in Colorado have very large class sizes.
My wife, who is a 6th grade math teacher in a charter school, tells me that new students coming in from regular public schools are often 2-4 years behind grade level math comprehension.
Everyone who still supports teacher’s unions and think that they are supportive of school reform, choice, and empowering parents and kids in their ability to select the BEST quality education has to watch three movies. BTW – it is not teachers that are the problem, it is their union leadership. Let me make that clear.
1. Waiting For Superman
2. The Lottery
3. Won’t Back Down
Teacher’s unions and their massive political power are not the only reason for our failing government school system, but they are the prime factor. It is not money and funding. Teacher’s unions block most all efforts to introduce even modest reforms as they are most concerned with growing their membership and collecting union dues to funnel to the Democratic Party, which also enables bad government schools.
We spend over $700 BILLION A YEAR on government schools – local, state, and federal combined. The Dept of Education doles out $80 billion a year. What are we getting for all this now? Using any metric available – test scores, graduation rates, rankings with other countries, etc. shows we are not getting very much at all and too many of our kids are getting hosed.
If it’s class size that makes the determination, why then did we achieve better results than now back in my day when 30+ students was pretty much the norm for pretty much all classes?
I think there is some other major factor at fault in our school systems failure to educate so many students than class size, one that will not be corrected by reducing it.
The biggest problem I see for both parents and teachers if failure to teach reading and understanding the use of language ahead of all other subjects at the very earliest level of a child’s learning.
There is no excuse at all for a child to leave kindergarten without the ability to read and understand what is written, by himself, at the level of his useful vocabulary.
If you can read and understand what is written, you can learn anything you want to learn to do anything you want to do at any point in your life.
So parents, why are you letting your children get by without fully developed reading skills at an early age? It’s your responsibility, the schools are just an aid to you in it.
(BTW, mathematics is the second most important subject, and math is a language in it’s own right.
“Colorado is not one of the 20 states that support lower- and middle-class families with private school tuition either through a voucher or tax deduction/credit.”
Hopefully, it will stay that way.
The use of vouchers is not designed to improve school choice. Vouchers for students to attend private schools is a backdoor way to get public taxpayer funding for religious organizations.
Students do well in ANY school when their parents are involved to the extent that they place high expectations upon their children and enforce these expectations. Test scores and other measures of school performance simply reflect the fact that most parents would rather watch the Super Bowl on television than help their children do their homework. Of course, it’s easier to blame the schools and teachers than to admit their own laziness and stupidity.
Many students have poor reading comprehension. Ask a typical university student to read a randomly-chosen paragraph from their physics textbook and then explain it to you. You will be shocked by their poor performance in many cases.
My view is that reading comprehension is the most important skill that a student must learn. It starts at home with parents at age two or three or the child falls behind from the start.