“What charter schools have done is dramatically expand the choices that consumers – our citizens – get to use so that there are all kinds of different types of schools… longer school days, more intensive language study, science and technology focus… we’re giving our citizens more choice than they could ever have imagined 20 years ago.”
— Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, quoted on the Colorado League of Charter Schools website
When fellow Daily Post contributor Cynda Green and I headed out from Pagosa Springs to visit our first Colorado charter school 18 months ago — the newly-opened Childrens’ Kiva Montessori School in Cortez — I thought I understood a couple of things about the education alternative called “charter schools.” My notions were based mainly on a free showing of the 2010 film ‘Waiting for Superman’ at the Liberty Theatre a few years ago. That showing had been organized, as I recall, by Archuleta School Board member Joanne Irons. The film ran about 2 hours, and I came away with the understanding that charter schools were tuition-free, publicly-funded schools formed to develop and test out innovative educational models that might be challenging to implement in a conventional public school setting. I understood that, in certain school districts, charter schools were so popular, a lottery was required to limit the number of entering students.
I also understood that the very idea of ‘charter schools’ had proved threatening to many people — especially, to some people employed in conventional public schools, and to teachers’ unions.
The ‘Waiting for Superman’ promotional poster shows a elementary-age girl sitting at a metal desk beside a stack of books. She has her hand raised, a smile on her face, ready to give the correct answer to the teacher’s question.
She is, however, sitting in the midst of a devastated, bombed-out landscape such as we might expect to see in a war movie.
A catchphrase stretches across the bottom of the poster:
“The fate of our country won’t be decided on a battlefield, it will be determined in a classroom.”
Well, maybe that’s a wee bit overly-dramatic. But the image in the poster is nevertheless interesting on a couple of levels. For one thing, the metal desk looks suspiciously similar to the metal desks to which I was assigned, fifty years ago, during my public school education. And the stack of textbooks, and the smiling face and the raised hand — these likewise remind me of my own elementary school experience.
I think we can agree that children — at least, very young children — are basically the same type of creatures they were 50 years ago, with the same need for love and validation, the same nutritional needs, the same need for exercise and fresh air, the same sense of curiosity.
The same desire to grow up, and do grown-up things.
But despite the identical metal desks, and the same tired textbooks and the same tendency to tune out the teacher’s droning lecture, public school education in 2016 has changed significantly — in certain ways — since the days when I sat in the back of the classroom, waving my hand to offer the correct answer. The devastated background in the ‘Waiting for Superman’ poster was perhaps meant to reflect those changes, metaphorically speaking. But I can imagine a few other backgrounds that would reflect other perspectives, other ways to summarize how public education has changed over the past 50 years.
Here’s one possible (if slightly cynical) background image:
The rise of standardized testing and data banking within the education industry — as promoted by certain federal and state bureaucrats and legislators — has tended to obscure each child’s individualized nature and propensities.
And here’s another (slightly cynical) view of the education industry in 2016:
Choice is a double-edged sword. As long as every student is working at the same assembly line, there’s a certain kind of “equality” built into the system. As soon as someone starts talking about a new charter school… we’ve created, as Governor Hickenlooper notes, “choices that consumers — our citizens — get to use so that there are all kinds of different types of schools…”
Yes, we’ve created “consumer” choices, but we’ve also created competition — publicly funded competition — and that makes us uncomfortable. Government bureaucracies don’t often try and offer alternatives. We are accustomed to “one size fits all” in government operations. For the sake of fairness, and efficiency. Government is not supposed to accommodate individual choice among its citizens. We supposed to be cogs in the wheel. For the sake of fairness, and efficiency.
Nevertheless, a certain subset of citizens will always be attempting to assert their individuality, and the state of Colorado made a decision, back in 1993, to begin a controversial education experiment based on the premise that, in fact, one size does not fit all when it comes to public education. The experiment was also based on a belief that teacher-led and parent-led schools — small educational laboratories, you might say — could develop new (and better?) instructional models, that could then be utilized in our larger, more conventional schools.
Soon after that first trip to Cortez to the Children’s Kiva, a group of young Pagosa moms formed a non-profit organization to explore the possibility of creating a publicly funded, tuition-free charter school here in Archuleta County. That group has been visiting model schools throughout Colorado and New Mexico — 17 visits in all — with generous funding assistance provided by the Colorado League of Charter Schools.
A year and a half later, the group is about a week away from having the first draft of their charter school application completed. Next week — if all goes as planned — the Pagosa Charter School Initiative will send off that draft application to the League of Charter Schools, for a preliminary review. The document will describe nearly every aspect of the future school’s operations, from academic assessments, to student discipline, to its food program, to the ways the school will interact with the larger community.
The school will be named Pagosa Peak Open School… and plans to open its doors in about a year and a half… in the fall of 2017.
Tomorrow in Part Two, we begin exploring the development of the Pagosa Peak school model, and the extensive learning process that a group of intrepid volunteers have put themselves through, in hopes of winning approval for a new charter school.