The Colorado League of Charter Schools’ vision is for all Colorado students to have access to high-quality, publicly-funded school options…
— Colorado League of Charter Schools website, 2019
The Colorado League of Charter Schools, a Denver-based non-profit that encourages the success of educational options throughout Colorado, played a major role in helping a group of young Pagosa Springs moms start Pagosa Peak Open School, approved three years ago by the Archuleta School District and now serving about 105 students in grades Kindergarten through 6th grade. As with all charter schools in Colorado, Pagosa Peak is publicly funded and tuition free, and accepts students from any family living in Archuleta County.
A few days ago, the League sent out one of their regular newsletters, and it included an op-ed by Dan Schaller, the League’s vice president of State & Local Policy, entitled What We’re Up Against.
It’s hard to deny that we’re in the midst of a difficult period for charter schools right now. On a national level, two of the main Democratic presidential candidates have come out with explicit anti-charter education platforms, the Chicago teachers union just demanded a cap on the number of charter school seats as a condition of ending their strike, and legislation with a number of dangerous anti-charter provisions was recently signed into law in California.
Here in Colorado, we just had a school board election cycle with very few bright spots for pro-choice candidates supportive of charter schools. And as we look ahead to the legislative session set to begin in less than two months’ time, school board representatives have signaled their intention to bring legislation that could seriously undercut existing charter autonomy and new charter development.
If ever there was a time for us all to come together and put differences aside, this is it.
Indeed, the charter school movement in Colorado, and in America, is anything but monolithic. Educational models of instruction vary widely from school to school, and the guiding visions also run the gamut. Some charter schools are built around Montessori principles, for example, while others focus on Project-Based Learning, STEM education, Classical Inquiry, the Arts, or other some set of educational priorities. Some are aimed at dropout recovery; some focus on blended and online instruction.
Back at the beginning of the charter movement, it was often a group of teachers — disenchanted with standard public education — who initiated a new school, hoping to try out innovative techniques and ideas. These early school experiments were often based on progressive ideas about social justice and equality. As the movement developed, for-profit corporations moved into the sector, along with supporters from the conservative side of the American political spectrum, and charter schools in general were increasingly viewed as a threat to traditional, unionized public education.
Dan Schaller hints at those differences in his recent essay:
Because we comprise a sector that is made up of a wide variety of political viewpoints, it can sometimes be tempting to think we are more defined by our differences than our similarities. However, in this kind of environment, we engage in that sort of thinking at our peril. If we want to see Colorado’s charter schools continue to survive and thrive, we must come together and do our part to advocate for the strength and protection of our schools.
The societal forces that drove states like Colorado to begin building a charter school support system during the 1990s were, in some ways, the same impulses that have provoked a wider demand for public school “accountability.” For the first 150 years of public education in America, we assumed that a school district would hire the most qualified teachers they could attract, given the tax funding available, and that each teacher would do his or her level best to impart the skills and information demanded by the local district’s adopted curriculum.
This preference for a locally-determined curriculum and local control of teacher performance is, in fact, written into the Colorado Constitution in Article IX, Section 15, which specifically assigns the control of local schools to local boards of education:
The general assembly shall, by law, provide for organization of school districts of convenient size, in each of which shall be established a board of education, to consist of three or more directors to be elected by the qualified electors of the district. Said directors shall have control of instruction in the public schools of their respective districts.
During the last half of the 20th century, we saw education pulled in two opposite directions. In Colorado, for example, recognition of the right of parents to educate their children at home — a right first recognized in 1973, but not legally finalized until 1988 — was no doubt part of the same underlying dissatisfaction with public education that created the charter school movement and other attempts to generate education options.
At the very same time, demands for better accountability led to the imposition of state-controlled “standards” and the accompanying “standardized testing” that, for all practical purposes, eliminated local control of publicly-funded education in Colorado.
In other words, some groups felt the improvement of educational outcomes depended upon increased local control — by individual families, and by individual schools — while other groups were pushing for centralized, standardized control by the state.
It seems we’re now entering another phase of public school policy development, and this phase might be driven largely by teacher unions. Earlier this month, three union-backed candidates scored the three open seats on the Denver school board.
From the Chalkbeat.org website:
This marks the first time in a decade that candidates supported by proponents of “education reform” won’t have the majority on the Denver school board. For years, Denver has been a national model for a certain brand of education reform. Tuesday’s election results could mean a departure from long-standing reform policies opposed by the union, including approving new independent charter schools and closing low-performing schools.
The pendulum swings.
The teaching profession has never been highly compensated except in a few countries. China, for example, pays its teachers a salary 44% higher than the local GDP (based on Purchasing Power Parity or PPP), according to a report published by TeachingAbroadDirect. German teachers earn a salary 1% higher than the local GDP.
But 93 of the 100 countries surveyed by TeachingAbroadDirect pay their teachers less than the average GDP. In the US, teachers earn a salary about 18% below the GDP, which is lower (in PPP terms) than in Vietnam, France, Spain, Finland, Australia, Canada, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Iraq.
We recognize, however, that through the long history of public education in America, young people typically entered the teaching profession for altruistic reasons, not necessarily because of the salary and benefits. But in recent years, the number of college students graduating from Colorado teacher education programs has been declining, falling from 3,924 in 2011 to 3,268 in 2016 — a decline of 17%.
Meanwhile the number of public school students in the state increased by 9% — from 843,000 in 2010 to 912,000 last year.