When I began this editorial last week, I was envisioning a pendulum swinging, very slowly.
I experienced my first hypnotic view of a pendulum — specifically, a Foucault Pendulum — at the California Academy of Science (CAS) in San Francisco when I was around four years old. French philosopher Leon Foucault had unveiled his original pendulum in 1851 in Paris, where an enormous ‘bob’ swung back and forth on a 219-foot cable. His experiment was intended to demonstrate the rotation of the earth on its axis, as well as the Coriolis Effect.
A replica of Foucault’s famous pendulum swings in the East Pavilion of CAS from a 30 foot cable. The shiny bronze weight swings in a straight arc according to the laws of inertia and gravity. Below the constant back-and-forth arc of the bob is a circle of upright pins set 6 degrees apart. As the Earth turns, the pins slowly rotate into contact with the constant arc of the bob, and are knocked over.
Or you could say, just as accurately, that the bob’s arcing path slowly rotates 360 degrees while the Earth remains still. That’s how we actually perceive it, as the audience watching from behind the railing.
If you are patient, you can watch the pins fall.
Due to the Coriolis Effect, it takes longer than 24 hours for the circle of pins to rotate beneath the steadily-swinging weight. Knocking over 360 degrees worth of pins in San Francisco — latitude 37.7°N — takes about 39 hours, but if the pendulum were swinging at the North Pole, it would theoretically take only 24 hours.
In the video above, you can watch the steady, hypnotic movement of the pendulum, and you can hear a quiet cheer from the audience at about 1 minute and 40 seconds, as two opposing pins fall over.
We humans experience a certain sense of satisfaction when our expectations are met, especially if we’ve been waiting for a good while.
The education pendulum I’ve been considering, while researching this story, swings much more slowly than the Foucault Pendulum. The arc, from one extreme to the other, is measured in decades. And because K-12 education in America has been both publicly funded and compulsory for the past century and a half, it’s also a highly political pendulum.
The pins that get knocked over are many, and various. Tax funding. Social justice. Health and nutrition. Standardized testing. Equity. Career preparation. Social Emotional Learning. Sex education. Immigrant families. Unions. Bureaucracy. For-profit corporations. Charter schools.
I have a special interest in that last category — charter schools — due to the fact that I helped write the charter application for Pagosa Peak Open School, the first publicly-funded charter school to be approved by the Archuleta School District. I also currently serve on the school’s board of directors.
But all of the categories are interrelated, interdependent. As the pendulum swings, all are affected, in their turn.
Looking back over the past 26 years since the Colorado legislature approved the Colorado Charter School Act, the state’s charter school movement has seen considerable success, at least in terms of student enrollment. As of spring 2018, Colorado charter schools were educating about 120,500 of the state’s 911,500 public school students. The chart below, from an article on EducationNext.org, shows charter school growth from 2000 through 2017.
Colorado has the largest percentage (13%) of students attending charter schools of any US state except Arizona (17%). About 51% of the kids attending the state’s charter schools are “students of color” compared to about 45% in conventional public schools. 21% are English Language Learners — kids whose first language was not English — compared to about 16% in conventional public schools.
Any school faces challenges in meeting parental expectations… community expectations… Department of Education expectations… but Colorado charters often struggle with one particular challenge: facilities. Conventional public schools generally operate within buildings that were funded by voter-approved bond measures, with the bonds repaid out of property tax mill levies. A separate mill levy funds the district’s ongoing operating costs. Conventional schools don’t pay rent, in other words.
Charter schools often have no access to bond-funded facilities. They typically pay to lease or purchase their facilities out of their operating budget, which puts a charter school at a financial disadvantage when compared to conventional schools.
On the other side of that coin, this means that it typically costs the taxpayers less money to fund a new charter school than it costs to fund a new conventional school. For example, Pagosa Peak Open School — with 100 students — is currently in negotiations to purchase the Parelli Building for around $4 million. Archuleta School District, last year, was considering a new elementary school building for its 500 elementary students. The estimated cost was about $35 million. (That proposal is currently ‘on hold.’)
For a number of political reasons, charter schools have found supporters across the political spectrum, although that support has not typically come from teachers unions.
Here’s a quote from an interview with then-candidate for Colorado governor Jared Polis, posted on the74million.org. Prior to being elected governor, Polis had a successful career in technology — successful to the tune of maybe $300 million in personal wealth. He then moved into politics, and while serving on the Colorado State Board of Education, helped to open two charter schools with multiple campuses, aimed at serving disadvantaged children.
I think, on the [political] left, we’re interested in serving all kids and in particular low-income, and that’s not just a race thing; we have a lot of poor areas of white kids, too. We’re interested in serving kids of all races and all economic backgrounds with the best-quality public school available, whether it’s a charter school or a district school.
I think the difference is, that [US Secretary of Education] Betsy DeVos and the Republicans are talking a lot about low-quality options, and options for the sake of options. We want to make sure all of the options are good options. Democrats are supporters of district schools, of charter schools, of independent schools, of magnet schools, of every kind of school — it’s just a question of where best to focus our limited public resources to improve the learning opportunities for every child.
Almost every reform proposed by supporters of public education has an added cost, it seems. (Charter schools might be the most prominent exception.) In particular, there’s been considerable talk lately about increasing teacher salaries in Colorado. The legislature handed off that idea to the voters this year by proposing Proposition CC, which would have provided additional tax revenue to the state government, to be used partly for K-12 education. The pro-CC marketing campaign came up with the clever motto, “CC Yes Yes” — playing off the fact that “CC” sounds like the Spanish affirmative: “Si, Si”.
The voters responded “No, No.”
As Governor Polis notes, public resources are limited. So we’ll talk next about limited resources, and how you cut up the pie…