Photo: Dr. Steve Perry presenting a keynote speech at the Colorado League of Charter Schools annual conference, February 2025.
Public education for children has always been political, even if some people wish it wasn’t.
As mentioned in Part One, I attended the Colorado League of Charter Schools annual conference in Denver last month, along with four other volunteer members of the Pagosa Peak Open School board of directors.
Pagosa Peak Open School — more affectionately known as PPOS — is our community’s non-profit charter school serving students in grades K-8. PPOS is authorized by the Archuleta School District and receives tax funding from the state of Colorado, and is thus able to be tuition-free. PPOS is also semi-independent, developing its own curriculum, policies, and educational model.
The original idea behind charter schools in Colorado was to allow for small-scale educational experiments, with the aim of increasing choice for families, and for teachers with innovative ideas. Our state’s charter schools are supported by the Colorado Department of Education’s ‘Schools of Choice’ Unit, which also supports blended schooling, online schooling, home schooling, and non-public schooling.
The Colorado Department of Education (CDE) is also tax-funded, of course. Free public education is not ‘free’ — in the sense that it’s tax-funded — but it was required by the Colorado Constitution, as written in 1876.
The general assembly shall, as soon as practicable, provide for the establishment and maintenance of a thorough and uniform system of free public schools throughout the state, wherein all residents of the state, between the ages of six and twenty-one years, may be educated gratuitously. One or more public schools shall be maintained in each school district within the state…
Charter schools are a more recent development, and were established in Colorado in 1993 through the passage of the Charter School Act.
The final keynote speech at the 2025 League of Charter Schools conference was delivered by Dr. Steve Perry, who labeled his lecture, “New Time, Same Problem: A Call for Bold Solutions”. Those bold solutions require, in his opinion, political action.
The League described Dr. Perry as “one of the most influential and innovative voices in education today, Dr. Perry is a bestselling author, educator, and Founder and Head of Schools at Capital Preparatory Schools. Having dedicated over 30 years to transforming the lives of disadvantaged children and families, his keynote will reveal a hard truth: While we already know how to create great schools, the real battle lies in overcoming the politics that hinder progress.”
His mission seems simple: to provide high-quality education with college-bound opportunities for children in poverty.
But politics keep it from being simple.
From the Capital Preparatory Schools website:
It is his belief that in order to best educate a child, you must treat them and their family as your family. He exemplifies this practice throughout his work in schools and with school communities throughout the country…
Dr. Perry is completely committed to closing the educational inequities that plague our youth and families in low-income communities. He considers the current state of education as being in crisis and when he speaks, it is a call to action, to ignite an urgency to save the children…
He started his first school in 2005 in Hartford, Connecticut, as a district magnet school, but stepped down as principal in 2014, amid tensions with the Hartford School Board and the local teachers union.
Since 2015, he’s founded four charter schools, two in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and two in New York City.
The model provides a nurturing and loving environment that fosters strong student-teacher relationships, requires rigor throughout a classic college-preparatory curriculum, demands high expectations, and is relevant, connecting student learning to real-world experiences and opportunities. Since this model was implemented in Hartford, Connecticut in 2005, it has sent 100% of its predominantly low-income first generation graduates to college.
For comparison, we might note that Colorado high schools send an average of about 65% of graduates to college. I believe that’s about the same percentage of Pagosa Springs High School graduates who enroll in college.
Writing as an education activist, I do not consider “enrolling in college” as the ideal outcome for every public school students. Here in Colorado, about half of the students who do enroll in college end up dropping out — for various reasons — without obtaining a degree. Nevertheless, they typically end up with thousands of dollars in student debt that will take them years to pay off.
The cost of college has more than doubled over the past four decades, and student debt has risen along with it. The student loan balance in the U.S. now totals more than $1.74 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve. About half of all students who graduate with a bachelor’s degree leave college with student debt burdens, averaging about $30,000, according to USA Today.
A 2022 survey of 1,000 recent college graduates by Intelligent.com indicated that 48% were “living paycheck to paycheck” and 69% were concerned about their ability to repay their student loans.
The same survey indicated that only 46% of graduates are working in the same field in which they earned their degree.
But granting that college is not necessarily the right choice for everyone, the Colorado Constitution demands that all children have access to a free public education. The Constitution does not, however, demand that families be given a choice as to which educational model they prefer for their children.
That decision — to provide educational choices — is made by the Colorado legislature, and by local school boards.
Which is to say, the decision is political.
Read Part Three, tomorrow…