Vinny Badolato is vice president of public affairs at the Colorado League of Charter Schools.

Wednesday is an important day for the charter school sector in Colorado.  That morning, the State Board of Education (SBE) will be voting on rules containing a set of standards that pertain to certain aspects of charter school operations and charter school authorizing.

These rules, once approved by the SBE, have the potential to transform the school/authorizer relationship and mark the next phase in the increasingly positive and productive evolution of charter schools in Colorado.

Wednesday’s vote is the culmination of multiple years of work by a wide variety of policy organizations and policymakers to move the charter school sector in Colorado to the next stage.  This effort has been spearheaded by the Colorado League of Charter Schools as a key tenet of the “Charter 2.0” initiative to implement and integrate quality standards and principles across Colorado’s charter school landscape.

The goal is to elevate the already high-performing charter school system to a new level based on industry standards and best practices that better define quality in order to cultivate a more fertile and productive system, as well as strengthen the relationship between charter schools and authorizers.

The SBE is tasked with approving rules for these standards as part of HB 10-1412, a bipartisan bill that represents a close collaboration between several education associations and stakeholder groups.  That bill created a committee of experts, dubbed the 1412 Committee, appointed by various state policymakers with the task of developing and vetting standards for charter school and authorizers in several categories, and then submitting a slate of recommendations to be approved by the SBE by January 15, 2012.

This committee met monthly for nearly a year, vetted proposals, and submitted its recommendations – not only for the required SBE standards rules, but also for a number of additional policy areas for board rules and legislative action (I’ll talk more about legislative impact of the 1412 Committee recommendation in my next post).  It was extremely gratifying to be a part of the genesis and excellent work of this committee, and it is heartening to know that the SBE will be approving a thoroughly vetted and expertly developed set of high-quality standards for schools and authorizers.

The actual background and content of the standards, along with the work of the committee, has been written about in this space previously (here and here), but I do want to mention why these standards are so important.  On the school side, the standards before the board represent a clear set of guidelines concerning aspects of charter school governance and admissions/enrollment.

Previously, these guidelines and directives were scattered throughout federal and state laws and regulations, making assurances of compliance difficult to ascertain. Now, schools will have only one place to go in order to verify their decision-making and policies in these areas, as well as help to silence those who have for too long used anecdotes based on fallacies to disparage charter schools.

In regard to authorizers, this marks the first time in the almost 19 years since the Charter School Act was passed in Colorado that the state will have examined and issued policies detailing what high-quality authorizing looks like in Colorado.   Just as schools will now have a go-to place to evaluate their policies and know what is expected of them, authorizers will also have a clear and concise manner to evaluate their policies and practice to understand what high-quality authorizing looks like in Colorado.

This is a sea-change from current practice.  And since we know that good authorizing is an essential element of a high-quality charter school system, these standards can only serve to further improve charter school performance into the future.

Once the standards are approved, the League plans on educating all stakeholders about the integration and implementation of the standards and will be evaluating that implementation to ensure that these standards are followed and utilized across the board.

If followed with fidelity, which I expect they will be, then these standards will help shift the charter schools sector so that the entire Colorado public school system – and the children it serves – will be the beneficiaries.