This commentary was submitted by Democrat Jared Polis who represents Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. Congress.
With this week’s celebrations of school choice week all across America, I remain optimistic about the great promise and opportunity of offering effective public school options for parents and students.
Chief among these are quality charter schools, which are leading the way in student achievement in so many areas in Colorado and across the country. Online learning is another important public school choice opportunity to help students succeed, whether blended, supplementary or full-time. Districts also open focus schools or magnet schools that are open equally to families across the school district.
In Colorado, as in some other states, we wisely allow students and their families to choose schools outside of their neighborhood school and even their school district. Districts can take cues from parental demand to replicate and expand successful models with waiting lists and modify or close unsuccessful schools.
With Colorado legislators getting back to work and the State Board of Education passing important rules on charter and online school issues, it is essential that state policymakers focus on sustaining the innovations of school choice, while realizing positive student outcomes. Just in the past month, we have learned that charter schools boosted student achievement growth rates in Denver Public Schools by five percent, led by such outstanding schools as the Denver School for Science and Technology and West Denver Preparatory Charter School. These schools and others like them across the country underscore why charter schools are critical to our public education system.
They are a reminder to policymakers at all levels to ensure that laws, rules and other policies facilitate student choice.
For choice to be meaningful, there also needs to be a transportation component. Choice should not mean choice only for those who have parents who can take them to a school across town. Not including busing options or transportation reimbursement risks letting choice further stratify schools by income level.
Good school choice enhances, not detracts from, our public education system because the competition helps drive traditional public schools to do better and effectively meet the wide variety of student learning needs and interests. That’s why we are seeing such a huge increase in the popularity and student enrollments in charter schools in Colorado and the U.S. Even as the country as a whole experienced a massive increase in charter school enrollment last year, Colorado ranked 8th in its increase of 8,500 students, an 11.9 percent jump. We saw the opening of 13 new charter schools in our state just last year.
In Congress, I have worked with Republicans and Democrats to infuse some of Colorado’s successful charter school policy structures into federal law by amending the one bipartisan piece of education legislation to pass the U.S. House of Representatives, the reauthorization of the federal Charter School Programs.
My bill to expand and replicate effective charter schools would codify for the first time federal investment of dollars in this effort. This legislation also includes new language that I proposed prioritizing multiple charter authorizers, such as the Colorado Charter School Institute, and autonomous charter school food services.
When a school district is the only authorizer, it can put them in a very difficult situation, because they are sometimes the approval body and regulator of what some view as their own competition. While enlightened districts have embraced choice as part of a dynamic portfolio of public schools to better serve all families, too many districts continue to see them as competition with “their” schools.
In Colorado, it is critical that lawmakers, state and local administrators and other decision-makers not back away from the progress they have made in these and other areas by restricting charter schools’ access to grants, facilities and flexible contracting for student services. This is a struggle every legislative session and one that should come into sharp focus as we recognize the benefits of school choice during school choice week.
Similarly it is essential that the fast-growing online learning environments are not shut to Colorado students. Recent data shows that some full-time online schools are struggling, and others are performing comparably to other traditional schools in the state. This should come as no surprise. Our goal should not be to stifle innovation, but rather to identify successful online practices, build and replicate them, and improve schools that are failing.
If a particular school continues to fail, fewer parents will choose such a failing model resulting in its closure, but policymakers should not eliminate or suppress the entire online model. Some struggles in this emerging field are to be expected in the early years of any new model, especially when it involves technology and particularly when many online students have failed in traditional learning environments. Full-time online and part-time online learning can be an ideal setting for at-risk students and others who learn better with this approach. Additionally, blended online and supplemental online learning are helping students access classes that were previously unavailable to them. Technology and choice in general are supporting student achievement, and should be nurtured not weakened.
While the House considers the recently released Republican education accountability and teacher effectiveness bills, it would serve members well to remember the outstanding bipartisan work on the charter school act just four months ago, so this essential piece of legislation does not languish during partisan bickering and inaction. Children cannot afford stagnation, and the federal government has a critical and constructive role to play in empowering parents across our nation to make the best choices for their child.
As a founder and former superintendent of charter schools in Colorado for low–income students and English language learners, I have seen first-hand how charter schools and choice can help open doors for children who otherwise would probably not be in school at all. Children succeeding in school is a make or break issue for the economic strength and competitiveness of our nation and state. Empowering all families with school choice should be honored every week in word and deed, not just this week.
I have great respect for the good Congressman, though we do not agree on the school choice issue. He makes a crucial point that DPS should heed:
“For choice to be meaningful, there also needs to be a transportation component. Choice should not mean choice only for those who have parents who can take them to a school across town. Not including busing options or transportation reimbursement risks letting choice further stratify schools by income level.”
Right now, the only parts of the district with any attempt to level the transportation field are those connected to the politically powerful. West Denver’s kids are ignored, as usual.
Rep. Polis: Given that charter schools perform about the same as traditional schools, it does not follow that competition helps raise performance for traditional schools. We have plenty of traditional and magnet schools that could be used to help raise performance across a district but policymakers have not chosen, by and large, to do that. It is easier and more politically expedient for people like yourself to pander to parent/voter requests for 21st Century separate and more-than-equal schools, aka, charters.
“Districts can take cues from parental demand to replicate and expand successful models with waiting lists and modify or close unsuccessful schools.” You assume all parents have equal access to information and can assess school assessment data equally well–a poor assumption. So, whatever districts can take will be garnered from the motivated, connected, and astute parental communities as many other parents and students get left behind.
“…we have learned that charter schools boosted student achievement growth rates in Denver Public Schools by five percent…” Interesting, isn’t it? But you come to the wrong conclusion. If charters and magnets allow students from outside Denver, it is not accurate to say that achievement has grown in DPS. Schools like DSST also are provided millions of outside dollars in funding; Oprah never comes by Lincoln with a million dollar check and Liberty Media never gives Montbello $7 million, only to DSST. “My bill to expand and replicate effective charter schools would codify…” All you’re doing now is to slowly create a shadow school system as bureaucratized as the one we have.
“Some struggles in this emerging field are to be expected in the early years of any new model…” So, am I to assume that forcing children to be experimental subjects without their consent is to be ethically condoned? You and others may retort that leaving kids in failing schools is no better an ethical take on the matter. I would agree that allowing children to languish is tragic. The thing is, we could help all kids with the system we have and it turns out that it takes more than a school or a district or teachers for children to succeed in life–it takes an entire community and it takes eliminating poverty and malnutrition only, it’s just too darn hard for adults to take that on. It’s far easier to play a shell game of blame with the public: “Join us next week on ‘Scapegoat’ when we try to blame ________ for the failure of American public schools!” The school reform game has been playing in America for a hundred years, why stop the show now if every new generation falls for the pretense?
“…competition helps drive traditional public schools to do better…” Are you certain? Is that all it takes? Here’s a suggestion: expose and train all significant parts of the educational system (mostly teachers and admin) to master’s degree levels of knowledge and personal research in and out of the classroom–in both a content area and in educational theory and practice. Then, instead of spending your and your fellow politician’s precious time in trying to guide a system you don’t work in every day, just leave education to we professionals and use your extra time actually doing something about childhood poverty, increasing technology access for low and middle income groups, and engaging in public works projects that improve the quality of life for everyone.
Hey Jeff,
Where’s the evidence that giving MA’s in Education works? In fact most of the evidence suggests it does not a thing to improve student learning. You might also want to reread the CREDO study in terms of the CO schools and check out some that same Stanford teams more recent research. Some charters are doing much better than district schools….New Orleans? You also might want to check out the recent study by A+ that sheds some light on charters and DPS. Hey don’t get me wrong many charters in OH AZ and even here should be shut down which in most cases is the district’s fault!
@ Jeff “pander to parent/voter requests” or as the rest of us like to call it, representing your constituency instead of special interests trying to protect their turf and the status quo. I personally think the congressman should be applauded for standing up for the families in his district that are demanding choice, even though it is not a popular position amongst those that give boat loads of money to his party.
I’m not sure that anyone is really demanding choice. I find almost no evidence to support that, aside from the few parents that Stand manages to scrounge up from time to time. In fact, some of my constituents in SW Denver have expressed frustration with me for pushing in a West Denver Prep high school and a DSST at the former Loretto Heights. No one ever asks me for more choice. They ask me for more support to existing schools.
This new report, about Minnesota’s experience with the “competition driving better results” fallacy, should be instructive: http://www.scribd.com/doc/78177066/False-Choices-The-Economic-Argument-Against-Market-Driven-Education-Reform
With regard to Colorado charters and CREDO, the study didn’t look at how charters support English learners, which in Denver, are a huge chunk of the charter school population. But I have. I will write a piece very soon that shows how that all pans out.
Mr. Farmer, to which “special interests” do you refer? Shouldn’t you include those special interests such as the Walton Foundation, Gates Family Foundation, Stand for Children, etc., who pour millions into those most successful charter schools and ignore low income neighborhood schools? The parents of students in such “apartheid” schools as Denver’s Kepner Middle School, overcrowded with 1200 students and 95% Latino certainly wouldn’t qualify. Mr. Polis, a rich man, represents the charter school lobby that is, as stated, well funded by “special interests.” The status quo hasn’t changed. It’s still an authoritarian system, the same as it has been for over a century that principally benefits the privileged.
Van, good question. My answer, Finland, for starters. See, the thing is that over there, the teachers are granted far more autonomy but also are expected to be professionals. As I see it, teaching is a complex profession and requires constant attention to doing essentially, research in the classroom. Not just formal action research but also informal assessment of one’s students. The ability to be able to do real research, understand complex information from human subjects, and construct meaningful lessons upon reflection on classroom research is hard-won and few young adults with a bachelor degree or TFA-only experience can really perform at this high intellectual level. http://www.pearsonfoundation.org/oecd/finland.html And then, one should have another MA in a discipline for 6-12 teaching so one really knows one or two subjects well and can carry out fundamental research in that discipline.
Just the degree alone, in anything, is not what I’m advocating. It must be a specifically-targeted MA program that emphasizes being able to ask good questions about the subject and then designing credible research programs to find solutions. This is what classroom teachers do every single day whether they know it or not. Then, add in on-going support for professional teachers, budgeting flexibility, freedom from standardized tests and curricula and you will see dramatic changes. And oh yes, get politicians out of the way.
I am also familiar with CREDO and the success in New Orleans. An interesting exchange took place on this website three years ago http://blog.ednewscolorado.org/2009/10/20/about-that-stanford-report-on-charters It would appear we have yet to answer some of those questions. With CREDO-CO, and the A+ work, I don’t see the methodological provisions made for selection bias and attrition effects nor any mention of funding differences. New Orleans? So what? It’s demographics are different along with any number of other attributes. Neither you nor Tim actually attempted to answer my questions, all you’ve done is suggest I do more homework.
Andrea and Ed did a nice job addressing related matters. And Tim, we all know about the squeaky wheel. The Tea Party minority was successful (as have movement conservatives) in wresting power from the traditional Republican Party, building local membership and using that to eventually claim a share of federal House representation (to the great detriment of both the Republican Party and the nation). Same in education, so long as we allow it to be politicized.