The war for education continues, and the side of literacy and opportunity suffered a defeat in Colorado earlier this month. Teachers unions’ and their allies dominating school boards flexed their bureaucratic muscle to stop school choice in its tracks.
Charter schools around the country, especially those structured to provide an education based on the classical model, have succeeded in improving the educational opportunities and achievements of those lucky enough to be enrolled in them. That fact that has remained as steady over the years as the low reading scores posted by the public-school system. What has evolved is the tenacity of the opposition from the local public school boards over which the teachers’ unions exert so much control, and from whom desperate parents must seek a blessing for a charter.
Consider Colorado, for instance. Over the past couple of decades, a number of charter schools have sprung up employing the classical education model, churning out highly literate students well-prepared for the universities the vast majority of them graduate on to. The academic achievement promised and delivered by these schools is a welcome contrast to the pablum and low expectations generally offered by the public schools, which endeavor consistently to barely exceed the lowest common denominator, the predictable results of which are virtual immobility in student achievement scores over the past half century.
One of these remarkable institutions is Ascent Classical Academy, which boasts two other schools in the state, offering students enhanced opportunities which some 600 parents in the Boulder area decided they want for their children. These parents sought the assistance of Ascent, and boldly, diligently, and meticulously went through the bureaucratic paces only to be summarily rejected by the local school board. (Though not before being labeled as Nazis and bigots by a union-whipped mob at the requisite public hearing for daring to wish for their youngsters a disciplined environment wherein they would learn not only the alphabet and the findings of Euclid, but an appreciation for the traditional ideals of their country and a sense of its historical and philosophical patrimony).
The next step for these beleaguered parents — now not only desperate for a quality school and exhausted by the laborious process of starting one, but freshly stung by the vilification they endured for loving their children and disillusioned by the tendentious and well-oiled opposition — was to appeal to the State Board of Education. That seven-person board consists of three Republicans and four Democrats. The rejection of the charter came about as a tie vote of 3-3, one of the Democrats having recused herself, falling along the predictable lines. It seems literacy is now a partisan issue.
The State Board’s majority failed to even consider the legal merits of Ascent’s appeal, that the charter’s structure is fully compliant with relevant statutes and the State Board’s own guidance. Rather than obeying its role as an impartial legal adjudicating body, the state board saw fit instead to obey the political demands of teachers’ unions, which fear school choice in much the same way as vampires fear sunlight.
The school boards’ objections are typically couched in concerns that the charter, for one reason or another, will fail to meet the board’s standards regarding discrimination, generally meaning not that the charter will not discriminate among applicants but that it cannot guarantee a student roster consisting of X percent of this or that minority or identity group. But the real fear is likely what it has always been when it comes to charters: that if they graduate too many students who don’t do drugs, find themselves in trouble with the law, or get pregnant (or get someone else pregnant), and instead can read and write; know something of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates; and feel some sense of gratitude when they hear Beethoven or read the Bill of Rights, the result could be an exodus from the underperforming public schools to the excelling charters, and with it a concurrent diminishment of union power.
Serious improvement in educational delivery may be at the point now of examining options to emancipate school choice from the fetters of the union-dominated school boards, which have a vested interest in the status quo and an ideological opposition to traditional, effective education, the learning of knowledge for its own sake and the passing along of our patrimony. A battle was lost in Colorado, but it is a long war and it will continue, for there is a great deal at stake.
Kelly Sloan (@KVSloan25) is a Denver-based public affairs consultant, columnist, and fellow at the Centennial Institute.
