Good news is rare in many fields, but in education pleasant exceptions keep cropping up. Despite corrupt teacher unions’ self-serving resistance to nearly any sensible reforms, various school-choice programs are gaining ground and proving their worth.
Even in the age of Obama, liberals are coming around to the conservative idea that freedom is better than one-size-fits-all in schooling, as it is elsewhere. The easy explanation is that liberals love their children as much as conservatives love theirs, and it’s creating bipartisan agreement that it’s a good idea to adopt ideas that work. In many major cities, this is a revolutionary idea, and it is revolutionizing education.
The latest success story comes from Denver, where Democrats long ago bought into radical reform of the failing city school system. David Osborne, director of an education reform project at the Progressive Policy Institute, penned a piece in this summer’s issue of Education Next on how this came together. The result has been an expanding universe of charter schools and “innovation schools” (essentially a lighter, less autonomous form of charters) in the Mile High City.
Beginning in 2005, against fierce resistance, reformists took steps to transform a system that students had been fleeing for private schools and suburbs. They closed dozens of underperforming schools and opened even more new ones, most of them charters.
Today, about 37 percent of Denver public school students attend charter schools (18 percent) or innovation schools (17 percent), whereas only 7 percent attended charters in 2005. Between 2005-15, overall student proficiency in reading, writing and math increased by nearly half, much faster than the state average. The share of students dropping out of school fell by more than half. The city’s black and Hispanic students, who lagged the state’s non-white student performance outside of Denver, are now nearly on par with them.
All types of elementary schools in Denver have improved, but the success at the high school level has been driven almost entirely by gains in charter schools, Osborne notes. This despite the fact that charters serve demographically identical populations in terms of income, race (they are actually a bit more non-white than other public schools) and special-needs status. Charters also receive 19 percent less in funds for each student they enroll.
Innovation schools have not improved as rapidly as charters, but a plan is already afoot to grant them autonomy more like that of charter schools.
“Denver has proven, for a decade now, that charter schools offer a more effective model of urban education,” Osborne writes. And as he notes, the same strategy is being used in many other cities, such as New Orleans and Washington, D.C., with historic levels of success.
The reasoning behind charters is simple. Government may be the best instrument for guaranteeing money for universal education, but nothing about government suggests it knows how to actually run a school. The evidence of the past several decades is that it is terrible at the job, especially when faced with the severe challenges presented by poor cities.
The liberal and Democratic buy-in to school choice made the difference in Denver, benefiting schoolchildren of all backgrounds. In a sharply politically divided America, it is heartening to see a good idea like this one catch on with people of all backgrounds.
