Three suburban Colorado legislators last month introduced a bill designed to run public charter schools out of the state. Yet, most charter schools serve urban, not suburban, children. In Colorado, 49.5% of all charter school students live in a city. Not surprisingly, more than half are non-white. Additionally, almost 40% are eligible for a free or reduced lunch, which is how education systems measure low-income students. By way of contrast, just 2.5% of Colorado’s suburban students attend a charter school.
So, why are state Reps. Tammy Story and Lorena García, and Sen. Lisa Cutter crusading against a public education option preferred by minority families who aren’t their constituents?
It’s not as if they’re “bad” schools. The Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University studied national test scores from 2009 to 2019. Colorado charter school students placed second in the nation. In a slightly different study by Stanford University’s Center for Research of Educational Outcomes, Colorado’s public charter school students benefitted from extra personalized learning each year — equal to 15 extra days of reading instruction and 13 days in math — when compared to district schools. That’s fantastic for the state’s 135,000 children lucky enough to get off of a waiting list and get a seat.
