Today more than ever, a strong education is a child’s pathway to future success.
Globalization, resulting labor market changes and the growing emphasis on advanced education to secure high-paying jobs have increased the need for schools to prepare all children to succeed.
While many public schools are effectively meeting this challenge, some – often those serving our neediest students – have consistently struggled to meet these increased educational needs. And as the stakes have risen, so has the pressure on state policymakers and school district leaders to improve such struggling schools.
That’s why it is so puzzling that the Colorado legislature has weakened a first-of-its-kind state law passed in 2000 that enables state policymakers to close failing schools and reopen them as independent charter schools.
But this is precisely what the legislature did last spring when it passed House Bill 1240. Only one independent charter school had opened under the 2000 law before the legislature gutted it.
The watered-down law opens significant loopholes to stymie the creation of additional independent charter schools. For example, it allows schools where students consistently underachieve to avoid closure by creating “school improvement plans,” but offers little or no guidance about how much time the school has to improve or by what criteria the plans should be measured.
Similarly, HB 1240 allows districts to avoid state-imposed shutdowns of failing schools by implementing “major restructuring.” Again, it is unclear what criteria such restructuring must meet.
Why is weakening the 2000 law a mistake? The former Cole Middle School in Denver offers the first, and only, opportunity to answer this question.
The school, which in 2004 became Colorado’s first to be closed by the state Board of Education, reopened as Cole College Prep in 2005. It provides a living laboratory from which policymakers, education leaders and the public can learn.
Cole’s conversion got off to a rocky start, in part because the 2000 law had serious design flaws. First, there was no provision made for kids caught in the transition from district school to charter. Second, the process for selecting the group that would open and run the new independent charter school was woefully murky. Finally, the timing required under the law was problematic.
This created controversy surrounding the state’s ultimate selection of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) to run the new Cole.
These flaws in the law produced some troubling consequences. First, there was not the level of community buy-in or support that a better process might have generated.
Second, KIPP, a national school operator with a solid reputation, was forced to throw away its successful playbook and improvise an awkward implementation strategy. KIPP typically opens schools with only fifth-graders, and then adds a grade a year until the school includes grades 5 through 8. At Cole College Prep, however, KIPP had to accommodate former Cole Middle School seventh- and eighth-graders instead of phasing in the school one grade at a time.
Finally, the time constraints imposed by Colorado law left insufficient time for KIPP to find and train a new principal through its nationally recognized leadership training program.
These issues guaranteed a bumpy opening for Cole College Prep. Take the lack of leadership training as an example. Cole College Prep opened its doors for the first time in August 2005. By that time, the new school had already lost its first principal and would soon lose its second. It was not until well into the school year that Richard Harrison, a Cole teacher, took the reins.
This leadership turnover also prompted a teacher exodus. By October, three teachers – half the school’s faculty – left or were preparing to leave. To make matters worse, the governing board required by state law to oversee Cole College Prep had dissolved, and KIPP never stepped in during the school year to create a new board, something that could have provided tremendous support for an already overworked principal.
Amid challenges like those faced by Cole College Prep, can one truly expect student performance to improve? The answer, apparently, is yes.
While test scores alone cannot paint a full picture of any school’s performance, scores can provide an objective basis by which the new school can be compared with the old.
On the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP), Cole College Prep’s students scored higher than students in the former Cole Middle School in nearly every category of reading, math, science and writing.
In most cases, student performance either doubled or tripled from the previous year. With the exception of its eighth grade reading scores, the new Cole also met or exceeded the performance of other regular Denver Public Schools serving similar percentages of at-risk students.
If independent charters like Cole College Prep can show such significant improvement in just one year, the last thing the state should do is weaken the law that allows such schools to be created.
Instead, the state legislature and board of education need to take steps now to fix the design problems in the 2000 law and ensure that provisions of HB 1240 are either changed or enforced so they do not weaken the state’s ability to open new independent charters like Cole.
While the new Cole has had only one year of operation, and that year was full of obstacles, the school still began to demonstrate positive student results. Imagine what types of performance improvement we might see if changes in the law are made now to remove those obstacles.
If education does represent the doorway through which children must pass to be successful adults, then state leaders must learn from the lesson that Cole Middle School seems to teach: Sometimes, closing one door can lead to the successful opening of another.
The report is available on the Web at Article/colereport.final06.pdf.
