With a 2020 session ahead likely to be full of partisan rancor and pitched legislative battles, my wish is that when it comes to K-12, education we can find bipartisan support for three key principles: supporting great teachers, expanding school choice options for families, and improving the way we fund our public schools.

Colorado has thousands of great teachers leading classrooms in all corners of the state. They are changing kids’ lives through inspiration and hard work. Unfortunately, many state and local policies fail to treat our teachers like the professionals they are. Too often teachers are forced into one-size-fits-all employment contracts that limit their ability to negotiate higher salaries based on performance.

Teachers are also one of the few kinds of public employees who don’t have a choice in their retirement plan — meaning that many teachers are required to contribute huge sums of their salary into a pension system that mostly funds other employees’ retirements.

My first wish is that Colorado legislators will give teachers the same control over their salary and benefits that other professionals have.

Here’s one thing Colorado legislators should not do if they want to help teachers: dump more money into the same broken system.

For decades, Colorado has increased the amount of money it spends on K-12 education. Colorado’s education spending is at the highest level in its history, but the money doesn’t ever seem to end up in teacher’s pockets. Since 1990, we have increased K-12 spending by 20%, but teacher salaries are down 20% over that same time period.

We need to find more targeted ways to ensure the money ends up going to teachers.

One way would be to increase the teacher tax credit for school supplies. Currently teachers spend over $500 out of their own pocket on supplies for their classrooms. A tax-credit-funded account for teachers will give them autonomy over how these dollars are spent without forcing them to deplete their personal bank accounts. Think of it as a voucher for teachers to purchase education materials.

My second wish is that Republicans and Democrats come together to expand school choices for families. No one school can be the best school for every child, but Colorado’s education system must serve every student. This means that we must fight to give kids access to as many options as possible.

In order to increase the number of high-quality options available to families, legislators should allow public charter schools to expand or replicate if they can show a proven track-record of success. Public charter schools in Colorado are succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. When comparing Colorado charter schools against all 50 states on the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, Colorado charters would be #1 in the nation in 4th grade math and #2 in the nation in both 4th grade reading and 8th grade reading.

To expand school choice, we should focus not just on public charters, but also helping students choose a traditional district school outside of their zoned school through the state’s robust open enrollment law. Open enrollment — which allows parents to choose a traditional district school outside of their neighborhood school — is the most common form of school choice in Colorado.

Despite its popularity, there are still many transportation and bureaucratic barriers for students who want to use open enrollment, especially low-income and special-needs students. School districts have blocked recent efforts to provide more transportation options to families, but I hope legislators on both sides of the aisle will agree that low-income and special needs students should be given every support possible, including transportation to a school of their choice.

Finally, I hope that in 2020 we find a way to fix our broken and outdated school funding system.

Right now, the largest factor in determining how much funding students receive is based on the school district they attend, not the students themselves. This system-focused model often results in bizarre outcomes, like additional state subsidies for resort towns like Telluride or Aspen, while many rural students are left holding the bag. We should scrap this outdated funding system and adopt a formula that is based exclusively on the needs of individual students, not bureaucracies.

All three of my wishes for Colorado schools have strong bipartisan support, even if defenders of the status quo may fight like hell to oppose them. And because of that, were I granted a fourth wish, I would wish for a little more common sense when it comes to how we decide education policy in this state.

Luke Ragland is the president of Ready Colorado, a center-right education advocacy organization.