The coincidence was ironic.

Last week, the state released the latest results from annual “CMAS” student achievement tests administered across Colorado — revealing yet another year of abysmal performance in the wake of COVID’s school closures.

The same week, a proposed charter school focused on Black students in Denver won its appeal before the State Board of Education to be reconsidered after being turned down by the state’s largest school district. Denver’s school board — once a national leader on educational innovations like charter schools but more recently dominated by an anti-reform majority controlled by the local teachers union — now will have to give the 5280 Freedom School another hearing.

Though the two developments were unrelated, the timing illustrated anew how poorly so many of our state’s public schools are performing — and what’s needed to turn them around: more choices for parents. Change can’t come soon enough.

As reported in last Wednesday’s Gazette, aggregate student performance on the Colorado Measures of Academic Success tests crept up slightly from last year but still lags student performance from 2019. That’s the last year of testing before COVID’s lockdown shuttered schools and stranded students in remote learning at home, where many kids languished. Not only did their academic development deteriorate amid the isolation, so did their social, emotional and mental health.

What really puts it all in perspective, though, is the 2019 test data from which statewide student achievement has slid. That year, only 44.5% of Colorado students met or exceeded expectations in English, and 32.7% did so in math. Viewed as a grade for our state’s public schools in educating our kids, either of those numbers would be well below an F.

Of course, the 2022 results — even lower, at 43.5% and 31.4%, respectively — still were accompanied by attempts to view the glass as half full even though it wasn’t close.

“Today, we celebrate the fact that student scores were better in most cases than they were in 2021, but we continue to face the challenge of fully bringing kids back to the levels they were before the disruptions of the pandemic as well as closing the historic opportunity and achievement gaps,” declared Colorado Education Commissioner Katy Anthes.

“Bringing kids back,” in other words, to a level of achievement in which fully two thirds still weren’t even performing at grade level in math.

What was actually worth celebrating last week was in fact the tentative victory of the 5280 Freedom School, which will have another chance to disrupt the one-size-fits-all public ed monopoly and try something different in hopes of reaching at-risk students.

Such charter schools, which serve a tenth of Colorado’s public school students, can make a real difference in student achievement. Research a couple of years ago by Colorado’s Common Sense Institute revealed, for example, that charter schools have higher graduation rates than district-run schools in the state’s metro, north central and Pikes Peak regions. And they have a nearly 6% higher graduation rate for Black students across the state.

Accountability metrics like the annual CMAS results can be enlightening — but only if Coloradans, from parents to policy makers, read them the right way. There’s little to cheer in incremental improvements when the big picture is so dismal. Let’s use the numbers instead as a reminder of the major reforms that are needed to stop failing so many Colorado children.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board