Colorado Senate President James Coleman and state Rep. Jennifer Bacon have introduced a bill, Senate Bill 26-170, to form an education task force, for the umpteenth time, to identify and expand “effective public schools.” Their goal, for the umpteenth time, is to find public schools that have addressed “opportunity gaps” based on race, geography and socioeconomic status.

Almost 40 years ago, education “reformers” initiated this idea: if only public schools did a better job of educating low-income, minority children, the achievement gap limiting opportunities for low-income students of color would close. This idea generated the charter school movement and Colorado Measures of Academic Success (CMAS) testing.

In Colorado, reformers envisioned charter schools, with independence from regulations and union agreements hindering traditional public schools, would innovate education strategies that would close achievement and opportunity gaps. Bad teachers had to be fired and bad schools had to be closed.
Let’s acknowledge that Jim Crow education along with Jim Crow everything else did produce unrelenting poverty and segregated, under-resourced schools. That’s history that cannot be ignored or forgotten ever.

In the 2000s, gushers of legislative work followed, including laws to base teacher performance evaluations on the results of their students’ CMAS scores, expansion of charter school funding, creation of the Charter School Institute, creation of innovation schools and innovation school zones, and now the introduction of tax credits for student scholarships to attend private schools. Achievement gaps remain.

SB26-170 replays portions of this script. The bill will establish a task force of people with various education backgrounds appointed by the usual executive and legislator leaders to find and replicate “successful” schools. This search, funded by gifts, grants and donations, will hire consultants to do this work.
It’s imperative citizens pay close attention to the gifters, granters and donators. Few individuals or foundations give large chunks of money with no agenda.

Traditionally in Colorado, the gifters are either conservative foundations such as the Daniels Fund or “reformers” such as the Gates Family Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (or its current iteration), and City Fund. These entities support education reform movements to privatize public education so schools would no longer be public, although they would probably be funded with public dollars.

The task force can save a lot of consultant money with some basic research into the Colorado Department of Education’s (CDE) data sources on school and student “achievement performance.” This public data tells the story of achievement gaps if anyone cares to look.

Let’s assume, as bill sponsors apparently do, CMAS scores are the gold standard for determining “successful” schools. The elementary school reading, math and science tests, along with test participation rates, are published at CDE’s School View so anyone can view results by individual schools.

Analyzing the best elementary schools in Colorado selected by AI and other school rating programs, these schools educate students who are mostly white, income secure, native English speakers, without disabilities, and in the case of magnet schools, selected.

Top performing schools are either located in high income neighborhoods or are gifted and talented magnet schools. Polaris school in Denver is top of the top. This school educates the brightest children in Denver. Here are its statistics: 17% of students are on free-and-reduced lunch to the district’s average of 63%, 43% are minority to the district’s average of 63%, 7% are non-English speakers to the district’s average of 36% and 7% are disabled to the district’s average of 14%. Polaris has an achievement performance rating of 98.5%, exceeding standards in every measured area. If CMAS is the only selector, by gosh, Polaris wins.

Buffalo Ridge Elementary in Castle Pines is another successful school with a 76.8% rating. It is situated in an affluent community. Its demographics are not consistent with state averages: 14% of students are on free-and-reduced lunch, 32% are minorities, 8% are English language learners, and 14% are disabled. To compare, state averages run thus: 45% free-and-reduced lunch, 51% minority and 36% English language learners.

It appears that if CMAS is the best measure of achievement, low-income kids are at the butt-end of another opportunity gap breaker. No surprise there.
Sen. Coleman and Rep. Bacon no doubt know about Denver’s many years’ experiment in trying to mitigate achievement/opportunity gaps. The experiment involved busing students so schools had a more distributed mix of children. The court ruled in 1995 to end the Keyes v School District 1 case. By that time, thousands of Denver residents and their children moved out of the city to the suburbs. Today, Denver Public Schools are re-segregated with minority students concentrated in charter school systems such as Rocky Mountain Prep, KIPP and University Prep.

Low-income students in these Denver charters show varying results across years and within school systems, even though these schools use mostly the standardized curricula and teaching strategies implemented by their charter entity. Results never reach Polaris levels.

What if Denver tried the best solution to reduce achievement gaps and gave it up: integration. What if integration beats out charters and privatizing as the most effective strategy for mitigating achievement and opportunity gaps. What then?

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.