They're Coming to take it away (Choice, that is)

Parental choice (as in school choice) has been a part of the Colorado education environment for years. Liberals and Democrats have been fretting for years over how to take choice away from parents. They have had to go so far as claiming to support choice, but only opposing vouchers. Those of us who have had to deal with these dishonest people always knew better.

Now that the National Education Association labor union has taken control of the Colorado state government through the election of a Democrat party majority, the left has found its opening to attack parents. Michael (Honey, will you please go out and steal my opponent's yard signs for me) Merrifield is leading the charge to destroy the charter school movement in Colorado.

Merrifield and his labor union allies are pushing for legislation that would limit charter school attendance to only students who fall below a certain income level. In other words, he wants to take choice away from middle class families, effectively trapping them in low performing schools when necessary. This was from the January 9th Gazette: "State Rep. Michael Merrifield told us during an interview that he also would like to means-test applicants to charter schools and online schools, limiting participation to “at-risk students.” But that takes the choice of schools out of the hands of parents and falsely assumes that only children in lower socioeconomic circumstances can be “at-risk.”

It is interesting to watch as the anti-parental choice left fights this charter battle from both sides. In D11, which is populated with anti-choice board members and administrators, the argument against charters locating in low income neighborhoods is that there would be no transportation provided by the charters, so poor families would not be able to get their kids to the school. What the administration and liberal board members are saying is that poor families don't care enough to make an effort to get their kids to a quality school, so there is no use in placing one in their neighborhoods. Out of the other side of their mouths, administrators such as D11 CFO Glenn Gustafson are pushing the Democrats to prohibit middle class families from attending charters because Gustafson claims that charters are hurting D11's budget. The argument is that when students leave their neighborhood schools for charters, the money follows the student.

Notice how Gustafson and other anti-parental choice educators and legislators always attack the parents for removing their kids from their failing neighborhood schools in attempt to give them a quality education, but they never acknowledge that these schools are failing those kids in the first place. To people like this, it is more important for a child to bring money into a district by occupying a seat in a neighborhood school building than it is for the public school district to actually earn that money by thoroughly educating that child.

To be clear, the leftists are saying on one hand that it is meaningless to locate a charter in a poor neighborhood because those kids won't attend the school anyway. On the other hand, they are attempting to create legislation that would prohibit kids from middle class neighborhoods or higher from attending charters at all. The highest performing schools in the state(TCA, Cheyenne Mountain Charter) would not exist should this legislation become law. That, of course, is the ultimate goal .

Those on the left have criticized my use of the term "anti-parental choice" to describe them, but they are proving me to be correct once again. After the Democrats have had their way on the state for a couple of years, an education system that already has very little accountability will have even less with the removal of parental choice. It certainly is not about educating kids for those elitists on the left, many of whom send their kids to private schools. It is about using kids,however, to continue to fund an education system that spends more money on politics than it does on education.