Where’s the focus on education quality in Colorado?

The truth is that our schools are in crisis. The latest National Assessment for Educational Progress test results — known less formally as “the Nation’s Report Card” — were released last month, and they can only serve as a wake-up call for families and policymakers. The average student in our country remains nearly half a grade level behind in math and reading compared to pre-pandemic levels — and those pre-pandemic levels were nothing to brag about. If ever there were a time when quality must be front and center in the dialogue and decision-making about education in our state, it is now.

As has been a consistent drumbeat for years, many point exclusively to a lack of funding as the issue driving these distressing outcomes. If only there were more and adequate resources devoted to education, the argument goes, then we would see the results our kids need. As someone who has been closely engaged at the Colorado state Capitol for the past decade, I can attest firsthand to just how much this line of reasoning dominates the debate on education.

The problem is that this singular focus on funding belies the facts. One of the more compelling pieces of information I’ve seen recently is a graph from the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. It clearly shows that even while per-pupil funding in Colorado has increased 92% over the past decade, test scores have gone in the opposite direction.

Funding might play a significant role in our public education system, particularly when it comes to paying our indispensable teachers what they deserve, but it is clearly not the panacea many portray it to be. Spending alone will not get our children the outcomes and opportunities they deserve.

In the Colorado public charter school sector, we have centered quality as the North Star around which we orient our efforts. It is why we were pleased to see a recent report from the Keystone Policy Center showing that Colorado charter schools not only consistently achieve higher academic outcomes in general, but that these stronger results become particularly pronounced in our state’s areas of highest need.

Indeed, across many of Colorado’s most historically underserved communities, the Keystone Report shows that students are 32 percentage points more likely to attend a Colorado Department of Education “Green/Performance” school when attending a charter versus not. And charter schools are doing this with less money, not more.

But even with these promising results, we recognize that there is more — so much more — to be done. It’s why two years ago our school leaders established quality standards for organizational membership. It is not enough for the charter school space to just create more public school options; those options need to be consistently high-quality if we’re going to do our part to deliver the results students and families in our state deserve.

Sadly, conversations such as these are not ones that are happening more broadly across public education in Colorado right now. Our kids deserve better. They deserve a debate grounded in data and focused on results.

We must make quality the central tenet of our education discussion and refuse to be distracted by all things tangential.

As our elected officials debate education throughout the remainder of the 2025 Colorado legislative session, quality must be the litmus test by which we evaluate potential policies, spending and proposed bills. We must identify the things that work and extend them to ALL of our public schools. It is the least we can do for our public school students and families, especially in areas where few quality options exist.

Dan Schaller, CLCS President   |   The Denver Gazette

Dan Schaller is the president of the Colorado League of Charter Schools, a membership organization representing the interests of Colorado’s 262 public charter schools serving more than 136,000 students. Schaller is a former high school teacher in Denver. He and his wife have two school-age daughters.