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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2005-01-12

Speaking of Charter Schools

from the Rocky:

A lawsuit filed Monday in Denver District Court says only the Boulder Valley School Board should be allowed to approve charter schools in the district.

The legislature passed a law two years ago to give limited chartering authority to the state Charter School Institute; this was a "back-door" approach to allow more charter schools in districts which were unfriendly to charter schools, and thus denied most or all applications.

This is an interesting case. The reflexive resistance of some education bureaucrats to charter schools does make it difficult to keep these operating in the way they were designed to. However, common sense--and a variety of legal judgements--establish the doctrine of "local control" in Colorado schools, which dictates that the decision-making process for schools should be as close to the school as possible, with the state given a largely oversight role.

So what's interesting is going to be seeing how the two ideas play out, even within one side of the ideological spectrum: will conservatives, who are advocates of both charter schools AND local control, find a happy middle ground to argue?

I'll try to keep an eye on this one.
Posted by: Michael / 1/12/2005 01:12:00 AM

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