There is a lot of talk in the education community these days about "reform." But what most people mean by "reform" seems to be school choice, in the form of charter schools. I was the prime sponsor of a bill in Colorado (Senate Bill 09-163) that provides real reform. I believe that real reform involves improving the education system so it helps struggling students and schools, not so it provides ways to help kids flee from schools with a lot of struggling students.
SB 09-163 changes the way Colorado holds schools and districts accountable and how they are dealt with if they are low-performing. It eliminates the rating system that has been used to label schools based solely on the number of students at each level of proficiency on state assessments during one year. Not surprisingly, with this rating system, the schools labeled "Low" and "Unsatisfactory" were the ones with a significant number of poor students. The new method of accountability in SB 09-163 measures the amount students grow in their learning from year to year. With the old system, schools that had students who improved from one year to the next but didn't make enough improvement to rise to a higher proficiency level appeared to make no progress, whereas with the new system, schools are credited with a realistic reflection of student learning. Now we can see that many schools with a high percentage of poor students are doing a good job of moving kids forward.
The other notable way the new accountability system helps struggling schools is by providing assistance to them. It gets parents involved in planning for school improvement. It provides a panel of experts to review the improvement plans and make suggestions. The old system didn't provide any help; it just forced low-performing schools to be converted to charter schools after three years of low ratings. However, after the first school underwent this conversion, and subsequently closed a year later because the chartering entity failed utterly, state law was changed to allow other kinds of restructuring. The new system broadens the options for restructuring, and even better, it gives schools five years to implement changes and see if they work before being forced to restructure.
Labeling schools doesn't help kids, and it doesn't make schools better. Judging schools on one year's test scores alone is not a valid reflection of how they are doing. The old accountability system was put in place by our former governor, Republican Bill Owens. Thank goodness our new governor, Democrat Bill Ritter, saw fit to approve the new, true reform. Let's hope that likewise our new Democratic president will see fit to change the federal accountability system from the punitive Republican version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in "No Child Left Behind" to something that is true reform too.