Floor Speeches

As we begin to rewrite No Child Left Behind, we renew our commitment to closing the achievement gap and ensuring that each and every child, regardless of economic or ethnic background, receives a quality education and the opportunity to succeed.
 
At the committee’s June hearing on charter schools, we heard how top-performing charter schools with a rigorous curriculum and high expectations, are turning around student achievement and providing a world-class education to at-risk students.
 
Seeing the impact of such schools in neighborhoods across 40 states and the District of Columbia, parents want more access to excellent charter schools, but sadly the demand far exceeds the available seats.  About 365,000 students are on public charter school waiting lists nationwide, including 38,000 in Colorado.  
 
To address this problem and expand access to hope and opportunity, I introduced the All Students Achieving through Reform (All-STAR) Act, which enables successful public charter schools that get the job done to expand and replicate.  By building on what we know works, All-STAR allows more at-risk students to attend a great school and realize their full potential.
 
I know that there are those who wish that charter schools didn’t exist, and others who would like to see every public school converted to a charter school.  This bill embraces the pragmatic common ground that public charter schools are an asset to our education system, but only if they do what they were supposed to do: expand hope and educational opportunity to those students that need it the most.

We will hear today about the need for charter schools to improve their performance to better meet the special education needs of all students.  We will hear about the need for quality authorizers to intervene or close bad charter schools and ensure a fair authorizing process.  We will hear how many superintendents and teachers see charter schools as a powerful tool in a portfolio management approach to district governance.

The All-STAR bill is a catalyst—a catalyst for allowing disadvantaged kids to have a transformative life experience at a high-quality public school.  It is a catalyst for states to embrace good policies that promote quality charter growth while strengthening accountability and oversight.  It is a catalyst to promote best practices among authorizers, making sure that charter schools successfully serve the needs of students with disabilities and English language learners.  And it is a catalyst for proven models to disseminate throughout our schools, both traditional and charters.

As already recognized through Title V funding dating to the Clinton administration, the federal government has a critical role in helping new and innovative charter schools get off the ground.  Serving as laboratories of educational innovation, charter schools have pioneered some of the most promising and influential reform strategies, such as extended learning time, principal autonomy, data-driven research and instruction, and a laser focus on results.
 
This bill creates a separate and distinct allocation for the other major benefit of charter schools.  Yes, charter schools cause innovation to occur and challenge the forces of the status quo to embrace the hard work of improvement.  But charter schools also represent a part of the solution for what we all came here for, why we serve in this Congress, on this committee.  Data is a funny thing; we all try to use it for political advantage.  There are studies that show that charter schools are “better” and “more diverse” than other public schools, and studies that show that charters are worse or less diverse than other public schools.

What is indisputable, however, is that successful innovations have led to outstanding results.  Schools like KIPP, Harlem Success Academy, and Ricardo Flores Magon in my district are defying the odds and stand quietly as the most powerful testimony in refutation of those who believe but dare not say that “these children can’t learn.”

The Ricardo Flores Magon Academy in Westminster, Colorado, prepares kindergarten through eighth grade students for success in school, college and beyond.  The school has a longer school day with five hours of core subject instruction each day and an extended school year and provides for summer enrichment programs and need-based tutoring, as well as one-to-one and cohort interventions.  All students have daily tennis and chess lessons and all teaching staff undergoes three weeks of intensive prior to the start of every school year.
 
The Academy’s student population reflects the community: 93% Free/Reduced Lunch; 90% Latino; and 80% English Language Learners.  But its students’ outcomes do not reflect those characteristics: 93% of 3rd graders scored proficient or advanced in reading, compared to 73% for Colorado.  And each and every student–100% of 3rd graders—scored proficient or advanced in math, compared to 69% for Colorado.  

We must invest in All-STAR schools like these around the country—run by innovators who have succeeded where others have failed—so they can serve more kids, can transform the lives of more families, can break the vicious cycle of poverty and ignorance, and can replace it with a virtuous cycle of enlightenment and prosperity.  
That’s why I introduced this bill, and that’s why I am proud to invite my colleagues today to join us in learning from our panel about the opportunities, fairness issues, and challenges in the public charter school movement.