Teachers union is afraid of competition.
The war for education continues, and the side of literacy and opportunity suffered a defeat in Colorado earlier this month. Teachers unions’ and their allies dominating school boards flexed their bureaucratic muscle to stop school choice in its tracks.
Charter schools around the country, especially those structured to provide an education based on the classical model, have succeeded in improving the educational opportunities and achievements of those lucky enough to be enrolled in them. That fact that has remained as steady over the years as the low reading scores posted by the public-school system. What has evolved is the tenacity of the opposition from the local public school boards over which the teachers’ unions exert so much control, and from whom desperate parents must seek a blessing for a charter.
Consider Colorado, for instance. Over the past couple of decades, a number of charter schools have sprung up employing the classical education model, churning out highly literate students well-prepared for the universities the vast majority of them graduate on to. The academic achievement promised and delivered by these schools is a welcome contrast to the pablum and low expectations generally offered by the public schools, which endeavor consistently to barely exceed the lowest common denominator, the predictable results of which are virtual immobility in student achievement scores over the past half century.
ne of these remarkable institutions is Ascent Classical Academy, which boasts two other schools in the state, offering students enhanced opportunities which some 600 parents in the Boulder area decided they want for their children. These parents sought the assistance of Ascent, and boldly, diligently, and meticulously went through the bureaucratic paces only to be summarily rejected by the local school board. (Though not before being labeled as Nazis and bigots by a union-whipped mob at the requisite public hearing for daring to wish for their youngsters a disciplined environment wherein they would learn not only the alphabet and the findings of Euclid, but an appreciation for the traditional ideals of their country and a sense of its historical and philosophical patrimony).