Face the State

Face The State Staff Report

At a Thursday luncheon in Denver, former U.S. Education Secretary Bill Bennett spoke to Colorado’s Alliance for Choice in Education about why the nation's current system is failing its students.

BennettFTS Staff Photo

According to federal statistics, 60 percent of high school dropouts come from low-income families. Bennett applauded ACE's commitment to providing families educational choices through privately funded scholarships.

Bennett said the generosity by ACE is “all but typical,” and the public education system in America is in “serious despair.” According to Bennett, as children progress through school, their ranking in math and science drops when compared to other countries. When tested in 3rd grade U.S. students are ranked comparatively high against their peers, but that parity is erased by the 11th grade. His explanation is that the expectations of what students need to be learning becomes muddled in middle and high school because of unproven and experimental reforms.

“It is less clear what we want out of our students,” said Bennett, who believes the older students get the more disagreement there is about what they need to know.

He also said an overall lack of accountability is another failure of the public system. Bennett says that schools should operate more like a business, being rewarded or sanctioned based on individual student performance. Unlike a business that loses money when a customer leaves, he noted, schools have nothing to lose when a child drops out.

Linda Chavez, a high school student supported by ACE, and first in her family to graduate from high school, comes from a troubled background with an abusive father and over-extended mother. Chavez said she felt just like “another number” in the public school system, and at times, school and grades were all she had control over. Her ACE scholarship allowed her to attend La Academia, a private school in West Denver targeting at-risk kids.

“My personal struggles have been a test of my dreams to go to college,” Chavez said. She is graduating high school in a few weeks with a 4.0 GPA and planning to attend Colorado School of Mines in the fall.

There are 52 million children in America's public education system. Bennett said that ACE is “an escape, an alternative, a way out, a life boat and a ladder,” but there is still a lot of work to be done.