By Gideon Aigner

It is often said that your perspective on life changes as you live it.

For Lauren Thorpe, a third-year history major at Colorado State University studying to become a teacher, the change from high school to college was quite drastic.

“It was a culture shock for sure,” Thorpe, a 2022 graduate of Colorado Springs Christian School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said. “I wasn’t expecting it to be as big of a transition as it was, because it’s still Colorado. ‘It’s not that big a deal.’ But it was, and I think that was just a big culture shock, and it definitely was a bit difficult at first.”

“The academics were really good [at CSCS],” Thorpe said. “I will give them kudos for their academics and their college prep… In terms of culture and the students, it was sheltered. It was a small private Christian school. Obviously, things happen, but compared to what I’ve heard other people have dealt with, it was fairly sheltered.”

Thorpe’s experience in high school was quite different from most, as she was able to attend a private school because one of her parents worked on campus. According to the Pew Research Center, 83% of all students in the United States attended traditional public schools in 2022, compared to 10% of students in private schools, and 7% in public charter schools.

A large debate is between the prevalence of traditional and charter public schools. All public schools are funded with tax funds, largely based on property taxes. According to the Colorado Department of Education, the main difference with charter schools is that they have “more flexibility than traditional public schools as regards curriculum, fiscal management, and overall school operations.”

A charter school, unlike a private school, is free of charge to the student, but a student’s family must apply for the child to be able to attend. These differences in operation have created discussions around which approach to education should be more prominent in modern America.

Regardless, educators and students alike agree that the Covid-19 pandemic changed the conversation around education in America.

“To me, the pandemic was the biggest shift in mindset,” Daryl Solomon, the director of the Career Tech Center for Poudre School District in Fort Collins, Colorado said. “Parents are out of

control right now. When I was a dean of students, it wasn’t kids who threatened me. It was parents threatening to harm me physically because of something that their student did.”

Solomon says that she feels a lot of additional friction from parents because of what parents believe her job is, contrasted with what her actual responsibilities are. This has been exacerbated by claims from President-Elect Donald Trump that educators are performing surgeries on students in schools and making children transgender or gay.

“I cannot believe the misinformation that parents and the community have about teachers and educators and what our job is and what we do,” Solomon said. “People think ‘you’re indoctrinating my kids.’ That is actually illegal. When you learn how to become a teacher, you learn it has nothing to do with your own opinion and what you think; it’s about how to teach kids to think critically.”

While this is the stated intention of all schools in the U.S., Liberty Common Schools Headmaster, former Congressman Bob Schaffer, believes that charter schools are more efficiently able to meet the educational needs of their customers. Liberty Common High School was the best high school in Colorado for SAT preparedness in 2024, and has been one of the top academic schools in the state for years. Shaffer thinks that the customers, being parents and their children, should have control of the curriculum and how pupils are taught.

“The customers get to drive,” Schaffer said. “They get to decide they’re not having their children’s lives defined for them by politicians or government bureaucrats.”

Further, Schaffer believes that charter schools, like businesses, are more driven by competition, supply and demand than regular public schools. In Fort Collins, there are currently 8 traditional public high schools compared to 4 charter high schools and 3 private high schools.

“Schools are not monolithic. There’s good ones, and there’s bad ones,” Schaffer said. “The beauty is, if there’s a charter school that’s established and it’s not attracting customers, is not generating the cash flow from the business standpoint, it shuts down.”

“We don’t have that benefit with governmental monopoly schools,” Schaffer said. “If [a public school] is doing poorly, then the government tends to appropriate money to just keep them open. Even though they’re not serving their customers efficiently or serving them particularly well… The addition of a charter school is great for those families who choose it, and usually great for those families who don’t.”

“Once competition exists, then everybody starts trying to compete with one another,” Schaffer said. “Everybody in the education marketplace tries to outdo one another in appealing to families

and in quality. In doing so, you drive up the quality, which for children and families, is the thing that matters the most. Efficiency with their tax dollars matters to charters, who tend to be more efficient. For example, [Liberty Common] spends fewer dollars per pupil in this school, than public schools do generally, yet our results are consistently high.”

According to the PEW Research Center, while half of the U.S. believes that there are problems with the current state of education in America, the source of that problem is argued. Thorpe says that she thinks a lot of it comes down to the parents.

“Education is never just on the teachers,” Thorpe said. “It also is really big on the families. I never want to put anyone down to parenting styles, but I think also a lot of problems that we’re seeing right now is helplessness and complacency in a lot of parents in their child’s behaviors that end up showing up in classrooms.”

It has been demonstrated that parents don’t actually know what happens or is expected of their children in school, with one study demonstrating that, since the Pandemic, 90% of parents believe that their kids have caught up to where they should be, while many of them simply are have not. The reality is that most students in 2023 are behind where their peers were in 2019, and Thorpe says that this hasn’t been adequately addressed.

“I think it’s if we address the damage that has been done to children’s development in education from the pandemic and everything that’s been happening, then we can right the ship,” Thorpe said. “If we just keep going about the way things have been going and say, ‘The kids have gotten worse now,’ and that’s all we do about it, then we can’t fix this.”

Since 2019, K-8 students have been on average half a year behind where they should be in math. Similar to Solomon’s sentiments, since the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a demonstrable disconnect in children’s educational perception by the parents, and what the reality of their situation is. Solomon believes that one way that schools can adapt to the modern educational environment is by teaching kids more about the trades if college is not the right path for them, something that charter and private schools don’t emphasize.

“One thing I’m really proud of in my current position is that we just started an auto program,” Solomon said. “We have kids that didn’t go to school who are getting straight A’s in the Auto Program.”

While career technical skills may sound simple to the average person, any trade requires certifications and real world practice to work, something that can be provided before a student becomes an adult.

“Yesterday I did a class observation,” Solomon said. “[The instructor] was teaching about changing brake fluid. These kids were doing equations, they were testing voltage, and talking about condensation. Kids were demonstrating high level critical thinking skills and problem solving while earning college credit. All of our teachers are certified to teach at either AIMS [Community College] or Front Range [Community College], and then they test to get industry certification. We’re giving kids an opportunity to start earning.”

Further, Solomon says that this approach has helped students who struggle in more traditional classroom environments. She says that this is a boon for public schools with less of a focus on test scores, and more of a focus on opportunity. Some surveys have even found that 45% of students believe that “getting a college degree is not worth the investment,” so this provides a path for that demographic.

“The kids I worked with in the Dean’s office, they would say ‘Solomon, I don’t want to sit in a Shakespeare class. I need to start making money because we don’t have food,’” Solomon said.

“Now they’re going to start making more money than I do by the time they graduate high school,” Solomon said. “They’re getting educated, they’re earning money, they’re going to school, and they’re passing, so I’m really proud [of them]. I think Career Tech Education is really the way to go… Having opportunities and options for whether you want to go to Harvard, or you want to work in an auto shop; You can come to my school and we’re going to meet your needs.”

Further, Solomon wonders if an increased emphasis on post-secondary education may be starting to dissuade students who don’t have as much economic opportunity.

“I just wonder, [if emphasizing] ‘college, college, college,’ where does that leave all of the other students who are just as bright and intelligent and have just as much potential,” Solomon said. “I think a lot of people have no idea what kids go through. I did a ton of home visits during COVID, and I’m going into trailer parks, and these kids are starving, and I’m trying to meet all of their needs… if you’re not exposed to it, you just don’t even know that that side exists. [There’s] nothing wrong with college. I loved college, but I had a family in a financial situation that we could afford it.”

And while charter, private, and traditional public schools all aim to get pupils ready for the next step, the disagreement largely lies with whether the state is the right body to determine a child’s path.

“The whole theory of charter schools goes back to the natural law,” Schaffer said. “[It’s] a universal premise about education, that it is the right and responsibility of parents to direct the

education and upbringing of their children. To oppose charter schools is to discard that premise, and to replace parents with the government.”

“If you favor governments and unions and the bureaucracy of education, you might not have a high opinion of charters,” Schaffer said. “If you favor the power and importance of the individual, the idea that families are the most central and essential unit in American society, the idea that parents have the right responsibility to direct the education and upbringing of their children, then charter schools satisfy those values.”

Regardless of philosophical differences, for someone like Thorpe looking to enter the education field, the focus should remain on the children and their teachers.

“I don’t blame administrators for focusing on test scores, because that’s currently what decides funding,” Thorpe said. “I will say though, if it is obvious that is all you focus on, that will discourage students. It will discourage them from doing anything, not just in pursuing higher education, but in pursuing their current education… You need to have it balanced with other things like social-emotional learning relationships and generally teaching you how to be a human.”

“I think you also just need to have an overall support system for the adults in the school,” Thorpe said. “They’re the ones who make the environment, and if they’re not feeling it, then the students aren’t going to feel it. So I think conversations need to gear towards how can we support our educators, [in order] to support our kids?”

And regardless of views on how best to educate our future leaders, everyone agreed that we need to support them better than we are now. The only question is how?