Stephen Schuck: Giving Low-Income Kids A Path Forward.  
Stephen discusses the Parents Challenge program and its stunning success rates.  Stephen ran for Governor of Colorado.  Lost that election but found his new calling - school choice to give low-income kids a path out of poverty.  Stephen digs into the ugly truth about the failing education system in Colorado.  Would you accept a school for your kid with a 75% failure rate?   Doubtful.   After uncovering these disturbing numbers, Stephen championed a new program called Parents Challenge.  Zip Codes should not determine the quality of kids’ education.  Unaware of school performance data, parents lack the information & resources to consider alternatives to poor-performing schools. The perfect storm: poor children in under-performing schools with no way out - systematically sustaining the cycle of poverty.  Join me for this inspiring story; it’s the best almost eighteen minutes you’ll spend today.

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In this episode we cover:

• We believe low-income parents should have the same kind of choice that high-income parents already have.  Level the scales. 
• Your children do not need to remain trapped in a school system that is failing them. 
• Parents challenge is not a philanthropy program -- parents challenge is a partnership.  
• Choice & freedom are enshrined in virtually all aspects of American society. Why not in education, especially for low-income families, for whom education offers the greatest hope for economic advancement?
• I started to understand the system & how it's funded – it suddenly becomes obvious! The power is on the wrong side of the equation.  The power is on the side of the provider, not on the side of the consumer.  All the money goes to the provider. They have a monopoly.   
• The conventional wisdom was very different from reality. They said problem was that teachers weren't getting paid enough. Many teachers were going to their own pockets for materials. That's not the cause. That's a symptom. 
• What is the underlying cause?   The underlying cause was power was on the wrong side of the fulcrum. No marketplace, no competition. It's obvious why they were generating a lousy product --- there are no consequences.  
• Good teachers didn't get paid enough. Bad teachers couldn't get fired. It was a system designed to generate exactly what it has - mediocrity. And any call for excellence was discounted because the thinking was that to do better, you had to spend more. Not true.  
• If you take more dollars and allocate them to a poor-performing school, the only place from which that those dollars can come is the higher-performing school. Now we have a system that's penalizing success and rewarding failure.  

Amazing Informative Links:

• https://parentschallenge.org/
• https://www.edchoice.org/engage/what-we-can-do-about-school-choices-supply-side-problem/
• https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/is-school-choice-enough
• https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/11/02/school-choice-covid-parents-chose-charter/6231