The big money promoting privatization in Denver tried to capture the Denver school board, but was defeated by candidates endorsed by the Denver Classroom Teachers Association.
Chalkbeat Colorado reported:
Denver school board candidates backed by the teachers union won all four open seats Tuesday, unofficial election returns show, making it likely the board’s current balance of power will hold.
Eleven candidates were vying for four seats on the seven-member Denver school board.
Union-backed candidates won by commanding leads in three of the races and a solid lead in the fourth, according to unofficial returns. Two of the three incumbents who ran for reelection, Michelle Quattlebaum and Scott Esserman, lost their seats.
Teachers union-backed board members have controlled the board of Colorado’s largest school district for the past six years. Members who support charter schools and other education reform strategies gained a bigger foothold in 2023 and had a chance to flip the board majority this year.
Now, the board will continue to be composed of four members who were endorsed by the teachers union and three who were backed by reform interests.
Denver Classroom Teachers Association President Rob Gould called the early returns on Tuesday a victory of “people over money.” Like in past elections, reform groups were on track to outspend the teachers union, according to the latest campaign finance reports.
The pro-charter funders are made up of billionaires, charter school operators, and big-money privatizers.
Among the donors to school board elections are billionaire Philip Anschutz, the richest man in Colorado; he was also a funder of the anti-public school documentary titled “Waiting for Superman,” which claimed falsely that charter schools are the answer to all the problems of public schools.
Other billionaire donors include Netflix founder Reed Hastings and John Arnold, a former trader at Enron.
Then there’s an alphabet series of organizations, some of which use fancy names–the equivalent of Parents for Public Schools– to hide the fact that they are pro-charter.
It’s hard for the average voter to make sense of the election with so many groups endorsing certain candidates.
Tto cut through the hype and propaganda of the charter lobby requires a wise ally.
Mike DeGuire has the experience and wisdom to sort out the charter groups from the true friends of students, teachers and public schools.
Mike DeGuire is a veteran educator in Denver. He says it’s time to take stock and assess the damage that “reform” has inflicted on students and public schools in Denver.
Is public education a public or a private good? This issue is at the heart of the school choice debate sweeping the country.
Advocates for school choice are advancing policies that move us toward the privatization of our schools, treating our children’s futures as commodities rather than community investments. This well-funded bi-partisan coalition promotes privatization through charter school expansion, vouchers, tax credits, and education savings accounts. Republicans use the words “parental rights, freedom and competition,” while neoliberal Democrats brand it as “innovation and expanding opportunity.”
Public education is one of the last shared institutions that binds us together across race, class, and geography; when we weaken it, we weaken democracy itself.
The result is the same for communities when privatization becomes a reality in red states with vouchers or in blue cities where most charter schools are located. Vouchers segregate schools by class and race, diminish the importance of community, and severely limit funding for public schools.
Charter schools operate like private schools, create competition for students, often have unelected boards. Additionally, the charter schools, not the community, get to determine who enrolls, who stays, and what kind of learning takes place. As marketplace ideology takes over, public dollars and democratic control move from local neighborhood schools to private boards and political operatives.
Denver Public Schools (DPS) shows how this movement works in a blue city, and why it matters now in Trump’s vision of America’s education system.
Different slogans, same destination
On the right, and in most Republican-led states, legislatures enacted policies to privatize education with vouchers and education savings accounts (ESAs) designed to route public funds to private and/or religious schools. Often, these tactics originate with model bills written and promoted by the American Legislative Council (ALEC) and their allies. The goal is to let public dollars “follow the child,” which means diverting them away from democratically governed school districts.
On the neoliberal Democratic side, the mechanism is the charter-centric “portfolio model.” Local school boards often elected with large amounts of pro-reform money approve policies to close or “restart” neighborhood schools. Then they open new charters, bring in “operators” deemed to be “effective,” and the district “manages” the schools and their networks like an investment portfolio.
This storyline was supercharged under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, which rewarded states for removing barriers to charter growth and for aggressively initiating school “turnarounds.”
The overlap with Republicans and Democrats is structural. Both sides define schooling as a marketplace and shift authority from elected school boards to private actors, like charter boards, appointed authorities, and national nonprofits. In their book, “Wolf At the Schoolhouse Door,” Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire describe “how Republicans and Democrats joined to support failed policies whose ultimate goal was to eliminate public education and replace it with a free-market approach to schooling.”
Charles Siler, who worked as a lobbyist for the libertarian Goldwater Institute, told the Washington Post that “Charter schools are part of the incremental march towards full privatization. In many ways, charter schools are the gateway to total public-school dismantling.” Since vouchers are unpopular with the public and some lawmakers, Siler continued, “privatizers have to engage in incrementalism, and they use different names to create a sort of moving target.”
Both camps sell the public on privatization by claiming that “failing test scores” prove neighborhood schools, especially those serving Black and Brown students, are broken beyond repair. They argue the racial achievement gap is proof that these schools must be shut down and replaced with charters through “school choice.”
This narrative is deeply misleading. First, decades of research show that standardized test scores mostly measure socioeconomic status and neighborhood inequality, not the quality of individual schools. Poverty, housing insecurity, and systemic racism drive disparities, not the mere fact of attending a district school.
Second, the research demonstrates that replacing schools with charters has not closed achievement gaps. Denver Public Schools illustrates the point: after years of churn, closures, and huge charter expansion, racial disparities in achievement persist. Black and Latino students continue to score lower on state tests than white peers — not because they are “trapped in failing schools,” but because privatization has siphoned resources from their neighborhoods, destabilized communities, and ignored root causes.
Bipartisan funding for similar goals
The funding networks and foundations knitting these free-market agendas together are deep-pocketed and bipartisan. For instance, the conservative Walton Family Foundation underwrites charter startups and charter facilities nationwide, spending well over $1 billion on this effort. The majority of their political spending goes to Republican causes, with over 2/3 of their PAC money going to Americans for Prosperity, founded by the Koch brothers.
In his book, “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America,” journalist Christopher Leonard describes how the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a Koch-funded right-wing group, creates model legislation which can be introduced in state legislatures. Many of these bills aim towards privatizing schools by implementing voucher programs.
City Fund raised millions, largely from Netflix founder Reed Hastings and hedge fund manager John Arnold, to spread charter schools in over 40 cities through portfolio management systems and by bankrolling local political action groups. While Hastings supports Democratic causes, he is opposed to teacher unions and believes that local school boards should be abolished. Arnold, also a Democrat, gifted the KIPPcharter network millions, and like many billionaires today, is seen as cozying up to the Trumpadministration for influence.
The Bradley Foundation and ALEC financed the policy and political infrastructure for vouchers and ESAs for decades. The Bradley Foundation, the Colorado-based Coors family, and the Koch foundation were three of the six billionaire families that funded Project 2025, which has been the playbook for Trump since he took office in January.
Many of these same philanthropic and political dollars fund both a Republican voucher push and a Democratic-branded charter expansion — two lanes of the same privatizing highway.
Denver: a “portfolio” laboratory
Denver is often cited by education reformers as a national model as it implemented unified enrollment, systematic school closures, and rapid charter school growth. But the backstory behind who paid for these policies is less sanguine. A Network for Public Education report details how Denver Public Schools became a neoliberal “experiment,” using a web of nonprofits and political groups to expand charters and restructure the school district.
Both Republicans and Democrats contributed large amounts of money in Denver school board elections to promote corporate reforms, such as teacher pay for performance, school choice systems, and enrollment zones. In the 2017 DPS school board election, billionaires gave huge sums to the Denver candidates favoring charter school expansion. According to a report from the Network for Public Education Action, these included “Colorado billionaires Phillip Anschutzand Kenneth Tuchman, and out-of-state billionaires John Arnold of Texas and the Alice, Jim and Stuart Waltons of Arkansas.”
Both sides define schooling as a marketplace and shift authority from elected school boards to private actors, like charter boards, appointed authorities, and national nonprofits.
Meanwhile, years of churn and school closures left communities reeling. Even reform-friendly analyses concede that the “portfolio model” era meant opening lots of charters and closing or “replacing” dozens of neighborhood schools. Researchers studying this model have cited significant concerns with the efficacy of the model, including equity issues, narrow reliance on test scores, instability and churn, tensions among schools, and loss of democratic control and community voice.
In a 2016 article, progressive education advocate David Osborne documented that “Since 2005 [Denver] has closed or replaced 48 schools and opened more than 70, the majority of them charters.”
The billionaires’ money helped maintain a pro-charter majority school board until 2019 when teacher union-backed candidates were elected because of organized community backlash to the reforms and unrest after a teacher-led strike that year. That shift caused alarm bells among the billionaire backers of the pro-charter movement. They moved quickly to expand their funding to two political action groups in Denver.
RootED and Denver Families for Public Schoolsreceived over $38 million from Reed Hastings’ City Fund organization, which they used to promote their pro-charter agenda through grants to charter schools, local think tanks, and other community groups. Their efforts paid off in the 2023 school board election, when three of their endorsed candidates won their elections after Denver Families Action spent nearly $1 million to promote their campaign.
Outside spending has transformed Denver board elections into major dark money funding events, with the 2023 election hitting $2.2 million, just shy of the 2019 record of $2.3 million.
In an op-ed for Charter Folks, Clarence Burton and Pat Donovan, leaders for Denver Families for Public Schools, described their plans to repeat the 2023 wins in the upcoming November 2025 school board election. They may spend some of their vast resourcesfrom City Fund to sway voters.
In the next four years, DPS faces continued enrollment declines, and district leaders seem inclined to approve more closures to rebalance finances. That is the portfolio playbook’s endgame: when money is scarce, close neighborhood schools and expand privately run options. If successful in electing their endorsed candidates, Denver Families Action is poised to help that happen.
Do charters drain district resources? What the evidence says
District leaders and parents feel the fiscal squeeze when enrollment flows to charters. Fixed costs don’t disappear just because 5% or 10% of students leave. Research consistently warns that losses to enrollment can trigger costs that are not fully “variable” — you can’t cut 1/20th of a teacher or 1/10th of a bus route. Studies from New York and other locales estimate significant per-pupil losses in host districts as charter school share rises.
A policy brief from the National Education Policy Center summarizes the structural mechanisms that occur with fixed costs, diseconomies of scale, and shifting student composition. The brief describes how “a network of philanthropists and wealthy donors have reshaped the political economy of school finance, advocating for school voucher policies, charters, and privatization in the face of declining public-school enrollments.”
Pro-charter think tanks argue the picture is “mixed,” especially longer-term if districts close schools and cut staffing, the very things communities have fought against. But even those reviews concede there are short-term inefficiencies and significant harms. In practice, these policies mean closures, layoffs, and program cuts in neighborhood schools.
This bipartisan push undermines neighborhood schools, deepens inequality, and places corporate interests above the common good.
Trump-world raises the stakes
Under President Trump’s second term, privatization is not just encouraged; it’s federal policy. A January 29, 2025, White House directive ordered the Education Department to steer states toward using federal formula funds to support K-12 “choice” initiatives, which was a direct push for vouchers and related schemes.
Trump’s “Agenda47” likewise spotlights universal school choice as a signature plank, tied to dismantlingprior civil-rights guidance and reshaping federal oversight. Plans to weaken or abolish the Education Department are framed as clearing the path for parental choice.
Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon increased the federal department budget for charter schools by $60 million to a historic record of $500 million. At the closing session of the National Democratic Governors Association meeting, McMahonstressed to the governors they should open charterand micro-schools to promote more competition. This is the Republican Lane, wide open.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 promoted federal tax credits for vouchers, which are now approved federal legislation. The CEO of Democrats for Education Reform is pushing Democratic governors to use these new federal vouchers to expand learning opportunities for economically disadvantaged students or lose “free federal money.”
The policy highway already built by the neoliberal Democrats (charter growth, closures, portfolio management) has made it easier for a voucher-first administration to push public taxpayer dollars out of democratically governed systems. That’s the interlock: Democrats normalized the market; Trump-world aims to privatize the whole store.
The bottom line
Denver is not an outlier — it’s a warning. A bipartisan coalition normalized the idea that public education should be run like an investment portfolio, where schools are opened, closed, and “reconstituted” based on technocratic dashboards and political spending. The Trump administration’s voucher agenda, promoted for decades by the Koch brothers and other conservatives accelerates the same logic, now directs federal policy to help states route public dollars out of public governance altogether.
If we believe education is a public good — funded equitably, governed democratically, and accountable locally — the public must see charter expansion and vouchers as two halves of the same privatization project. When education is treated as a public good, it is essential for democracy, civic participation, economic stability, and social cohesion.
Every child deserves an equal chance in life. Therefore, education must remain a public good — not a marketplace where opportunity is limited to the school’s choice of selecting students. The question isn’t whether our schools should be run like private businesses. It’s whether we are willing to fight for education as a right, not a privilege.
And, if the public cares about our children’s future,they need to vote, organize, and promote legislation accordingly.
Mike DeGuire, Ph.D., is the vice chair of Advocates for Public Education Policy. He has been a teacher, district level reading coordinator, executive coach, and a principal in the Denver metro area for most of his education career. He also worked as a leadership consultant for several national education organizations, and as an educator effectiveness specialist with the Colorado Department of Education. His writing is also featured on a4pep.org.
Tom Ultican is a retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics. Before joining the teaching profession, he worked in the corporate sector.
He writes here about a shoddy piece of research on charter schools in Denver.
Ultican writes:
Another education study financed by Arnold Ventures and the Walton Family Foundation blurs education reality. Their 2022 model did not pass the laugh test so “researchers” from the University of Colorado Denver tried again. Unfortunately their claims still confuse correlation with causation. This error seems purposeful.
The study of school reform in Denver was conducted by the Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA). They state, “For the past three years CEPA has partnered with the Center on Reinventing Public Education to consider a paradigm-shifting approach to family and community engagement efforts in school districts.” It is a study apparently to justify and promote the portfolio model of school management, a system first proposed in 2009 by the founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), Paul Hill.
In their 2022 study, this same team also used state testing data from years 2004/5 through 2018/19. They explained that the first 4-years of the research employed pre-reform data and the final 10-years were from the portfolio model reform period. The authors reported, “During the study period, the district opened 65 new schools, and closed, replaced, and restarted over 35 others.” (Page 7)
The National Education Policy Center contracted with Robert Shand to review the 2022 Denver study. Dr. Shand is Assistant Professor of Education Policy and Leadership at American University and an affiliated researcher with the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Shand also did a review of the new 2024 study.
In his 2022 review, Shand agreed that the test scores for Denver Public Schools had gone up but he noted a few reasons why claiming these gains were because of the portfolio model was unreasonable:
Demographics shifting to a larger percentage of white students in Denver coincided with the reforms.
Per-student revenues increased in Denver by 22% but only 13% across Colorado.
Student-to-teacher ratio in Denver dropped from 17.9 to 14.9.
DPS was already showing academic improvement before implementation of the portfolio reforms.
Black and Hispanic/Latinx students were growing at approximately 0.06 standard deviations per year pre-reform and 0.03-0.04 standard deviations per year post-reform. (Page 7)
“While the new report does convincingly demonstrate that the gains are not significantly due to changing demographics, it fails to address other critiques of the prior study, including (1) that the portfolio model was undertheorized, with unclear mechanisms of action and insufficient attention to potential drawbacks; and (2) that circumstances, events, and resources besides the portfolio reform and student demographics were changing concurrently with the reform. Additionally, the report’s sweeping conclusion—that Denver’s reform is the most effective in U.S. history—is unsupported. The improved outcomes in Denver during this time period are impressive, but the authors seem overly determined to cite a package of favored reforms as the cause.” (Page 3)
While Shand agrees that demographic changes are not the whole reason for the improved test scores, they are a significant input. The chart above from USAFacts.org shows the typically higher scoring groups Asians and Whites going from 54.2% of the population to 58.9% in the 14 years from 2005 to 2019. During the same period, the Hispanic and Black population shrunk from 42.9% to 38.1% which resulted in a 9.5% shift in the population from a lower scoring to a higher scoring racial mix.
An even bigger impact on the scoring in Denver was the change in economic circumstances. Standardized testing is useless because the results are dependent on one variable, family wealth. Statisticians assign r values between -1 and +1 to results tested. Plus 1 signifies certainty, zero shows no influence and -1 indicates certainty in the opposite direction of expectations. The only input ever found with more than 0.3 r-value is family wealth at 0.9 r-value. The median family income in Denver is up significantly.
Two sources show how strongly Denver’s family income has grown. Neilsberg research shares that between 2010 and 2020 the median income grew from $61,394 to $82,335, a 25% growth. City-Data states:
“The median household income in Denver, CO in 2022 was $88,213, which was about the same as the median annual income of $89,302 across the entire state of Colorado. Compared to the median income of $39,500 in 2000 this represents an increase of 55.2%”
This kind of wealth growth over the 14 years the Denver researchers studied was bound to have a significant impact on testing results, but they ignored it. Add this to the 9% greater revenue for Denver schools and three less students per teacher compared to the rest of the state and of course Denver’s student made comparative testing gains.
Professor Shand mentions the damage caused by school turnaround efforts and closing schools noting the research indicates these are especially harmful events for students in low income or marginalized neighborhoods. (Page 6 and 7) Shand concluded:
“In sum, this report provides some additional supporting evidence in favor of the tentative conclusion that Denver’s portfolio reform was positive. Importantly, the report also grossly exaggerates both the magnitude of the success and certainty behind the evidence for it. The findings should thus be interpreted with extreme caution. (Page 8)
He is being nice. He should have concluded that this report is school choice propaganda.
About the Report Authors
The lead author, Parker Baxter, is Director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at the University Of Colorado Denver School Of Public Affairs. He previously was Director of Knowledge at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. Parker is also a Senior Research Affiliate at the CRPE, where he worked on the District-Charter Collaboration Compact Project and the Portfolio School District Project. He is a former alumnus of Teach for America.
Anna Nicotera is a Senior Researcher at Basis Policy Research specializing in quantitative and qualitative applied research methods. She worked six years as Senior Director, Research and Evaluation for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Nicotera was a Graduate Research Assistant at the National Center on School Choice, Vanderbilt University for four years.
David Stuit holds a Ph.D. in Leadership and Policy Studies from Vanderbilt University. He is a former Emerging Education Policy Scholar at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice (Rebranded EdChoice), and member of the American Enterprise Institute’s K–12 working group. He began his career as a classroom teacher in Denver, Colorado.
Expecting an unbiased piece of research from this group is like learning about the dangers of smoking from Phillip-Morris.
Jeanne Kaplan was a tireless champion of public schools in Denver. She was elected to two terms on the Denver school board. She fought for better, more equitable, fully funded schools. She opposed charter schools because they drained funding from public schools. She was a long-time crusader for civil rights, and she appalled by the takeover of the Denver schools by charter interests, who flew a false flag, pretending to care about equity.
Jeannie learned that she had lung cancer last April. Her medical treatment did not slow the disease. She died yesterday. She was 78.
I met Jeannie in Denver in 2010 as I was traveling the country to promote my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. When I met her, we became fast friends. We were on the same page, and she told me about the damage that charter schools were doing to Denver’s public schools. Candidates for the Denver school board were funded by Dark Money, privatizers, and out-of-state billionaires. It was almost impossible for a parent to raise the money to be competitive with the corporate reform candidates.
Jeannie was a warm and caring person who inspired others to get involved, despite the odds crested by Big Money. She started her own blog called “Kaplan for Kids,” and I reposted some of them here.
I think the best way to honor her memory here is to post what seems to be her last commentary, which overflows with wisdom, candor, experience, and common sense. I humbly add her name to the honor roll of the blog.
Reap what you sow and the chickens come home to roost. The elephant in the room. Aphorisms appropriate to describe what is happening in public education in Denver.
After 20 years, more than 5 superintendents, and 11 different school boards, the results of education reform in Denver have become clear, and they aren’t pretty. After opening 72 charters in the last 20 years, 22 of which have closed, the declining enrollments in neighborhood schools have forced the prospect of school closures. Who knew opening 26 privately run elementary charter schoolsin competition with district-run schools would ultimately force the district to make some hard financial decisions? And who knew that ignoring its own 2007 data showing stagnant population growth would lead to less demand for elementary school seats in the 2020s? Apparently, not those with the power for the last 20 years. And, as an ironic aside, many of the same people who were the decision-makers in the past and who were unable to make substantive change then, have now decided they will somehow make these previously unattainable changes from their outside “oversight” committee, EDUCATE Denver. In fact one of the co-chairs, Rosemary Rodriguez, was a DPS board member when on March 16, 2017, a Strengthening Neighborhoods Resolution passed, stating:
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a citywide committee be formed to review changing demographics and housing patterns in our city and the effect on our schools and to make recommendations on our policies around boundaries, choice, enrollment and academic programs in order to drive greater socio-economic integration in our schools.
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that in the face of the sharp decline in the number of school-aged children in gentrifying neighborhoods, the committee is also charged with how to think about school choice and school consolidation to ensure that our schools are able to offer high-quality, sustainable programs for our kids.
These former school board members and former and current civic leaders have formed a “shadow school board” to evaluate and oversee the current superintendent and school board. Why? It appears they don’t like what they are seeing being proposed by the current superintendent. What don’t they like? It appears they have determined the current superintendent is not committed enough to their reform agenda. You know – the one that has been in place when they were in power, the one that has produced the biggest gaps in the nation, more segregation, and more resource inequity.
“Over the past 20 years, Denver Public Schools has added a lot of schools. It has added students, too — but at a much slower rate.
The number of public schools in Denver grew 55% between the 2001-02 and 2021-22 school years, while the number of students grew just 12%.
Denver went from having 132 schools serving about 72,000 students in 2001-02 to 204 schools serving nearly 89,000 students in 2021-22.
The number of elementary schools in Denver grew 23% over the past 20 years, while the number of students grew just 4%.”
Through expensive marketing and often false narratives, charter schools have had free reign to prey on susceptible families resulting in DPS losing 7400 elementary school students who would have otherwise most likely attended a neighborhood school. Then add in:
a state law that prohibits a district from shutting down low enrollment charters,
a district that has ignored demographic information predicting declining enrollment,
a district that employs “attendance zones” and a secretive CHOICE system to often force place students into heavily marketed, often unwanted CHARTER SCHOOLS, and
Established student-based budget formulas that increase dollars for middle and high school students, special education, English language learners, gifted and talented programs, and students living in poverty. Resource distribution is now more closely aligned with the costs of serving these students. p. 51
Refine Student-Based Budgeting formulas to ensure they are best meeting the needs of all of the district’s students. Continue to evaluate and adjust student-based budgeting formulas to 1) meet student needs, 2) make progress on closing the achievement gap, and 3) grow the number of high school graduates and college-ready students. p. 53
No one should be surprised the DPS superintendent is saying schools must be closed (new word is UNIFIED but it still means CLOSURE), given the quagmire he entered. What would you expect to happen when 72 new charter schools are opened in a landscape of stagnant or declining population growth? Who should be held responsible for the chaos and churn caused by this over-expansion of new charter schools?
I know, I know. One isn’t supposed to talk about charters any more. But it is the elephant in the room. Education “reformers” want you to believe charters are an irrevocable fact of life in public education, stare decisis if you will. But as we have recently witnessed, that precedent is non-binding. So let’s use it to the advantage of neighborhood school advocates. Let us not assume charters are inevitable, especially given the chaos and poor academic outcomes charters are producing. Denver isn’t the only place experiencing the madness of so many charters. Just this week lifelong educator Arthur Camins wrote:
It is time for Democrats–voters and the politicians who represent them–to abandon charter schools as a strategy for education improvement or to advance equity. Charter schools, whether for- or non-profit, drain funds from public schools that serve all students, increase segregation, and by design only serve the few.
It is worth repeating that in 20 years, DPS has added 72 charter schools, 22 of which have closed. As students of public education repeatedly attest to, charters have been particularly harmful to neighborhood schools for they gut these schools of resources. Charters have also been disruptive to communities and have contributed to increasing inequity and segregation in our schools. It is not possible to have an honest conversation without addressing that elephant in the room. Charter schools along with their partners – choice and competition – have had their chance in Denver and their biggest accomplishment has been to pressure neighborhood schools to close.
Let us not overlook the demographic projections DPS has been aware of since the mid 2000’s.
“It’s really simple, we’ve seen a slow down in births,” said Elizabeth Garner, demographer for the state. “Starting back in 2007, that was our peak birth year, we’ve seen a slowing in births ever since. So with fewer kiddos, that means lower school enrollment.”
Let us not overlook who was supporting and approving this unchecked expansion. DPS had strong indicators from as early as 2007 onward the population of the city and the number of school-age children was flattening, and yet the district with the strong support of many of the aforementioned “oversight committee”, EDUCATE Denver, pushed for this proliferation of new charter schools without giving demographics its proper due.
Loss of students = loss of funding (SBB) = loss of programming and supports = closure
Superintendent Alex Marerro has been charged with improving student outcomes and reducing gaps by implementing his strategic plan. School unifications are one way he has chosen to start this process. He inherited a district suffering from years of “feel good” oversight from boards and the nonprofit world determined to paint a rosy picture of reform education success, a district more focused on good public relations stories than actual educational outcomes. Now he has to try to provide solutions to problems that have not been dealt with honestly for years. And yes, “unification” has raised as many questions as it has provided answers such as how transportation and language services will be provided and what will be done with these empty buildings. And there is the elephant in the room – again. Charter schools. Why are they not included in his recommendations? Again, he has no authority to recommend closing them, even though several are also suffering from declining enrollment.Given this reality, it will be interesting to see how he chooses to address this issue. In the end, how can the board fairly evaluate him according to measures both they and he just agreed on, if it rejects his operational ideas?
As for what neighborhoods these closures would most heavily affect – What would one expect to happen when new charters are opened in neighborhoods heavily populated by families of color and families struggling economically? Why is there any surprise that most of the schools on the “unification” list affect these neighborhoods? How could it be otherwise when these are the sites of uncontrolled, privately run options to public schools. Sadly, it only makes sense that these are the neighborhoods that would suffer the highest impact of school closures.
Few like to close schools. It is a heart-wrenching, disruptive, negative process. But given the lack of thoughtful planning and oversight for 20 years, what is the better option? Keeping schools open without the financial ability to provide necessary services and supports, or providing unified schools with the money to provide language support, art, music, nurses, librarians, psychologists, speech therapists?
Imagine a great school district that had paid attention to population warnings and hadn’t opened so many charter schools over the last 20 years. Imagine all those charter school children filling those neighborhood schools.
Mike DeGuire is a veteran educator in Denver who has been a teacher and a principal in the public schools. He has researched the heavy hand of billionaires in expanding charter schools in Denver. He explains here that the current school board elections have been heavily influenced by billionaires, mostly out-of-state. As usual, they are hiding behind the name of a “parent” group. He predicts that their candidates will have a 10-1 funding advantage over those they run against. The billionaires plan to buy control of the school board.
He writes:
The Denver school board race is off and running, and several key groups have announced their endorsements.
The Denver Classroom Teachers Association, the local teacher organization, endorsed Charmaine Lindsay, Scott Baldermann, and Kwame Spearman. Denver Families Action endorsed Kimberlee Sia, John Youngquist, and Marlene Delarosa.
What is City Fund? How much funding did they give to this new group called Denver Families for Public Schools? What Denver Public Schools “families” do they represent?
According to Influence Watch, The City Fund is an “education organization that funds initiatives that promote the growth of charter schools and other school choice organizations. It also funds activist organizations that support increasing charter school access and school choice programs.” Chalkbeat reports that City Fund was started in 2018 by two billionaires, Reed Hastings and John Arnold, who donated over $200 million to “expand charter schools or charter-like alternatives in 40 cities across the country.”
Reed Hastings has called for the elimination of democratically elected school boards, he serves on the national KIPP charter school board, and he built a training center in Bailey, Colorado, to house the Pahara Institute, an education advocacy and networking group that supports the expansion of charter schools. In December, 2020, he spelled out his vision. “Let’s year by year expand the nonprofit school sector … for the low-performing school district public school — let’s have a nonprofit public school take it over.”
The City Fund set up its own political group, a PAC, called Campaign for Great Public Schools (also called City Fund Action), to give money to organizations that promote charter schools and lobby to privatize education. Since its formation, the Campaign for Great Public Schools has given millions to Education Reform Now, which is the political arm of Democrats for Education Reform. DFER is a “New York-based political action committee which focuses on encouraging the Democratic Party to support public education reform and charter schools.”
Campaign for Great Public Schools also gave millions to the American Federation for Children, which is “a conservative 501(c)(4) dark money group that promotes the school privatization agenda via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and other avenues. It is the 501(c)(4) arm of the 501(c)(3) non-profit group the Alliance for School Choice. The group was organized and is funded by the billionaire DeVos family.”
Denver Families for Public Schools received $1.75 million in 2021 from the Campaign for Great Public Schools to promote their three selected candidates in the current Denver school board race. Denver Families for Public Schools functions as a 501(c)(4), which means it can donate unlimited amounts of money in political elections without disclosing its donors. It functions as an “astroturf” group by engaging in the practice of creating the illusion of widespread grassroots support for a candidate, policy, or cause when no such support necessarily exists. It set up a website, Facebook page, hired staff and recruited others to lobby for its cause. It posts videos of parents who say they don’t like the current school board candidates if they are opposed to them. It participates in forums to promote its selected candidates.
When Denver Families Action announced its school board endorsements in August, the leading fundraiser in the at-large seat at that time, Ulcca Hansen, withdrew from the race since she did not gain its endorsement. Hansen stated she could not win without the significant financial resources that come from “soft side spending.”
This money is also referred to as outside spending or “dark money,” because the funders of the outside groups often remain secret. Hansen felt the dark money would outpace campaign spending by a 10 to 1 margin. The $1.75 million that Denver Families for Public Schools received from The City Fund will be a major factor in the DPS school board race.
Denver citizens need to know who is behind the endorsements, who pays money for the ads, the flyers, the canvassing, the messaging on social media, and why they are supporting their candidates for the school board.
Jeanne Kaplan served two terms as an elected board member in Denver. She has watched the board’s frenIed embrace of “reform” with dismay. open the link and read the full article, which appears on her blog. I am not putting the post into italics since she uses italics.
She writes:
Reap what you sow and the chickens come home to roost. The elephant in the room. Aphorisms appropriate to describe what is happening in public education in Denver.
After 20 years, more than 5 superintendents, and 11 different school boards, the results of education reform in Denver have become clear, and they aren’t pretty. After opening 72 charters in the last 20 years, 22 of which have closed, the declining enrollments in neighborhood schools have forced the prospect of school closures. Who knew opening 26 privately run elementary charter schoolsin competition with district-run schools would ultimately force the district to make some hard financial decisions? And who knew that ignoring its own 2007 data showing stagnant population growth would lead to less demand for elementary school seats in the 2020s? Apparently, not those with the power for the last 20 years. And, as an ironic aside, many of the same people who were the decision-makers in the past and who were unable to make substantive change then, have now decided they will somehow make these previously unattainable changes from their outside “oversight” committee, EDUCATE Denver. In fact one of the co-chairs, Rosemary Rodriguez, was a DPS board member when on March 16, 2017, a Strengthening Neighborhoods Resolution passed, stating:
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a citywide committee be formed to review changing demographics and housing patterns in our city and the effect on our schools and to make recommendations on our policies around boundaries, choice, enrollment and academic programs in order to drive greater socio-economic integration in our schools.
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that in the face of the sharp decline in the number of school-aged children in gentrifying neighborhoods, the committee is also charged with how to think about school choice and school consolidation to ensure that our schools are able to offer high-quality, sustainable programs for our kids.
These former school board members and former and current civic leaders have formed a “shadow school board” to evaluate and oversee the current superintendent and school board. Why? It appears they don’t like what they are seeing being proposed by the current superintendent. What don’t they like? It appears they have determined the current superintendent is not committed enough to their reform agenda. You know – the one that has been in place when they were in power, the one that has produced the biggest gaps in the nation, more segregation, and more resource inequity.
“Over the past 20 years, Denver Public Schools has added a lot of schools. It has added students, too — but at a much slower rate.
The number of public schools in Denver grew 55% between the 2001-02 and 2021-22 school years, while the number of students grew just 12%.
Denver went from having 132 schools serving about 72,000 students in 2001-02 to 204 schools serving nearly 89,000 students in 2021-22.
The number of elementary schools in Denver grew 23% over the past 20 years, while the number of students grew just 4%.”
Through expensive marketing and often false narratives, charter schools have had free reign to prey on susceptible families resulting in DPS losing 7400 elementary school students who would have otherwise most likely attended a neighborhood school. Then add in:
a state law that prohibits a district from shutting down low enrollment charters,
a district that has ignored demographic information predicting declining enrollment,
a district that employs “attendance zones” and a secretive CHOICE system to often force place students into heavily marketed, often unwanted CHARTER SCHOOLS, and
a competitive financial model called Student Based Budgeting (SBB – money follows the kid) to fund schools, depending on student needs, the goal of which is to close the achievement and resource gaps.
A controversial Afrocentric charter school for Black students was approved by the Denver school boardhttps://www.denverpost.com/2022/09/23/5280-freedom-schoool-denver-dps-charter/, after initially rejecting the proposal. The board worried that the charter would not attract enough students to be viable. Other charters in Denver have closed because of declining enrollment. If you read the comments that follow the article, the main theme of writers is shock that the Denver school board would open a racially segregated school.
The Denver Post reported:
After the state ordered Denver Public Schools to reconsider a charter school centering Black students and culture, the school board Thursday approved the school to open next fall.
But the approval comes with conditions, including that 5280 Freedom School must fill all of its open seats in its first year. The school plans to open with 52 students in kindergarten and first grade, and add grades each year up to fifth grade.
Denver schools are funded per pupil, and other new charter schools have had to delay opening because they didn’t enroll enough students. Existing charter schools have closed because their enrollment declined, and the district is considering closing some of its own schools due to low student counts.
The school board initially rejected the 5280 Freedom School for fear it would struggle to attract enough students to be financially viable….Last month, the State Board of Education ordered Denver to reconsider its decision. State Board members said it was unfair to assume that 5280 Freedom School would face the same challenges as other charters.
Colorado is a blue state where the privatizers have poured in millions of dollars to win school board seats. It’s the rare blue state that has gone all-in for privatization, led by Senator Michael Bennett (who served as Superintendent of Schools in Denver, although he was never an educator). Colorado’s Governor is Jared Polis, who is super-wealthy and founded two charter schools. Betsy DeVos hailed Denver as an exemplar of school choice.
Our friend Jeanne Kaplan served two terms on the elected Denver School Board and is a passionate advocate for public schools and civil rights. She has observed the bipartisan consensus around the DeVos-ALEC agenda with despair.
At 9:23 p.m. MDT on May 11, 2022 Education Reformers in Colorado suffered their first serious setback in the Colorado legislature. While SB 22-197, the so-called Innovation and Alternative Governance Bill passed both houses of the legislature, the resulting legislation was actually a defeat for reformers/privatizers in Colorado, a first such legislative stumble in many years. At the very least the adopted Bill placed a roadblock in the previously unobstructed march to privatization. At the most it was a sign of the weakening of privatization. We can only hope.
While education reformers/privatizers will try to convince you they got a victory in the fight for the soul of public education, that is not the truth. The Bill that passed and will likely be touted as a great success has little substance. In fact, one could say, “There is no THERE THERE,” for the final version neutered the original intent of the legislation and codified:
No third party governance with binding arbitration.
Retention of decision-making powers for duly elected school
An advisory non decision-making role for the State Board of Education should any disputes reach it.
After much ado SB 22-197 ended up being a nothing burger with very few of the original ingredients in place.
The Bill’s original purpose was to install an alternative, third governance model with binding arbitration for disputes between a school district (read DPS) and an Innovation Zone (read City Fund’s RootEd/Gates Family Foundation funded Denver Innovation Zone Schools.) Reformers took this inequitable, highly divisive idea very seriously. Simply put, they wanted special treatment for 12 (!) Innovation Zone schools. The Bill was sponsored by two Denver Democrats Senators, James Coleman and Chris Hansen, both of whom have been highly subsidized by various local and national reform organizations. In real time this bill was crafted specifically for for 12 out of about 1800 public schools in Colorado. After garnering no sponsorship in the House, Jen Bacon, Denver Democrat and former DPS school board member stepped in to co-sponsor the bill. With her leadership and knowledge of the importance of local control for school boards she was able steer the conference committee into producing a more palatable Bill. It must have been very awkward for Senator Chris Hansen to have to admit to his colleagues, the difference between his original bill and the one they were now voting on was the loss of binding arbitration. There were of course other changes but binding arbitration was the big one, for it would have undermined local school boards’ authority by allowing for the appointment of a “third party” to resolve disputes.
The privatizers are constantly on the hunt for new ways to undermine public schools. in this instance, they were thwarted. That’s good news.
Jeannie Kaplan, a former member of Denver’s elected school board, has warned for years about the subversion of Denver’s school election by well-funded, out-of-state “reformers.” Their money makes it difficult for ordinary citizens to run for the school board.
In this post, Jeannie reports that Dark Money is back and is prepared to fund candidates who support charter schools and other elements of the failed “reform” agenda. She has identified the groups that act as pass-throughs for Dark Money, she has tallied the total (to date) of $360,000, but it’s usually impossible to identify the original source of the money.
Diane Ravitch's blog 