“Potential solutions to the inequities caused by the billionaires’ push to privatize education in Denver Public Schools/Colorado”

(Updated November, 2023) Dr. Mike DeGuire

Billionaires’ goal is to privatize education

Billionaires have been using their philanthropic foundations to try and change how public education is delivered and governed across the country for decades. This scheme has worked in many cities where the state legislatures and local school districts have allowed it to flourish. Denver Public Schools (DPS) has been considered a “leader” in this privatiziation movement for years. Members of the new DPS Board and many of their predecessors have been influenced by the think tanks, community organizations, and the training they participate in with privatizer reform-supported organizations like the Pahara Institute and School Board Partners. The political influence that RootEd and the local community organizations they fund with over $40 million from billionaires creates a misleading, biased message of what the public really wants for their schools.

Billionaires fund organizations who mobilize parents at board meetings. They support groups to write op eds to decry the current work of the district. They fund research reports which sing the praises of their privatization reform methods, yet when analyzed in depth their findings fall short. They continue to fund charter and innovation schools, which then gain an unfair advantage in the services and programs they are able to offer their students. In effect, these policies have created separate and unequal systems of governance and schooling in a district serving a population that is nearly 80% students of color.

Change CAN happen to slow/stop privatization

Changing state laws and local school policies will be the primary ways to slow/stop the privatization movement. These changes cannot happen unless the public is motivated to push for them at the local, state, and/or federal levels. It will be necessary to build broad coalitions of educators, parents, citizens, and elected leaders to stop the intrusion of billionaires’ money into the decision-making for public education.

Charter and voucher laws vary across the country, and there are states that do NOT support charters as fully as Colorado does. In Kentucky, there are no charter schools, and the governor, Andy Beshear, recently joined in a lawsuit against the implementation of charter schools in his state. At the same time, a number of states have also passed new laws providing for vouchers and ESA’s to pay for their child’s education, which then takes money from the public education system.

In 2022, Helen Ladd, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at Duke University outlined four ways that charter schools “undermine good policy making.” She acknowledges that “some charter schools undoubtedly produce positive outcomes for many of their students.” At the same time, “charter schools typically do far more to interfere with, than to promote, the making of good education policy in the U.S. In particular, they make it difficult for publicly elected officials to develop coherent education systems, to adequately attend to the educational challenges of child poverty, to promote the racial integration of students, and to ensure strong public accountability and oversight for the use of public funds.”

As a result of these inequities, Dr. Ladd recommends that “charter schools should be subject to more stringent accountability procedures than traditional public schools. Policymakers need to provide more complete information about individual charter schools related to the quality of their financial management, student outcomes, and also to their internal school processes and practices.” Dr. Ladd recommends four changes to current policies:

1. “The growth of charter schools should be severely restricted. Limiting the growth of charter schools would limit inefficiencies associated with wasteful competition among schools.
2. State governments should provide transition aid to school districts losing students — and hence revenue — to charter schools. Charters should be required to provide the quality programs needed to serve students with disabilities or those from non-English-speaking families.
3. In authorizing and overseeing charter schools, policymakers should pay close attention to the potential for charter schools to contribute to racial segregation and isolation. That would require attention to the location of individual charter schools, the services they offer, and their strategies for student recruitment.
4. Charter schools should be subject to more stringent accountability procedures than traditional public schools. Given their public funding, policymakers need to provide more complete information about individual charter schools related to the quality of their financial management, student outcomes, and also to their internal school processes and practices.”

How citizens can take ACTION to ensure that their tax dollars support traditional PUBLIC schools

There are many ways that the public can get involved to pressure legislators and board members to enact new laws and policies to change the current trajectory of privatization in schools.

1. Become informed about the problems and the history of privatization in districts like DPS. This is probably the first best step to effecting change. Understand that the current insistence on market-based fundamentalism is harming many students. The current DPS “portfolio model” is a throwaway concept that does not honor or recognize the unique gifts that each student brings to the learning process. David Hursh describes several ways that citizens should refocus on the value of a comprehensive public education for every student. He encourages everyone interested in education to “recognize that the wealthy are trying to reshape public education in their own views, understand that test scores are often manipulated by the corporate reformers and the media to promote privatization and portray teachers and schools as failing, and push decision-makers to create schools that support students in engaging in real, critical learning.”

2.Work with state and local officials to support changes in laws that currently favor charter and innovation schools, similar to those ideas recommended by researchers such as Dr. Helen Ladd. (If the legislators are not committed to these changes, work to elect members who will be.)

Sample legislation has been developed by several public advocacy organizations. These are some possible legislative topics that could change the current inequities and promote transparency and increased accountability for all schools, regardless of their governing model:

a. Transparency & Accountability Parents’ Education Bill of Rights-All parents deserve access to critical information regarding school fees, dress code, disciplinary policies, promotion and retention policies, the present authorization and financial status of the school, free and reduced lunch policies, and access to transportation.

b. Fiscal Responsibility Not For Profit Act- Students deserve to attend schools where their access to resources isn’t determined purely by profit motives, and where the quality of their education doesn’t depend on how much taxpayer funding can be extracted.

c. Taxpayer Education Protection Act- All taxpayers have a right to know how public funds are being used responsibly in publicly-funded schools and not spent on gifts and enticements to expand their enrollments and increase their funding.

d. Transparency in Publicly-Funded Charter Schools Act- In order to protect students and public funds from exploitation by those in the charter school system, states should implement strong transparency measures that allow parents and taxpayers to oversee the management and expenditure of public funds. The parents and taxpayers supporting publicly-funded schools have a right to ensure their funds are being stewarded with responsibility for the effective education of all enrolled students.

e. Protect Public Infrastructure Investments Act- When taxpayer funds are used to purchase or construct buildings, private interests should not be able to take ownership of that property without adequately compensating taxpayers for those investments.

3. Support school districts to join together to communicate the truth about charter schools: e.g. higher administration costs, lower pay for teachers, lack of transparency in funding, questionable systems of enrolling and exiting students, overemphasis on testing, unfair marketing practices, and use of school resources to pay parents. In Texas, over forty PUBLIC school districts joined together to counter the monetized spread of charters in their region, and to spread the message of positive results they achieve with traditional public education in their schools. Their website We GO Public, highlights how “charter schools are also funded by private companies, individuals, and interests.” As an example of how taxpayer dollars are being misused, the Texas superintendents cited: “In essence, the taxpayer funds a charter school without receiving any benefits and provides no input on how it operates. In fact, the taxpayer may not even be aware that their dollars are funding a structure that a private company and/or group of investors could reap rewards or gain tax incentives. Moreover, the taxpayer may start to see their neighborhood school struggling because the funds are flowing into the charter. This is a double whammy for the taxpayer who believes his or her taxes are going to serve the students in the traditional public school. Instead, the charter school uses those funds and the public school can suffer.”

4. Encourage school board members to focus on the REAL values that most community members want for ALL students and educators by enacting policies to:

a. Limit or eliminate the use of standardized testing as a primary measure of both student performance and school quality

b. Provide increased oversight, transparency, and accountability for charters and innovation schools

c. Eliminate student-based budgeting practices and establish “need-based budgeting” for all schools

d. Change current local enrollment and choice policies to address segregation

e. Enact policies to ensure full contractual rights for teachers in all schools.

5. Urge congressional representatives to support Congressman Jamaal Bowman’s proposed federal legislation, the More Teaching Less Testing Act, to eliminate the use of state tests to rank schools and evaluate teachers, and to increase federal funding for Title 1 schools. Introduced last spring, “this bill corrects the imbalance between testing and teaching. More than two decades since the advent of No Child Left Behind,…repeatedly measuring test-score gaps won’t close the nation’s inexcusable opportunity gaps,” said Director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado Boulder Kevin Welner. “It’s time we shifted from our testing mania to a sustained commitment to providing children and their schools with the resources they need to be successful.”

Lorie Shepherd, University of Colorado Boulder Distinguished Professor and Past President of the American Educational Research Association stated, “This bill addresses decades of evidence showing what happens when teaching in the poorest communities is made to imitate multiple-choice tests … and all the joys of teaching and of learning are lost. Accountability testing was supposed to serve equity but has done just the opposite.”

6. Insist that state legislators increase state funding for education to eliminate the significant gaps in resources for programs and services to students, and to address the ongoing competition for students. “Colorado ranks 45th in the nation for the amount of tax money spent on education, and Colorado allocates $3,000 less per pupil than the national average.” In addition, teacher pay is 49th out of all states. Since the great recession of 2009, Colorado school funding has declined by over $10 billion.

Derek Black, Law Professor at the University of South Carolina researched this issue extensively in his book Schoolhouse Burning. He explains, “States do not need to experiment with public education; they need to fund it. Fair school funding can revitalize the teaching force, offer struggling students the support services they desperately need, and minimize the incentive for parents to opt out of the system.” The research is indisputable: more money for schools helps students achieve, especially students from low income families.

7. Encourage legislators to redesign the Colorado state accountability system to address the inherent problems with how the system defines and measures school quality and overall student performance. It is no longer viable for schools and districts to be evaluated primarily on high stakes standardized testing results, since they are unfair and biased for large portions of the student population. The 2023 Colorado Education Association report cited the accountability system as one of major roadblocks to teacher retention. “Contrary to our current model, an effective accountability system would serve to provide a full picture of how our schools are serving students (based on a broad spectrum of indicators) so that timely support for students’ and educators’ needs can be provided.” Derek Black says districts must “eliminate the unflinching allegiance to standardized tests and curriculum…and stop treating schools like businesses to be managed.” Colorado superintendents have also called for major changes in the system, and they need support from citizens to ensure that those changes occur in the legislature.

8. Organize and coordinate efforts within and across school district lines to spread the message that public schools must be preserved as “public” schools.

There are organizations in Colorado committed to changing current laws: Advocates for Public Education Policy, CEA, Working Families Party, CASE, Member only Facebook groups-e.g. Our Denver Our Schools, Thompson School District Reform Watch, Denver CMAS Opt Out, Colorado BATS, Classrooms not Corporations.

In addition, there are national organizations that support public education and work to stop privatization in education: e.g., Journey for Justice, Network for Public Education, Public Voices for Public Schools, Uniting to Save Our Schools, Public Funds for Public Schools, and In the Public Interest, Fair Test. Numerous state level group are also fighting to preserve and support public education: e.g. Illinois Families for Public Schools, Support Our Schools, Save our Schools Arizona, Public Education Partners, and We Go Public.

Diane Ravitch, author of Slaying Goliath and Nancy McLean, award-winning author of Democracy in Chains, offer specific ideas on how to fight back against the privatization movement in their 2022 joint video, where they focus on one key strategy: connect with others who care about public education and organize, organize.

9. Stay vigilant and be skeptical of the changing “messaging” that privatizers continually evolve based on perceived public opinions on K-12 education.

Amy Frogge, former Nashville school board member explains, “the education privatization movement ‘is a billionaire’s movement,’ and the only way it can ‘gain ground is to create controversy and distrust’ of the public education system.” This message of distrust and controversy has been especially widespread in the last few years, and Christopher Rufo, the billionaire-backed spokesperson for the “culture wars,” has been leading the charge. The billionaires also know how to “rebrand their messaging” when necessary to try and gain public support.

For example, as parents and citizens continue to voice concerns regarding the questionable value and unreliability of state standardized tests, the pro-privatization “think tank” leaders are now backtracking, insisting that testing results are NOT their “main concern” especially since charter schools are not doing much better in state testing. Rufo explains that “for 30 years, the argument has been ‘school choice is going to improve test scores’ — framing it as math and statistics — and then “school choice is going to improve outcomes for inner-city minority kids,” framing it as identity politics and targeting a specific demographic for help. But school choice was really not winning with those messages.” Hence they shifted the message to “argue that, rather than target discrete groups, they were going to offer universal school choice to everyone, tapping into middle-class sensibilities…Rather than emphasizing test scores and discrete demographics, the new generation of school choice activists made the argument about the curriculum, about values.”

The billionaires are working with their funded organizations to center their attention on“CHOICE”-the right of ALL parents to choose their own schools and their demand to have taxpayer dollars fund the students, not the public school system. Choice is the new “accountability,” for the privatizer funded think tank researchers who want to unravel the current public school system by encouraging charter schools, autonomous schools, vouchers, education savings accounts, and tax credits. The privatizers have made their current ideological positions clear: dismantle the public school system in order to meet the needs of the few, and insist that parents’ rights trump the needs of the collective public good for all students.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The systemic influence of billionaires in school districts like DPS continues to cause significant harm for students, families, and educators alike. In Denver and elsewhere, the market-based system based on high stakes testing, competition, student-based budgeting, and school “choice” has not fulfilled the goal of education as a public good for ALL students. The stark inequalities inherent in the DPS system are due to this ill-advised focus on education as a business. The privatizers and their billionaire backers helped to create this current crisis, along with willing participants at the state and local level.

DPS has suffered for decades due to this insidious intrusion of billionaires into the school system. Teachers continue to be pressured into preparing students to take standardized tests versus preparing students to think critically, to problem solve, and to collaborate with each other. Due to the hyper focus on test prep, the opportunities for students to experience the arts, project-based learning, and to follow their passions are severely limited. Schools compete for students, and many schools lack essential resources. Parents have to try and raise additional money when their school budgets are woefully inadequate for the essential programs their children need. Specialized services are often limited to those schools with extra funds. Citizens remain in the dark about how their taxpayer dollars are being spent by charter schools. Inequities exist across all school governing models, and segregation in schools by socioeconomic levels has become the norm.

The “potential solutions” in this article will only be possible through coordinated, active participation by those who understand how debilitating the privatization/reform movement has been for students. Citizens need to be committed to ensuring equitable support for students to maintain our “public” education system and to preserve our democracy.