There’s election rhetoric, and there’s reality. Hence, the election mailers sent to Denver households recently accusing the incumbent Denver Public Schools board and administration of “ceding space to a for-profit charter school.”

It’s no secret the Denver Classroom Teachers Association – the local union that helped fund the mailers through its donations to an independent expenditure committee – doesn’t like charter schools and is backing a slate of candidates who feel the same way. The union aims to turn over the current Denver board and change its trajectory. A long-standing talking point in that effort has been to denounce the booming charter-school movement as an attempt to privatize public education and turn it over to profiteers.

Yet, as education-affairs sleuth Chalkbeat Colorado reminded us the other day in its coverage of the race:

In Colorado, charter schools are required to be run by nonprofit boards. Charter school boards are permitted to contract operations and management to for-profit companies, often known as education-management organizations or EMOs, but that is rare in Colorado.

OK, so just how rare is it that charter school management and operations are contracted out to for-profit firms at the state’s 226 charter schools (and counting), which enroll well over 100,000 students? It turns out to be less than 3 percent. That’s according to Dan Schaller, government affairs director for the Colorado League of Charter Schools.

In other words, the charter school movement in Colorado is, to all intents and purposes, nonprofit. Pretty open-and-shut.

Which is why, as Chalkbeat reported Tuesday, those responsible for the mailer have now cried “uncle” following an outcry from current Denver school board members and charter supporters:

An independent committee trying to sway a Denver school board race has agreed to stop saying a “for-profit charter school” is moving into a DPS campus in northeast Denver. … the committee … agreed “not to use that messaging in any digital advertising or in any future printed mailings.”

But will the committee agree to go door to door asking for its errant mailers back?