There is lots going on in the world of politics, for what is known in the biz as an off-election-year. Over there we have the crowded and increasingly quarrelsome Democratic presidential primary, held against the backdrop of the impeachment theater. Over here we have Proposition CC – the ballot measure to remove the key disciplinary function of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights and allow the government to make free with whatever money it makes from overcharging on the tax proposal – and, less prominently, proposition DD and a somewhat interesting Aurora mayoral race.

Meanwhile, there are also a number of local school board elections which are escaping much attention, which is a shame considering the stakes.

I’ve been asked from time to time how places like even otherwise reasonable Douglas County and Grand Junction preternaturally fall to union-dominated school boards, for whom “education” apparently consists of slapping down any hint of excellence like a game of egalitarian whack-a-mole. The answer is that history is littered with examples of rotten things happening when no one is paying attention, but then of course teaching history is intolerably bourgeois.

Let’s consider the Denver School Board elections. Denver has its share of problems – crime is increasing; homelessness and vagrancy is accelerating as the principal social malady; traffic is hideous, made artificially worse by overweening and chimerical policies – but the city has a number of things going for it too, and improved education is among the top.

For several years now Denver’s families have enjoyed the benefits of a reform-minded school board which has made steady, if painfully incremental, improvements. A marked increase in the availability of school choice, primarily through the expansion of charters, has emancipated scores of children from educational purgatory. The establishment of higher standards, at times resulting in the closure of failing schools, has lifted the bar for all.

That the results are encouraging is inarguable. Charter schools routinely populate the top of lists of best schools, measured by a variety of factors including state test scores, college aptitude tests, graduation rates, college placements and so forth.

Not all greet this news with happiness. For the teachers’ unions any hint of educational excellence or scholarly success must necessarily be evidence of some social injustice – defined in this case as a weakening of the union’s monopolistic stranglehold on what nowadays passes for education, in their relentless pursuit of homogenization and the maintenance of the lowest common denominator as the standard.

The board has three open spots this election, which means that there is a possibility of it flipping from the current reform-minded majority, threatening the progress made to this point. The teachers’ unions are not about to pass up this opportunity, and accordingly a slate of candidates doggedly opposed to education improvement are in the running. At least five of the nine candidates for the three slots are actively opposed to school choice, three of them – Tay Anderson, Brad Laurvick, and Scott Baldermann – sufficiently so to have received the official union endorsement.

Anderson is fairly representative of anti-improvement set. He gained a bit of initial notoriety back in 2017 when he ran unsuccessfully for the school board while still in high school. Between then and now he spent his time accumulating the sort of life experience deemed invaluable by the union for serving on the school board – chanting slogans during the teachers strike, protesting ICE, that sort of thing.

The positions held by young Mr. Anderson are pretty much indistinguishable from the other anti-reform candidates. All, of course, are firmly dead set against allowing any more families the opportunity of enrolling their children in charter schools. Demand for educational opportunity already far exceeds the supply of available charter schools, resulting in growing waitlists. To school reform advocates these are names of children desperate for a chance at success; to the unions they are pawns to be sacrificed on the alter of fanatical leveling.

What, then, after doing away with better schools and SROs, are the anti-reformers priorities? Well, Anderson says that among his first are “to advocate for every Denver middle and high school to have a gender-neutral bathroom” and to “work to end period poverty” by stocking all school bathrooms with free tampons and pads. Forget Shakespeare, history, and Euclidean geometry, this is what modern schooling is about.

Call me a pessimist, but given the CEA’s political purchasing power and the progressively successful dumbing down of our culture it is entirely likely that the Denver School Board could flip and return to the pre-reform dark ages. I hope I’m wrong; for if I’m not, Denver will have taken a giant leap toward successfully transforming education into a complete impediment to knowledge.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.