It’s a truth universally acknowledged in Colorado that education fights go on and on and on. Denver is the locus because of arguments over current and past school boards and their policies. Past DPS school boards, supported by wealthy philanthropists who made their money in the usual ways, controlled DPS under the reform mantle, supporting charters, choice and standardized testing. They were given the boot, more or less, in 2017.

When an anti-reform board was elected, reform opponents argued the new members bought their seats with union money. Apparently money from wealthy philanthropists is cleaner in its vast volume than money taken monthly in dues from teachers’ salaries.

Now, there’s a philanthropic reform twist to this sad tale of back and forth. Parker Baxter, a University of Colorado, Denver director of CEPA, the Center for Education Policy Analysis in the School of Business, is using a $390,000 pile of Benjamins from Arnold Ventures and John Arnold, a natural gas billionaire who first accumulated his gobs trading for the fabulously wealthy and fabulously criminal Enron, to conduct his second study on Denver’s reforms.

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Baxter will use the money to grab millions of files of personally identifiable information (PII) from the State Department of Education to study what he’s already announced turned out fabulously: the DPS education reforms led by Sen. Michael Bennet and Tom Boasberg were a great success!

To do this new study of what he’s already studied and announced is fabulous, he will receive data on almost every student in the Denver metro area from the 2004-2005 school year to the 2018-2019 school year. Can we agree that it’s one massive download? The data will be anonymized, but the fields are extensive and highly specific, increasing the risk of protecting student data privacy.

He will have data on every student’s disciplinary history, ELL label, gifted and talented status, homeless status, migrant status, gender, racial background, type of school attended and, of course, reading, writing, math and science test CMAS scores, and PSAT and ACT scores. In addition to DPS data, he will use about 15 years of PII on students from Cherry Creek, Aurora, Jeffco, Adams 14, Englewood, Sheridan 2, Adams-Arapahoe 28J, Adams 12, Brighton 27J, Littleton 6, Mapleton and Westminster 50. Every metro district but Douglas County Schools is included. Why is that?

How will this analysis be different from his first study in which he found Denver’s schools performed fabulously after its reforms cinched in?

The purpose of the study is the same as his school and district-level analysis, except now he’s going after each kid. He will surely come to the same conclusions as in the first analysis. Arnold Ventures supports market-based solutions to public school problems and will certainly put its thumb on the scale. Apparently the Colorado Department of Education will too, as it expects to use this new examination of old material to spread the virtues of charters, innovation schools, school choice, etc., to the other non-reform districts in the metro area.

It’s too bad Baxter is proceeding in this direction. What would be really useful would be to address limitations from his first study. The National Education Policy Center located in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder offered its critique.

NEPC reminded us DPS had lots going on in Baxter’s initial study time period in addition to the reform portfolio program. DPS invested more money in certain students, it added Central Park, formerly Stapleton, and Lowry to its bank of schools, significantly growing from about 70,000 students to 90,000. Standardized tests changed. Improvements in English language education occurred. Some independently run, non-profit charter schools had the benefit of millions of dollars added to their budgets by philanthropy from such other fabulously wealthy men as John Malone and Bill Gates.

During this period, Denver’s innovation schools received help from RootEd, a school management enterprise supported by City Fund. City Fund was founded by Reed Hastings, the Netflix billionaire, and his Enron pal, John Arnold, who happened to donate $150,000 to now Mayor-elect Mike Johnston’s campaign. CDE hopes Baxter’s study will provide insight into how fabulously these innovation schools have operated to Denver’s benefit, even though a couple of these option schools are looking at un-innovating.

School finance is not Baxter’s main interest, even though he’s from CU Denver’s School of Business and this new study will receive data under the “audit exception” to federal privacy rules that govern student PII. He’s a policy guy. He doesn’t hide his bias. His essay for Education Next, “Dismantling Denver,” excoriates the current board and its supporters. Somehow it was unfair to Denver students a democratically-elected school board made its case to voters that reform as envisioned and implemented didn’t work that great.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.