Senate Majority Leader James Coleman has a grand idea. He wants to allow charter schools to open in locations in what he calls “education deserts.” This label is ascribed to low-income neighborhoods that are “deserts” because they lack charter schools.

Who knew? These “deserts” were identified in a 2018 Miami of Ohio University report funded and promoted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a very conservative, charter-school-and-voucher promoter out of Washington, D.C.

The idea of the Miami of Ohio report is to find places where the charter school movement can expand into public school districts. The motive is to identify low-income neighborhoods to market to while peddling the notion charters, especially with “prep” in their names, produce better outcomes in achievement for low-income students than public schools. It’s privatization using public funds. That is, public money pays for the students, but private and non-profit entities run the schools with faint oversight.

Based on Sen. Coleman’s concept, charter school applicants in “desert” locations would not have to apply to a local school district for authorization. Applicants would go straight to Colorado’s Charter School Institute. If you’re unfamiliar with this statewide agency, it authorizes charters that have been disallowed by school districts. CSI board members are not disinterested, objective evaluators of charter school applications.

CSI’s board of directors, appointed by the governor and the Colorado Department of Education commissioner, includes Brenda Dickhoner of Ready Colorado. She’s chief executive and president of this conservative, pro-school voucher advocacy organization. Nick Hernandez of Transform Education Now, a Denver-based nonprofit promoting charters, is also a board member of University Prep that recruits low-income children in Denver and has tried to expand into Adams 14. Then there’s Ross Izard, who lobbies for the charter school industry, including for the Education Alliance of Colorado, a pro-charter special-interest entity.

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These individuals are a sampling of the pro-charter orientation of the CSI Board. CSI has oversight of more than $311 million in public dollars serving 22,000 students. This money is diverted from 860,000 students in district public schools.

Why is this diversion significant? These millions are not balanced by local dollars. The funds come mostly from state school finance dollars. The $311 million is more than double the dollars Gov. Jared Polis wants to subtract from public schools based on declining enrollments. If more CSI-authorized schools enter districts with low-income students, more districts will see the chaos evident in Denver Public Schools, with closures of neighborhood schools only. Charters are off the hook. A lawsuit by parents against DPS’s school closure decisions is pending.

If CSI charters performed at substantially higher academic levels than public schools, that would be something. But they do not. In 2023, CSI’s average performance ranking across its 43 schools was 58.1, at the border between an “Improvement” and “Accredited” status. Twelve schools with more than 6,000 students landed in the Improvement category with an average 49.4 rating. These schools’ academic achievement parallels the achievement results of low-income students in neighborhood schools that don’t receive financial boosts from anti-public-school foundations and philanthropists.

Sen. Coleman’s bill concept is enthusiastically supported by Gov. Polis, who founded his own charter, New America School, 15 years ago and actively supports chartering as a solution to something.

Sen. Coleman and Gov. Polis have lots of wealthy company in their pursuit of pro-charter legislation and charter school growth. The Gates Community Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation are also big supporters, with the Waltons ploughing $20 million directly to Colorado Succeeds, the pro-voucher business executive’s leadership association, the Colorado League of Charter Schools, and Nick Hernandez’s Transform Education Now, among others.

As anyone who follows Colorado sports knows, some in the Walton family also own the majority of our state’s great sports teams. The Broncos, Nuggets, Avalanche, Mammoth and Rapids are a Walton-Kroenke-Penner family-owned juggernaut, putting Colorado and Denver at the leading edge of sports America. Oh, that they would stick to sports, finding the right supporting players to complement the incomparable Nikola Jokic of the Nuggets and the promising Bo Nix of the Broncos.

Better yet for Colorado, it would be transformative if the Walton Family Foundation and its peers throw their heft behind a grand scheme to make the state’s district public schools the best in the nation.

As it is, Walton Family Foundation dollars aren’t working for the 860,000 students in district schools. Foundation donations receive tax breaks that make fewer dollars available to the state’s General Fund used to pay for K-12 public education. Dollars contributed to charter schools and their lobbying associations feed the networks of under-supervised and over-valued education institutions whose success claims far exceed their actual accomplishments.

The state’s public-school finance is in a hole. In the next week or so, we’ll see whether public schools are given another shave. Sen. Coleman’s grand idea misses the mark. If education “deserts” exist, it’s not because public schools have betrayed children. It’s because our leaders, Sen. Coleman, Gov. Polis and others with great financial power have not stepped up. If they did commit to fair, equitable, and adequate school funding, that would be a triple-double worth an MVP award.

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