Smoke gets in your eyes when our leaders blow wildfire blasts to deflect from unhappy truths. Our public education foundations are ablaze, and too many of our public education policy leaders are fanning the flames. School board elections are some of the most important in our democracy. This timing offers an opportunity to put out the fires burning our schoolhouses down.

Denver Public Schools’ board usually gets the most attention from media. Our top political leaders have storied associations with DPS. Michael Bennet ran DPS as superintendent before becoming a U.S. senator. John Hickenlooper, former Denver mayor, governor, and now U.S. senator, put together wide-ranging laissez-faire legislation “freeing” charter schools to do pretty much what they please as far as curriculum, compensation, due process, etc.

Denver’s current mayor, Michael Johnston, wrote the legislation that now hamstrings district schools across the state. Former Denver mayors Federico Pena and Wellington Webb present “school choice” for charter and innovation schools as a panacea. Our current governor, Jared Polis, goes all-in on public school accountability, except as it relates to charters and their mostly undemocratic governance practices and financial opacity. He’s done harm by not taking on the TABOR knot.
These men promote the principles of Educate Denver and Denver Families for Public Schools, propagandistic purveyors of anti-public-school nonsense. Their non-stop criticism pervades our state’s current discourse as to how the vast majority of our children will experience their schooling.

With these great men leading the charge, what could possibly go wrong? Denver Families for Public Schools, with pro-choice and pro-charter Pat Donvan as avatar for the great men, is bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the DPS election in support of four candidates. They’re running for the at-large position and for seats in the northeast, central and southwest districts.

At the recent debate sponsored by Educate Denver, Chalkbeat and Denver’s local CBS station, Alex Magana, a long-time DPS administrator running for the at-large seat, made this astonishing statement: “Kids begin school at the same starting point.” He then questioned why DPS minority students have lower academic achievement CMAS scores than their white peers.

Educate Denver and Denver Families for Public Schools are apparently basing their critiques of public education, particularly related to the achievement gap, on Magano’s utterly incorrect and demonstrably false premise. Students do not enter school at the same starting point. That’s the crux of the education challenge.

As a leader of Kepner Beacon Middle School, an innovation “choice” school within the DPS system with its 90% minority and 89% low-income student populations, Magano should have the answer to his achievement gap question. Kepner Beacon Middle School crossed the “green” “meets performance” line by less than a point in 2025 at a 53.3 rating. But at all grades, only 18.3% of students met English language standards and only 10.4% met math standards. Those data points are not promising.

Every school in Denver in the “improvement” or lower category has large majorities of low-income and minority students. Most are in the 80% or above low-income population categories. These students clearly do not begin their education at the same starting point as more affluent white children.

This fact plays out across school districts. Take suburban districts like Cherry Creek and Jefferson County. In Jeffco, the average low-income student status of their children in “improvement” category schools is 63%. In Cherry Creek, it’s 62.8% for low-income children. Harrison School District has a student population similar to DPS. Of its 11 schools in “improvement” status out of 27 total schools, 10 have a low-income student population at 72% or more.

Caron Blanke, an Educate Denver and Denver Families candidate running for the central Denver board spot, claimed Denver’s charter schools performed better than its district schools. She further asserted charter schools are “public” schools. Let’s clarify.

Rocky Mountain Prep’s board with chair Pat Donovan of Denver Families, recently terminated its chief executive. In 2024, 10 of RMP’s 11 schools were in the “green” or “performance” category. This year, four schools are in the “improvement” category. One school dropped 21 points off the previous year’s performance, and another dropped 18 points. That data has all sorts of implications for the value of CMAS testing, quality of charter schools, and rationale for school “choice.”

Donovan is also on the board of KIPP schools in DPS and the League of Charter Schools. Of six KIPP schools, four are in the “improvement” category. Three of “improvement” KIPP schools exceed 80% of children in low-income status. These schools benefit from closures of DPS district schools. That’s an effect of school “choice.” Parents with children from closed DPS schools get to “choose” their children into “improvement” category charter schools that claim they are “better” than neighborhood schools. That’s how the word “false” gets attached to “choice.”

Are charters really public schools? Only based on their funding with taxpayer dollars and their CDE performance rating. Otherwise, they operate without public oversight.

Let the smoke clear, voters, to fill in your ballots with your eyes wide open.

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