Dr. Mike DeGuire

Posted: January 18, 2024

 

 

Recent coverage of the Denver public school board race would seem to indicate that the public had it with the previous school board. For those that voted, that may be the case, as they overwhelmingly supported three new board members who ran as a ticket to bring about their definition of change: more safety, more academics, and a more “effective” school board. But in reality, the goals of those funding the campaigns for the newly elected board members go way beyond these three platform topics. The three were funded heavily by an independent expenditure which outspent their opponents by over 5 to 1, thanks to nearly $1.44 million in dark money from outside the city. This amount was nearly twice the amount of money given to the political action campaigns of the reform candidates in 2023 as compared to money given by similar “reformer” groups in 2019.

 

Local news media explained that the “dark money” came primarily from City Fund, “a national organization that favors charter schools and school autonomy.” However, City Fund is led and managed by people who have much broader goals in addition to promoting “autonomy and innovation for public and charter schools.” The people connected with City Fund have been working behind the scenes to change how public education takes place in Denver, in Colorado, and across the nation for years, and not just in this most recent DPS school board race. Denver citizens should know who the people are that funded the school board 2023 campaign, their allegiances to other organizations and individuals, and the long-term vision that these groups have for public education.

 

Formed in late 2017, City Fund “received funding from a number of foundations who are committed to privatizing public education: the Hastings Fund, the Arnold Foundation, the Dell Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Ballmer Group.” In 2018, a leaked presentation described how City Fund planned to use its $200 million investment to increase charter school representation up to 50% in over 40 cities across the country. Denver was cited as a “model district” for this movement, along with New Orleans and Washington, D.C., since over half of the DPS schools were already functioning as either charter or innovation schools. This governing system is named the “portfolio model,” since the focus is for school boards to manage their “community’s portfolio of educational service offerings by divesting less productive schools and adding more promising ones.” In the past several decades, based primarily on test score results, Denver “unloaded” over 48 neighborhood schools and opened more than 70 charter schools and over 50 innovation schools.

 

City Fund and other like billionaire-funded foundations had already helped spread variations of this model to over half a dozen cities. The City Fund plan entailed funding from $15 to $25 million to “local groups where City Fund leaders will sit on the boards of directors. After seven to 10 years, the City Fund plans to exit a city, allowing the group to spread to new ones and “enabling national scaling.” In Denver the local group they created is RootED, funding them with over $40 million from 2018 to 2022. RootEd then funded over 40 Denver organizations to spread the City Fund message.

 

School board members from Oakland, Indianapolis, Camden, East Baton Rouge, St. Louis and San Antonio described the privatization goals of the City Fund playbook that occurred in their cities. “The organizations funded by the City Fund present themselves as local grassroots organizations when nothing could be further from the truth.” The board members explained how City Fund “is led by billionaires forcing their extreme market bias onto our school system. Its framework steers tax dollars away from the public schools and toward their chosen consultants, partner groups, curricula, and other products and services without oversight from elected officials. The movement manifests in the expansion of charter schools and their enrollment, division of public districts into factions, incubation of community advocacy groups, promotion of anti-public school legislation, and influencing of state and local campaigns.”

 

Denver citizens should know who the people are that funded the school board 2023 campaign, their allegiances to other organizations and individuals, and the long-term vision that these groups have for public education.

 

The guaranteed spread of Denver’s “portfolio model” took a turn in 2019 and again in 2021 when the DPS school board elected new members supported by the local teachers union. This worried the City Fund leaders and their allies at RootED as they believed a union-backed board might eradicate some of the systems in place to continue the portfolio model system. The “portfolio model” is not compatible with many teacher union beliefs, e.g. full teacher contractual rights in innovation schools. The new union-backed board made several changes that were concerning to previous school board members and their allies who had supported the “market-based” business model in DPS. In addition to reuniting two schools that had been co-located with innovation or charter schools, the new board discarded the district’s school ratings system that previous boards used to justify closing low scoring schools, delayed the opening of charters, and initially voted to limit the autonomy of innovation schools.

 

As a result of the 2019 DPS school board election results, in 2020, City Fund funded a new organization, Denver Families for Public Schools, formed with the backing of four Denver charter networks. This group was created primarily to promote pro-reform candidates for the DPS school board and to forestall any more erosion of the “portfolio model”, since City fund was spreading the system across the country. Denver Families then used most of the $1.75 million ($1.4 million) they received from City Fund to pay for widespread marketing in the 2023 school board election, including multiple first time-ever mayoral TV ads, in hopes that backers of their ideology would be installed on the DPS board. To ensure their message was heard across the city, City Fund also supported the creation of Educate Denver by working through their funded local group, RootED. Educate Denver included eight former DPS school board members, two former mayors, several legislators, and business leaders who had helped institutionalize the portfolio model in DPS under previous superintendents. Educate Denver used their influence with local media and other newly created groups, like Resign DPS Board, to lobby for the election of new board members in the 2023 election. The dark money worked, and three new school board members backed by City Fund were elected!

 

Who are the people behind City Fund, how are they connected with other pro-reform/privatizing groups, and what are their “long-term” goals?

 

Reed Hastings and John Arnold co-founded City Fund in 2017. The current CEO of City Fund is Marlon Marshall, and partners at City Fund include Ethan Gray and Chris Barbic. In addition to Hastings and Arnold, the City Fund board includes Neerav Kingsland, Romy Drucker, and Elisa Villanueva Beard.

 

Reed Hastings, of Netflix fame whose net worth is $4.6 billion, has a long history of supporting charter schools and alternative governance models in public education. Hastings is also a board member of the KIPP charter chain, the organization that Kimberlee Sia, one of the newly elected board members, was CEO at for six years. Hastings is opposed to elected school boards, he wants to “privatize” public education, and use his educational tech investments to expand ed tech in classrooms and replace teachers with computers. “Hastings and other school reform-minded tech billionaires want to use “high-tech solutions to replace human labor and disrupt longtime management and oversight approaches in the name of efficiency.”

 

Hastings helped launch NewSchools Venture Fund, which has invested $250 million in education entrepreneurs and “ed tech” products. He’s also been a major backer of DreamBox Learning, which develops the math software used in Rocketship schools, and the Khan Academy, an online teaching video clearinghouse. New Schools Venture Fund spent over $150 million to fund “charter management organizations, including Aspire Public Schools, KIPP and Rocketship Education, as well as groups like the New Teacher Project, which recruits midcareer professionals into teaching, and Khan Academy, which creates online video lessons.”

 

Hastings is a founding member of the Pahara Institute, which is now located in Bailey, Colorado, forty miles from Denver, thanks to his purchase and development of an $20 million training center there through his “non-profit,” Lone Rock Foundation. The Pahara Institute was originally founded by Kim Smith with the New Schools Venture Fund, a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm. Pahara Institute trains corporate, school, and civic leaders in long term strategies to promote charters, innovation schools, and educational technology systems across the country. Colorado participants in the Pahara Institute include former DPS Superintendents Michael Bennet and Tom Boasberg, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, CEO Bill Kurtz of DSST, Denver’s largest charter school charter chain,(who meets regularly with Reed Hastings), former DPS school board member Nate Easley, Hanna Skandera with the Denver-based Daniels Fund (a local conservative foundation that recently proposed paying for 100,000 seats to secular or religious private schools, publicly funded charter schools, or “micro-schools.”), and Scott Laband, CEO of Colorado Succeeds, an organization that promotes “protecting charter and innovation schools, including making steps toward more equitable funding for charter schools.”

 

In 2018, Hastings also worked with New Schools Venture Fund to create School Board Partners. Instead of supporting existing public schools, which they label as racist and failing, the School Board Partners plan is to “train” school board members to further the portfolio model of education reform, and to expand charter school growth.

 

John Arnold, whose net worth is $3.3 billion, has pushed for the elimination of teacher pensions, bankrolled the KIPP charter chain, and “financed right-wing groups like the Virginia-based Liberty Initiative Fund.” In addition, the Arnold foundation gave over $25 million to New Orleans charter schools, millions to YES Prep charter schools in Texas, Stand for Children, and parent groups that support closing failing schools and turning them into charters. He helped to fund Accelerate, a tutoring program relying on technology software, initiated by America Achieves, a group of investors that includes Denver’s mayor, Mike Johnston.

 

Marlon Marshall, the CEO of City Fund, is on the board of the twelve school Rocky Mountain Prep charter chain in Denver, has children in DPS, and is a board member of Education Reform Advocacy Now, an organization affiliated with Democrats for Education Reform. Education Reform Advocacy Now has given millions to Colorado organizations to support local school board candidates who agree with their philosophy of privatization in the public schools. This group, “along with its associated PAC Democrats for Education Reform, is also an active supporter of school choice through charter schools and the elimination of teacher tenure in public schools. In 2010, the group ran a high-profile ad in New York asking parents to “stop listening to the teachers’ union.”

 

Romy Drucker is the Walton Family Foundation Director of K-12 Education Programs. Since 2010, the Walton Family Foundation has given over $22 million to Education Reform Now, the same group connected with City Fund’s CEO, Marlon Marshall. The Walton Family Foundation has supported charter schools since the late 1990’s, they fund the far right American Enterprise Institute, which has ties to the Koch brothers and ALEC, and they have lobbied to destroy teacher unions. The Walton foundation has funded charter schools in Colorado and elsewhere with over $1 billion in loans to purchase school facilities.

 

Neerav Kingsland, partner and the first CEO at City Fund, was the CEO for New Schools for New Orleans, an all-charter school district, he pushed for more charter schools in all urban cities as early as 2012, and he outlined the City Fund goals to expand the model of increasing charters in over 40 cities when City Fund was formed in 2017.

 

Chris Barbic, partner at City Fund, is also the founder of YES Prep Public Charter Schools, a charter school chain in Texas, he served as the founding director of the Achievement School district in Tennessee, initiated to improve lowest performing schools, (yet proven to be a failure ten years later,) and he also was a Pahara Institute fellow.

 

Ethan Gray, partner at City Fund, is the founder of Education Cities, an organization funded by the Walton Family foundation that connects other foundations in 31 cities to promote charters, and he is the treasurer of the board with RootEd, the local Denver group that supports charter and innovation schools. Gray’s role with Education Cities was to disrupt urban school districts across the country by working with local foundations that support the move to eliminate traditional local control by elected school boards. He works closely with Donnell-Kay and the Gates foundations in that effort. He was a former board member of the Denver Strive charter chain of schools, and he formerly lived in Denver.

 

Elisa Villanueva Beard, City Fund partner, is the CEO for Teach for America, an organization funded by the Walton Family Foundation and others, and she helped place hundreds of teachers in DPS over the years. The Walton family foundation gave Teach for America over $150 million in grants over the past several decades. Research has shown that only “one-fourth of TFA staff stay in the classroom for more than five years, compared with about half of all new teachers,” creating churn and significant turnover for Denver schools and elsewhere. Teach For America’s alumni have started “some of the nation’s largest charter networks, including KIPP, Rocketship Education, IDEA and YES Prep.” Reed Hastings is a primary funder of Rocketship education.

 

As evidenced by their past work and their affiliations with other organizations, City Fund partners and their board members are directly connected to the billionaire-funded groups whose goals are to privatize education. The goals of the dark money funders in the November school board election are far more widespread than the original campaign issues:

 

1. Eliminate teacher pensions and teacher tenure.
2. Eliminate/reduce the power of locally elected school boards. (Unless they are in control)
3. Promote marketing and competition among local schools.
4. Infuse costly education technology to supplant the role of teachers.
5. Support corporatization of curriculum and instructional delivery processes.
6. Decrease the role of teacher unions in decision-making.
7. Enable more students to attend private, religious schools, and charter schools.

 

How will the new Denver school board vote when their primary funders at City Fund have these core beliefs about what should happen in the school district? Will they try to continue growing charters and innovation schools, leaving neighborhood schools to decline due to limited resources? Will they prepare the school district for the privatizing goals of City Fund and their allies? OR? Will they listen to the voices of families who have been left out of the conversation through years of gentrification and school closures? Will they listen to and act on the needs of educators who have been overlooked in the push for more reforms in the past?

 

Mike DeGuire, Ph.D., is an executive coach for school leaders in Denver, and he serves on the board of Advocates for Public Education Policy.