Jacqueline Falcón

Posted June 18, 2026

 

 

Michael Bennet. The name and face triggers a long standing certain kind of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) from 2006 when he served Denver Public Schools (DPS) as the unqualified Superintendent with no educational background and only the mindset to spearhead and install the business portfolio model of education in DPS that would fuel the efforts to privatize our neighborhood public schools, close them down under the guise of failure and set up charter schools, such as DSST, Kipp, Strive (now Rocky Mountain Prep) and University Prep, all purported as ‘better’ schools for our primarily low income Black and Latino students in Southwest Denver, the Far Northeast and Near Northeast.

 

I was a teacher at Manual High School in 2006 when Michael Bennet unleashed his elitist, racist, White privileged, “I know what’s best” patriarchy mentality on the innocent students at Manual. He arrogantly and mistakenly claimed the teachers at Manual were not teaching and failing the students and also pushed the false claim that the enrollment had dwindled to 500 students, when it was actually over 700 students. Citing a school as failing and under-enrolled is the common pretext for closing schools in DPS. Manual HS at the time had three ‘different’ schools on 3 different floors which created a confusing school environment that divided staff and students.

 

Manual HS, as it is still today, was predominantly low income Black and Brown students. As we all know, income status is the strongest predictor of outcomes on standardized tests. Michael Bennet and fellow privatizers know this all too well, as does any educated teacher and parent or anyone for that matter who can google the statistics on the relation between income and standardized test scores.

 

I remember being in the library when Michael Bennet came to speak to the staff from all 3 schools. I remember his arrogance as he condemned the teachers as failing students. At that meeting, I told Michael Bennet that he could switch all the staff from Denver School of the Arts (DSA) with all the staff from Manual and still get the same results at both schools. He got very angry and responded that he had heard other teachers say the same thing and it absolutely wasn’t true. Another teacher also heard him comment to one of his staff members, after talking to Manual teachers, that it was no wonder the students weren’t doing well at Manual, insinuating that we were boring and incompetent.

 

When he made the decision to close Manual despite student, parent, staff and community outrage and protests, he decided they were going to send our Manual students to West High School. When he was called out on the logic of that decision when the scores of West High School students were also ‘failing’ by his standards, he changed course and decided to send the students to South High School. Manual students also had the option to find other schools to attend outside of South HS.

 

Students, parents, staff and community complained about forcing students to take a long RTD bus ride out to South and the difficulty they would have getting there, waking up earlier to ride the bus and being sent to an unfamiliar neighborhood. Michael Bennet did a clownish photo op riding a bus to school with students to downplay the difficulties he created for Manual students getting to their new, ‘non-failing’ school for the duration of their high school time. Several of us teachers from Manual were also hired at South, despite the accusation that we were supposedly bad teachers. While we were also disgruntled by the changes and being forced out of Manual, we were also happy we could be with the 350 Manual students who were bussed off to South.

The district gave students laptops to use at South HS and promised to track their progress and attendance at their new school. They didn’t.

 

Throughout the course of the 2006-2007 school year, many of the 350 Manual students dropped out of South and by the end of the year close to only 60 students remained. One of my former students from Manual came to my room and asked me what happened to all of the other students when he noticed most of them were gone. I had no answer for him and neither did Michael Bennet. In the following years, I ran into students in the Manual neighborhood from time to time and some of them told me they dropped out, tried to find nearby schools to attend and that it was too hard to take the bus out of our neighborhood to go to a school they didn’t feel at home in, in a neighborhood that was unfamiliar to them. Michael Bennet quietly swept his failures of Manual students under the rug and of course was never accountable for the chaos he created for them in continuing their education or the high number of drop-outs he directly caused.

 

This is what a University of Colorado study, led by Professor Ben Kirshner, revealed after tracking the displaced Manual students and the impact Michael Bennet had on them by closing Manual,

 

The Denver Post reported:

 

• Only 52 percent of the students who were juniors when Manual closed went on to graduate. Manual had previously graduated 68 percent of its seniors.
• Historically, Manual students had a 6 percent chance of dropping out of After closure, the chance that a displaced Manual student would drop out soared to 17 percent.
• Colorado Student Assessment Program test scores among displaced Manual students dropped from between 3 and 38 points in reading, writing and math. Historically, Manual students typically gained between 8 and 19 points each year in those ”

 

In other words, the unqualified Superintendent Michael Bennet’s decision to close Manual had a crushing effect on Manual students.

 

Michael Bennet left Denver Public Schools after serving almost 4 years, so that he could be strategically placed in a vacated Colorado Senate seat. He left behind the start of a dirty trail for out of state billionaires to follow, that opened up the district to their privatization agenda and made sure his former Chief Operating Officer and childhood friend, Tom Boasberg was put in place as Superintendent to continue managing DPS as a business. This enabled out of state billionaires like Reed Hastings and John Arnold to later funnel money to local privatization groups such as RootEd, Denver Families and TEN to influence school board members and to push the con reform scheme of rating schools based on standardized test scores, create competition between schools and to close so called ‘failing’ schools attended by predominantly low income, Black/Brown students and replace them with charter schools.

 

In short, Bennet’s legacy in DPS is setting up the sketchy scheme of running Denver Public Schools like a competitive business under the business portfolio model which has led to the closing of at least 40 neighborhood public schools since 2006 and has replaced them with approximately 60 charter schools out of 200 schools in DPS, which don’t do any better than regular public schools and are largely attended by mostly Black/Brown low income students.

 

Now Michael Bennet’s campaign for Colorado Governor is of course mostly backed by billionaires, “more than half of Bennet’s super PAC donations are from billionaires, individuals and groups affiliated with organizations run by billionaires, and from a “dark money” group. Research shows that billionaires “are swaying elections all across America.” These are the same billionaires that don’t support public education, want to continue privatizing efforts in DPS, and aim to implement school vouchers which essentially amounts to a tuition stipend, with our public tax dollars, for rich parents whose kids attend private schools.

 

So of course, I have never voted for Michael Bennet and never will because of the everlasting destruction he caused to Manual HS which eventually spread to Montbello, Gilpin Montessori and other schools which were negatively impacted by his educational policies as superintendent. He is a typical wealthy, White privileged, arrogant man who is influenced and bankrolled by the same billionaires that are behind Trump and their common agenda is to create more charter schools in the U.S. and do away with public education. He has also done absolutely nothing as our Senator to support public education in Colorado, which ranks 35th-40th in the nation for the actual dollars spent per student, ranks between 45th-48th in funding vs. state wealth and ranks between 45th-50th for teacher wages and starting pay.

 

Hopefully, voters will see the out of state dark money from billionaires backing Bennet’s campaign and support Phil Weiser. We need leaders committed to our public neighborhood schools, students, teachers and parents and who won’t be a shill for out of state billionaires and their privatization agenda for Colorado.

 

Jacqueline Falcón is a 35-year veteran Denver Public School teacher, parent of two Manual High School graduates, and Manual Alumni.