Focusing on the long-term

Last night, DPS released Round 1 school choice school assignments to families across the district, including families whose children currently attend schools that were subject to closure for the 2025-26 school year. They did this knowing that Mamás’ reply in support of its motion for preliminary injunction was due today, March 21, and knowing that the court would not give us a hearing until we filed the reply. Because DPS has now effectively closed schools, Mamás has made the difficult decision that continuing to pursue preliminary injunctive relief (an order that would keep schools open for the 2025-26 school year) will cause more harm than it will do good at this point. You can read Mamás’ Notice of Withdrawal of Motion for Preliminary Injunction here. We will instead choose to focus our time, attention, and resources on a long-term strategy that will force DPS to take responsibility for its gross financial mismanagement, deeply rooted race- and class-based segregation, and other poor conditions for children in the district. You can read Mamás’ Notice of Withdrawal of its Motion for Preliminary Injunction here.

Mamás has believed from the beginning of this case, and long before, that school closures are mere symptoms of much deeper problems. Extensive research conducted before Mamás filed its complaint confirmed that school closures are but a part of a decades long strategy—begun in earnest by Milton Friedman, Richard Nixon, and Lewis Powell—to pick off profit from the public school system for the benefit of the corporate class. Colorado was one of the earliest volunteers for this non-public and undemocratic social experiment. For example, in 1985, then-Governor Dick Lamm co-chaired the National Governor’s Association “Parent Involvement and Choice Task Force” and hosted a critical meeting about “public school choice” at the Colorado State Capitol building. By 1993—a year after Colorado voters resoundingly rejected a ballot initiative that would have permitted public monies to go toward supporting private schools—Colorado became the third state in the country to pass charter school legislation, which created a mechanism for private corporations to receive public monies under the guise of providing “public” educational services to the state. (Sort of like how private corporations get public money to run prisons, except that there’s a provision in the Colorado Constitution that prohibits private schools from receiving public monies. There is no corresponding constitutional restriction related to prisons.)

DPS took the charter school model and put it on steroids. In 2008, under now-U.S. Senator Michael Bennett’s leadership, DPS adopted a “portfolio management” model. Under “portfolio management,” DPS has rejected “stability, uniformity, and centralized control” in favor of a “common market” that encourages “differentiated quality” of the schools that exist inside the district. (Here’s the document those quotes are pulled from.) In other words, DPS’ approach to public education for at least the past 23 years has been intentionally designed to create some good schools and some bad schools, and then to force them to compete with one another for students, financial resources, district-level support, and in the most extreme cases, to stay open at all. It is, of course, no surprise that almost all of the “good” schools (e.g., “high-performing”) are in neighborhoods that have historically been home to (or, for newer developments, were designed to attract) a higher socioeconomic class, whereas the “bad” schools (e.g., “low-performing”) are in neighborhoods that have historically been home to black and brown people, non-U.S. born people, and the working class. As a result, families and children are forced to compete for seats in the “good” schools that there are, by design, not enough of. Everyone who does not get a spot must accept their fate as “not chosen,” and…come what may.

The rapid and persistent opening and closing (and in some cases re-opening) of schools is an integral component of the market-based school administration strategy that DPS employs. Between 2008 and 2019, DPS opened 65 new charter or innovation schools, while it “closed, restarted, replaced, or otherwise intervened in more than 35 existing schools.” That does not include the ten schools that DPS has now formally closed (in whole or in part) for the 2025-26 school year, nor those closed between 2019 and 2024.

Mamás believes that this behavior is part of a larger scheme to divert public money out of the actual public school system (where teachers are unionized and are entitled to other benefits that teachers who are employed by the private corporations that run charter schools do not get) and convert it to various private sector beneficiaries. This includes, of course, the charter school corporations themselves, but it goes deeper than that. Real estate deals appear to be a key component of the design.

That is why Mamás’ complaint in this case is 142 pages long, contains 501 paragraphs of allegations, and details a decades-long history of the calculated attack on public education that got us where we are today. This is and has always been about much more than the closures. Our hearts break for every family in Denver whose children were crying last night, and are sitting in classrooms filled with sadness this morning knowing that they only have a couple of months left with their beloved communities. And, sometimes you’ve got to know when to fold ‘em.

That said, our efforts to stop the school closures were not in vain. Through affidavits DPS filed in its response to Mamás’ motion for preliminary injunction, we have confirmed that it is extremely likely that DPS deceived the community during the course of the school closure process and made material misrepresentations in its Fiscal Year 2024 audited financial statement. We are currently evaluating the claims that may arise from this conduct. Onward.