How Billionaires Hijacked Denver's Schools
Investigation · MarySeawell.com Editorial
For nearly two decades, Denver Public Schools was ground zero for a national experiment in corporate education reform — an experiment run by people who didn't send their children to the schools they were reshaping.
The Portfolio Model
Denver Public Schools adopted the "portfolio model" beginning around 2007 under Superintendent Michael Bennet, who later became a U.S. Senator. The model treats a school district like an investment portfolio — opening, closing, and replacing schools based on performance metrics, as if children were stocks to be traded and communities were assets to be liquidated.
Tom Boasberg continued the approach after Bennet's departure. Boasberg was not an educator. He was recruited from a corporate vice president position at a multi-billion-dollar company. His qualification for running one of Colorado's largest school districts was that he understood spreadsheets and organizational restructuring.
The results, measured in human terms, were staggering:
The Portfolio Model by the Numbers
Every closure meant a neighborhood losing its anchor institution. Every "restart" meant teachers fired and communities destabilized. And the replacements — overwhelmingly charter schools — were accountable not to the communities they served but to the boards and organizations that funded them.
The Money Behind the Movement
The portfolio model didn't sustain itself. It was sustained by a network of billionaire-funded organizations that poured millions into Denver to ensure the right candidates sat on the school board and the right policies were adopted. Follow the money.
Stand for Children Colorado
A pro-charter organization that functioned as a political machine for reform candidates. Stand for Children provided "tens of thousands of dollars' worth of canvassing support" for its preferred DPS board candidates — door-knocking, phone-banking, and get-out-the-vote operations that dwarfed anything community-based candidates could muster. In the 2019 election cycle alone, Stand for Children spent over $300,000 on DPS board races.
Democrats for Education Reform (DFER)
Founded in 2007 by New York hedge fund managers Whitney Tilson, R. Boykin Curry IV, and John Petry. The name is instructive: it was designed to give Wall Street's education privatization agenda a Democratic veneer. The Colorado chapter was led by Jennifer Walmer for 11 years, embedding the organization deeply into state politics.
DFER's Colorado operation was brazen. During the February 2019 Denver teacher strike, DFER ran a text campaign attempting to prevent teachers from walking out — hedge fund managers in New York trying to suppress a labor action by working people in Colorado.
City Fund
Backed by Netflix founder Reed Hastings and hedge fund manager John Arnold. A leaked City Fund presentation revealed plans to invest $200 million to "increase charter school representation up to 50% in over 40 cities." Denver was a prime target — a city where the reform infrastructure was already deeply embedded and the political conditions had been carefully cultivated.
Walton Family Foundation
The Walmart heirs have spent over $1 billion nationally on charter school expansion. Colorado was a key recipient. The Waltons' vision of education mirrors their vision of retail: destroy local institutions, replace them with standardized chains, and extract value from communities that have no alternative.
Denver Families Action
In the 2023 DPS race, this independent expenditure committee spent nearly $1 million — outspending the Denver teachers' union 5 to 1. The name suggests grassroots parents. The money trail suggests something very different.
Gates Family Foundation
Where Mary Seawell landed after leaving the board. A major funder of charter infrastructure in Colorado, including the Luminary Learning Network and innovation zones. The revolving door between the DPS board and the Gates Foundation was not a bug in the system — it was the system.
Network for Public Education's Verdict
The Network for Public Education, a national organization that has tracked the reform movement's impact on public schools, summarized what happened in Denver with brutal clarity:
Since the early 2000s, billionaires have treated the Denver Public School District as a Neo-liberal education experiment.
The experiment operated, NPE found, through "a tangled web of astroturf groups, nonprofits, and training organizations" that "hijacked this public school district." The language is stark because the reality is stark. Organizations with benign names — Stand for Children, Democrats for Education Reform, Denver Families Action — served as vehicles for outside money to purchase control of a public institution.
The result: 48+ schools closed, communities gutted, teachers demoralized, and achievement gaps that widened even as the reformers claimed victory. The billionaires treated Denver's children as data points in an experiment they could walk away from. The communities could not.
[Source: Network for Public Education]
The 2019 Board Flip
In February 2019, Denver teachers went on strike for the first time in 25 years. It lasted three days, but its political aftershocks were permanent. The strike exposed the reform machine's disconnect from the people who actually worked in Denver's schools and the families whose children attended them.
Carried by the momentum of the strike, union-backed candidates won all three open seats in the November 2019 DPS board election, flipping the board for the first time in over a decade. The reform majority that Seawell had once led was gone.
The reform establishment did not accept the verdict quietly. In 2020, 14 former board members — all women, including Seawell — signed an open letter criticizing the new board. The letter was a remarkable document: former officials who had presided over the most disruptive era in DPS history lecturing their replacements about governance.
By 2025, union-backed candidates won again, continuing the shift away from the reform era. The legislature has also moved. The experiment is over. What remains is the damage.
They spent billions, closed 48 schools, opened 70 replacements, broke communities, and called it reform. Then they wrote an open letter complaining about the people who came to clean up the mess.