Writing from Colorado at News from the States, Kevin Bolling explains how “choice” programs are really a money grab for private schools.
The Colorado Schools Fund, launched in 2024 with $50 million in philanthropic support, is not simply financing new charter and microschools. It is reshaping the public narrative about education itself. Through a strategic mix of capital, ideology and political influence, CSF and its allies are advancing a powerful message: that market-driven “choice” is the only remedy for supposedly irredeemable public schools.
Once public schools are cast as broken beyond repair, charters and microschools become steppingstones toward something far more consequential: a broad voucher system that redirects public money to private and religious education. The Daniels Fund, whose donation seeded CSF, has long championed vouchers. Their investment signals the next phase, a push to convince parents that privatization is not only desirable, but inevitable.
The consequences are profound. This approach doesn’t merely siphon resources away from neighborhood schools; it erodes their legitimacy. When foundations and political operatives rebrand public education as a failure, they create the very conditions they claim to solve. And as public confidence collapses, the argument for taxpayer-funded private schooling becomes easier to sell.
That dynamic is already playing out in Pueblo, where Riverstone Academy presents an alarming test case. Operating under Education reEnvisioned BOCES, the school has marketed itself as a public elementary school while pushing a Christian curriculum. Ken Witt, head of the BOCES, even described Riverstone as “Colorado’s first public Christian school” during a board meeting last fall. Yet the school’s official paperwork made no mention of religious instruction. Was the omission accidental or intentional?
The backstory suggests the latter. Emails show Brad Miller, a lawyer for Pueblo County School District 70, requesting permission to establish a new school inside the district’s boundaries but governed by neighboring District 49. The arrangement, he wrote, would allow the group to work with Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal organization known for high-profile religious liberty cases to test “the legalities around the issue of whether a public school may provide religious education.”
Riverstone Academy appears designed as a legal provocation: a taxpayer-funded public school created to force a battle over whether public dollars can support explicitly Christian instruction. This is not a misunderstanding. It is a strategy, one aimed at normalizing religious schools operating with public funds.