Mike DeGuire explains how one group is quietly undermining Colorado’s public school system with an eye toward privatization. This piece was originally published at Colorado Newsline.
In Colorado, the Colorado Schools Fund, is quietly playing a pivotal role in shaping not just the charter school movement but also the narrative, policy environment and political groundwork required for wider public acceptance of vouchers. By combining capital, ideological goals, local legitimacy and policy levers, CSF and its allies are constructing a strategic message enabling market-based education reform to become the default solution for “failing public schools.”
In 2024, the CSF launched with $50 million in philanthropic backing. It is using these funds to “partner with communities” to open “outstanding new schools.”
After backing nine new charter schools and two microschools, it now plans to fund 25 more and implement a two-year fellowship program to train future charter school founders.
On its surface, the initiative looks like another investment in education innovation. But behind its messaging is a decades-long campaign by powerful business and political elites to weaken traditional public schools and replace them with a mix of charter schools, microschools, and, eventually, private school vouchers.
Who’s behind the fund
The fund’s leadership and board members tell the story. Founding board chair Jill Anschutz, director with the Anschutz Foundation, brings both money and commitment to the project. The Anschutz family, led by billionaire Philip Anschutz, the richest man in Colorado, has been one of the most influential conservative philanthropic forces in the country, underwriting everything from religious causes to free-market education reforms. Jill Anschutz serves on the Charter Schools Institute board, a state agency that authorized 45 charter schools, sometimes in school districts whose elected boards objected to their authorization.
Joining Anschutz on the fund’s board is Darryl Cobb, president of the Charter School Growth Fund. For nearly two decades, CSGF has been a major player in using over $600 million in philanthropic assets to scale charter school networks across the country, including DSST, Rocky Mountain Prep, James Irwin, and Third Future schools in Colorado. Its mission is to fund schools in “underserved communities with limited access to high quality schools.”
Also on the board is Hanna Skandera, CEO of the Daniels Fund. The conservative-leaning Daniels Fund is explicitly committed to expanding “competition and school choice through high-performing charter schools and private schools, tuition assistance/portable voucher programs, and other innovative market-driven education initiatives.”
In 2023, the Daniels Fund set a goal of adding 100,000 new charter, private, or religious seats in four states including Colorado by 2030. Luke Ragland is the Daniels Fund’s senior vice president of grants, and also a board member with Ready Colorado, one of the organizations that supported a Colorado voucher amendment last year.
The fourth CSF board member, Rosemary Rodriguez, is a former Denver City Council member and former Denver Public Schools board member during the heyday of the pro-charter reform era. She serves on boards of the Gates Foundation, the Colorado League of Charter Schools, and Educate Denver.
Rodriguez’s involvement as co-leader of Educate Denver connects the CSF within Denver politics and expands the broader network’s goals. Formed in 2022 and backed by business elites like oil executive Bruce Benson, Educate Denver has pushed the narrative that DPS students are “failing,” framing innovation and charter growth as the only path forward, despite lacking any definitive evidence that charters outperform traditional schools overall. For more than a decade, Benson and Anschutz have poured substantial funds into pro-charter DPS school board candidates, contributing another $60,000 in the current election cycle.
‘Failing schools’ narrative ignores inequality
Lydia Hoffman, the CSF’s CEO, outlined the CSF playbook in a recent presentation at the New Schools Summit in March 2025, organized by the New Schools Venture Fund, a multi-million-dollar organization investing in charter schools for nearly three decades. In the publication Charter Folk, Hoffman insisted new schools were necessary because Colorado has “30-point proficiency gaps between our low-income students and their peers.”
Hoffman’s argument ignores decades of research showing that poverty, not school design, is the central driver of achievement gaps. Instead of addressing inequities in housing, health care and funding, CSF highlights test-score disparities.
This “failure” rhetoric aligns perfectly with the “education desert” legislation advanced last spring by Colorado’s Senate President James Coleman, a leading member of Educate Denver. Coleman considered proposing legislation to allow the Charter School Institute to open new charter schools in school districts labeled as “education deserts,” justifying this plan by asserting the districts lacked “high quality” schools. Coleman delayed introducing the legislation to secure funding from advocacy groups. Together, these political and philanthropic efforts by CSF and groups like Educate Denver create the impression of a “crisis” in Colorado and the justification for privatized solutions.
Vouchers, the next frontier
The danger of this multi-million-dollar game plan is clear. While framed as “opportunity,” the strategy effectively drains resources and legitimacy from public schools. By branding existing schools as broken, these groups make it easier to argue for charters and microschools today, and vouchers for private schools tomorrow. The Daniels Fund’s explicit voucher ambitions are a glimpse of what lies ahead: Once enough parents buy into the idea that public schools cannot be fixed, the political stage will be set for taxpayer-funded private school access.
Tying these efforts to the national picture makes the trajectory even more concerning. The Trump administration passed a federal voucher bill in July and has framed public education as a monopoly in need of disruption. This federal push for vouchers to use as tax credits for private or religious schools is part of a broader national agenda championed by pro-privatization groups.
What’s at stake for Colorado
The historical influence of figures like Philip Anschutz, Bruce Benson and the Daniels Fund reveals this as a long game, not a sudden shift. For decades, billionaires and corporate investors have promoted policies and funded organizations that weaken public school systems while elevating market-based alternatives. The Colorado Schools Fund is simply the latest, well-financed group furthering that agenda.
For Colorado families, the stakes could not be higher. At risk is not just the funding of local schools but the very idea of education as a public good. The push to replace public education with a patchwork of privately run models may be sold as innovation, but its long-term effects could be devastating, creating steeper inequities, splintering communities and eroding the democratic foundation of public schooling.