A money barrage comes to a state board of education primary race
Updated, June 23, 2024: This post has been adjusted to include a comment from Marisol Rodriguez.
An ordinarily quiet primary in Colorado finds a Democrat challenged by a candidate with an extraordinary influx of money apparently from charter school backers.
Marisol Rodriguez is in many ways a conventional Democratic candidate. Her website expresses support for LGBTQIA+ students. She’s endorsed by Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense In America, and the Colorado Blueflower Fund, a fund that supports pro-choice women as candidates. Kathy Gebhardt, the other Democratic candidate, is also endorsed by the Blueflower Fund and Moms Demand Action, as well as the Colorado Education Association, Colorado Working Families, Boulder Progressives, and over 65 elected officials.
Rodriguez is running against Gebhardt for a seat on the state board of education, a race she entered at the last minute. The race will be decisive; the GOP candidate has disappeared from the race, so the Democratic primary winner will run unopposed in the general election.
Gebhardt has served on a local school board as well as the state and national association of school board directors, rising to leadership positions in each. She’s an education attorney (the lead education attorney on Colorado's school finance litigation) whose five children all attended public schools. Asked for her relevant experience by Boulder Weekly, Rodriguez listed parent of two current students and education consultant.
Besides a major difference in experience, one other difference separates the two. Gebhardt was generally accepting of charter schools while she was a board member, but she drew a hard line against a proposed classical charter, linked to Hillsdale College’s charter program, that would not include non-discrimination protections for gender identity and expression. She told me “charters don’t play well with others.” While Rodriguez has stayed quiet on the subject of charter schools, her allegiance is not hard to discern.
Rodriguez’s consulting firm is Insignia Partners. She has previously worked for the Walton Family Foundation, a major booster of charter schools. Her clients include Chiefs for Change, a group created by former Presidential aspirant Jeb Bush to help promote his school choice policies; the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy group for charter schools and charter school policy; and the Public Innovators in Education (PIE) Network, a national network of education reform organizations.
Some of that consulting work appears to have been with the Colorado League of Charter Schools. A February meeting of that board shows her discussing some aspects of CLCS strategic planning.
There’s plenty for CLCS to deal with. Colorado spent the spring debating HB 1363, a bill that would have required more transparency and accountability from charter schools. Critics call it “a blatant attack on charter schools.” Heavy duty lobbying efforts have been unleashed to battle this bill, including work by the Betsy DeVos-backed American Federation for Children, as reported by Mike DeGuire for Colorado Newsline.
It is no surprise to find Republicans in Colorado supporting charter schools; this is, after all, the state where the GOP issued a “call to action” that “all Colorado parents should be aiming to remove their kids from public education.”
But Democratic Governor Jared Polis, a former member of the state board of education, has also been a vocal supporter of charter schools. And now he is also a vocal supporter of Rodriguez and features in many of her campaign images.
Support from CLCS is more than vocal. The Rodriguez campaign has received at least $569,594 from Progressives Supporting Teachers and Students. PSTS filed with the state as a non-profit on May 21, 2024; on May 23 CLCS donated $125,000 to the group according to Tracer (Colorado’s campaign finance tracker).
The registered and filing agents of PSTS are Kyle DeBeer and Noah Stout. DeBeer is VP of Civic Affairs for CLCS and head of CLCS Action, the CLCS partner 501(c)(4). Noah Stout is a member of the Montbello Organizing Committee, a group that receives money through various foundations that support charter schools, including the Gates Foundation and RootEd, and previously served as attorney for the DSST charter school network in Denver. The address for PSTS is the address for 178 other organizations.
It appears that CLCS created and funded Progressives Supporting Teachers and Students for this election.
The $569,594 are listed on Tracer as PSTS’s only expenditures as of the beginning of June. [Update: As of this week, PSTS has spent a total of $1.2 million on the Rodriguez campaign].They consistent entirely of payments for Rodriguez-supporting consultant and professional services to 40 North Advocacy and The Tyson Organization (Tracer shows that CLCS has employed both before). The money has paid for video advertising, digital advertising, phone calling, newspaper advertising, and multiple direct mailings.
Where that mountain of money came from is not yet clear. There may be more clarity on the next mandatory filing date, which is Monday, June 17.
Rodriguez has been rarely visible on the campaign trail, but advertising supporting her campaign has been omnipresent.
Why spend so much money for a single Board of Education seat?
Colorado charters require authorization by the local school district. That charter question has made local school board races a highly contested focus of charter debates. In 2022, Chalkbeat reported that almost $5 million had been spent on 213 board campaigns in Colorado.
However, if a local school board denies a charter school application, the state board can overrule that decision.
The board was expanded from 7 to 9 seats in 2022. Currently charter advocates enjoy a 5-4 majority on the board. The seat that Rodriguez and Gebhardt are running for is being vacated by a term-limited member of the pro-charter majority; a Gebhardt victory could flip the board, and charter operators would face a tougher audience at the state board level. That’s likely why charter fans feel the need to spend more than a half million dollars to keep Gebhardt off the board.
Rodriguez commented via e-mail:
Yes, there is clearly an Independent Expenditure supporting my candidacy. All of the money that has been raised and spent is, so far as I can tell, being reported in alignment with Colorado and Federal law.
