On June 13, 2024, while district families were on summer break and with limited community input, the Denver (DPS) school board approved new guidelines (Executive Limitation, EL-18) for closing schools in the ‘25-‘26 school year. At that same meeting, in a 6-1 vote, the board approved a six month contract with a New Orleans charter school founder, Ben Kleban, to assist the board in writing their policies and in evaluating the superintendent.
Documents obtained through a Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) request indicate that Kleban was first hired by DPS in January, when Board President Carrie Olson authorized paying him $10,000 to facilitate a two-day board retreat after three new board members were elected in one of the most expensive school board elections in Denver’s history. Chalkbeat reported that the slate of newly elected members — John Youngquist, Kimberlee Sia, and Marlene De La Rosa — received over $1.4 million “from a group called Denver Families Action, which is the political arm of a relatively new organization called Denver Families for Public Schools. Its board is made up of local charter school leaders.”
Denver Channel 7 News documented that “Denver Families Action receives its funding from the City Fund, a national education organization that promotes increasing charter school access and school choice programs.” The “dark money” funders behind the election of these three new board members are especially relevant in this recent school closure criteria vote.
After the January board retreat, CORA documents show that Kleban secured unidentified “philanthropic support” to provide monthly coaching meetings for interested board members, and his input seems to have had a significant influence on the final school closure guidelines. Throughout the spring, Kleban met with board members and several key staff members, and in May, he proposed a comprehensive plan to continue working with the board during the next school year to provide advice and facilitation on board policies and the superintendent evaluation process.
Before the June 13 board meeting, board members had been committed to specifically not including any reference to standardized testing and state performance frameworks results as criteria for school closure decisions. They had also agreed to “equitably distribute the effects of changing demographics across governance models,” i.e. charter schools, in their criteria.
However, just weeks before the vote, Kleban provided board members seven pages of recommendations which stressed, among many other things, the importance of including standardized testing performance measures in school closure/consolidation decisions, and he also stated the equitable distribution effects across governance models should be removed. Kleban then scheduled individual meetings with several board members during this time, providing his own ideas on the proposed school closure policy.
At the June 13 board meeting, several board members stated that CMAS and other standardized tests were based in racism, did not reflect the full nature of student learning, and should not be included in this criteria. Significant research substantiates the many biases and inadequacies with standardized tests.
Yet after a contentious discussion, Olson offered an amendment to support including these performance measures, and the three newly elected board members joined Olson in a 4-3 vote to allow the superintendent to use high stakes test score results as a factor, though not the “sole condition,” in the school closure recommendations. The board also took out the wording that any type of governance model school could be included in school closure decisions, citing state law, and hence, charters would be excluded in school closure decisions.
Apparently, the majority of the board members paid attention to Kleban’s advice. In supporting the vote to include high stakes testing as a factor to consider in closing schools, Olson stated that standardized test scores and the state SPF are part of our reality. The three new board members agreed, arguing “that a school’s academic performance is important to families.” This decision is in direct contrast to the “declining enrollment advisory committee” that met in 2022 and developed school closure criteria they believed to be fair to all schools which did not include any reference to high stakes testing.
Olson’s vote to include standardized testing as a school closure criterion is also a major shift from her earlier positions around high stakes testing. When Olson ran in 2017, she campaigned against the previous education reform movement, stating “some of the damaging characteristics of reform common in DPS today are school choice, endless charters, high-stakes testing…. that do not truly measure effective instruction.”
Rosemary Rodriguez of the Educate Denver group praised Olson and the three new board members “for championing the inclusion of academic outcomes,” stating it “is absolutely critical as we work to move students toward high-quality learning environments and.. provide them with superior programming in a new setting.” Educate Denver is a school reform advocacy group dedicated to the education reform polices in place prior to 2019, and its members include charter board leaders, former DPS board members, and pro-charter advocates. These new school closure criteria and the vote to approve a new pro-charter school consultant seem to signal the resurgence of a familiar “pro-reform” era in DPS board policy.
Who is Ben Kleban and why did the DPS board decide to hire him as a consultant?
A former corporate financier with Boeing, Ben Kleban opened a charter school in New York in his early career, but he left when the state placed a cap on expanding charter schools. He moved to New Orleans where he founded New Orleans College Prep, a charter school management organization; however, all the schools in that network have since closed due to failing test scores.
During the time he ran the New Orleans charter school network, the staff followed a no-excuses model, which researchers posit may have contributed to significant trauma for many students in his network. No excuses is an “ultra-strict approach in which students, for example, got demerits for small offenses, and then if they continue to misbehave there are stricter more serious punishments.” Paul Thomas, Professor at Furman University, reported that “No excuses ideologies and practices have been a foundational staple of charter schools disproportionately serving Black students, Hispanic students, and poor students well back into the 1990s but blossoming in the 2000s since both political parties jumped on the charter school bandwagon.”
In DPS, several charter networks followed this system, including Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools, which were led for six years by current board member Kimberlee Sia. A 2019 article from the Christian Science Monitor wrote that “It’s no secret that KIPP, serving largely students of color, was part of the no-excuses educational movement for years. ” However, after significant scrutiny by both the public and researchers, many charter schools dropped this approach, though the damage had been already been experienced by many students in these schools.
Kleban left his CEO position with the charter network in 2016 when he was elected to serve on the New Orleans all-charter school district board. Andre Perry, a Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro, and a scholar-in-residence at American University, also worked in the all-charter New Orleans system, where he conducted extensive research on charter schools. Perry concluded that “New Orleans post-Katrina became a place where test score growth became the ultimate excuse to ignore community and ethical considerations … No person would wish to replicate what happened in New Orleans among their own communities, children, colleagues and neighbors.” Perry also stated that “many of the funders [of charter schools] happen to be corporate elites who simply don’t believe in government … They put collectively billions of dollars into breaking up school districts.”
Targeted for recall in 2019 due to community uproar over the way the board kept approving charters in New Orleans, Kleban acknowledged that the “continuation of charters … regardless of public sentiment has contributed to a sense among some that the school system is interrupting ‘the intention of local democracy.’” Citing personal reasons, Kleban left his position on the board in early 2020 before his term ended, and a short time later, he began working with a training organization for school board members known as School Board Partners.
“New Orleans post-Katrina became a place where test score growth became the ultimate excuse to ignore community and ethical considerations … No person would wish to replicate what happened in New Orleans among their own communities, children, colleagues and neighbors.”
School Board Partners (SBP) “spun out of Education Cities, an organization that advocated for the “portfolio model,” a strategy focused on expanding charter schools as well as giving district schools more autonomy.” (The portfolio model has been a cornerstone of DPS policy since 2007.)
Chalkbeat reported in 2017 that a “growing number of philanthropists, advocates, and policymakers say the way to improve schools is to upend the traditional school district.” They point to Denver as a “model with more charter schools and more district schools run like charter schools.” There are “prominent philanthropies…. that have also spent millions in recent years funding charter schools nationwide”, and they “are investing heavily” in the spread of the portfolio model. However, researchers of the portfolio model have identified major concerns with this use of philanthropy to disrupt school systems.
Several pro-charter organizations are the primary funders of School Board Partners: City Fund, a non-profit started at the same time as School Board Partners by billionaires Reed Hastings and John Arnold, the New Schools Venture Fund, a hedge fund group started by Reed Hastings that supports charter schools nationwide, and the Walton Family Foundation, an early supporter of charter schools which also funds the far-right American Enterprise Institute, which has ties to the Koch brothers and ALEC and lobbied to destroy teacher unions.
School Board Partners was founded by Carrie McPherson Douglas, a former member of Education Cities and a five-year leader with Aspire Public Schools, one of the nation’s first charter networks, which received start-up funding from Reed Hastings. While at Aspire, Douglas also attended the Broad Academy, an organization known for training leaders to promote charter school expansion.
SBP is also led by Ethan Ashley, a former New Orleans school board member who served on the New Orleans school board with Kleban. Ashley and Douglas belong to NewDEAL leaders, an organization whose CEO called for Democrats to get on board with charters, based on the recommendations of Democrats for Education Reform, which has supported the charter school cause for decades.
Key members of SBP include: Gregory Hatcher, SBP Board President, a former leader of the DPS Strive Prep (now Rocky Mountain Prep) charter schools network, and a founding board member of the Colorado League of Charter Schools Action CLCS action, a Walton family-funded group that lobbies to promote charter schools; Jonathan Klein, founder of the pro-charter GO Public schools in Oakland; Carl Zarazoga, a member of the LEE group, which supports charter schools and several former New Orleans school district administrators.
Besides Kleban, the staff also includes Nate Easley, a former DPS school board member from 2009-2013, and a major supporter of education reform during his tenure with the school board. During that reform era in DPS from 2005-2015, the district used test scores to close or replace 48 schools and opened more than 70, the majority of them charters.
School Board Partners recruits school board members from across the country to join their organization as yearlong “fellows” where they participate in training and coaching sessions with the SBP team and their invited presenters. In 2019, Olson began two years of training with School Board Partners. During her years as a SBP fellow, Olson worked with Kleban while he led training sessions in his role as a lead consultant for SBP. CORA documents verify that board members Youngquist, Sia, and De la Rosa have now joined Esserman and Quattlebaum as fellows with SBP.
SBP aligns their training with several reform organizations such as Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE), CREDO, and the Progressive Policy Institute. The Progressive Policy Institute, also funded by City Fund, promotes charter schools and school choice, and along with LEE, produces many of the professional development materials that underlie the School Board Partners program.
One of the primary goals of the SBP fellowship program is for school board members to “leverage their power to liberate students of color and their families” from the public education system they say is “failing kids — mostly kids from disadvantaged backgrounds — at a rate that threatens the future of our workforce, global competitiveness and long-term economic viability.” Rather than encouraging school board members to ensure adequate funding for their local schools or promoting community neighborhood schools to address neighborhood conditions impacted by poverty, SBP recommends that all school boards “authorize charter schools and approve school performance frameworks to ensure school quality and access.” (Bold print is from their website.)
The lone dissenting vote to hire Kleban came from board member Xochitl Gaytan, who questioned the need to spend $9000 in taxpayer dollars to hire someone from outside the state when there are several people already on the DPS staff who work directly with the school board to develop policy. In her comments, Gaytan stated that Kleban had missed several microaggressions in previous meetings with board members; that she had not seen his qualifications for this role; and that he knew very little about the DPS board or Colorado politics.
The only other board member to comment on his hiring was Olson, who stated she valued Kleban’s perspective on national policy and she liked to hear what other school board members are doing across the country.
The influence of the School Board Partners’ training and the decision to work with SBP’s Kleban since January seem to be impactful in this renewed focus on high stakes testing. As the new “corporate reform-backed” board members continue their training with SBP, and Kleban continues to advise the board for the next six months, this influence could be even more significant beyond this recent decision.
