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By Yesenia Robles

Voters in Colorado and around the country last week ousted several conservative school board members who pushed reform movements supported by big money.

But they weren't necessarily voting against reform, experts say. For some, it was about rejecting outside interests; for others, it was a feeling of not being heard.

"The safest thing to say is the vote was against school board members who were thought to be more extreme than their constituents," said Kevin Welner, professor and director of the at the University of Colorado. "I don't see it as a larger bellwether for the state."

Colorado children have had the legal right to choose a school outside their neighborhood for 25 years, and charter schools have existed for nearly as long. Distinctions between supporting or rejecting choice or charters — two main pillars of reform — have become more complex and were not key to voters' decisions Tuesday.

"People are getting used to that as part of the landscape," Welner said.

Change and choice

Vouchers, changing funding for charter schools and a dependence on testing are some of the reform efforts that have seen some pushback, including an opt-out movement where parents pulled kids out of standardized tests. Welner said that resistance doesn't translate to voters completely wanting to avoid choice, charters or tests.

The most-watched race was in Jefferson County, where an increasingly discontented, and attentive, community managed to recall three school board members elected just two years ago. In their two years, the recalled board members managed to overhaul the way teachers get paid, tying their raises to new evaluations; turned down some capital improvement projects; and provided equal funding to charter schools.

But the teachers union, which supported the recall, doesn't have a history of completely rejecting those so-called reforms. And new board members aren't planning on drastic changes immediately.

"The people backing the recall and some of their candidates actually were forced to embrace some of those issues," said Ben DeGrow, education policy analyst for the right-leaning Independence Institute. "The focus has seemed to be on how things are communicated. The opportunity still exists for reform."

Besides the Jefferson County sweep, three conservative incumbents lost seats in Douglas County to union-supported candidates. In the Thompson School District in Loveland and Berthoud, where the board majority rejected a new teachers contract, voters switched the board power, electing two new union-supported candidates and re-electing two incumbents who were part of the minority.

Conservative board members also were unsuccessful in the Adams 12 Five Star School District and in Colorado Springs District 11 in El Paso County — one of the most conservative counties in the state.

"I think the results really represented communities coming together to say these are our public schools," said Andy Crisman, president of the Thompson Education Association. "They're not the outside interests' public schools or someone else's public schools. People didn't like that an outside interest was trying to control the destiny of their children's education."

Large amounts of money poured into school board races, including an estimated $1 million spent by supporters and opponents of the Jefferson County recall.

But winners Tuesday night attributed the boots-on-the-ground approach for their success despite the large money spent.

"It's amazing we were able to compete against the machine and still win," said David Ray, one of the newly elected board members for Douglas County's school district. "I just think we represented the voice that hasn't been heard on the board."

Meaning of "reform"

Numbers from the Colorado secretary of state's office show Republican voters turned out in larger numbers in most of the state, including in Jefferson, Douglas, Larimer and El Paso counties.
In Jefferson County, 54 percent of eligible Republicans voted, but only 51 percent of eligible Democrats did. There were about 66,858 Republicans who voted, but the most votes against the recall were 65,652 to keep John Newkirk.

Meg Masten, an unaffiliated voter and one of the parent organizers in Douglas County who supported the new slate of candidates, says a big factor for her vote was how reforms have been pushed through by the current board without community input.

"I question what the word 'reform' has always meant," Masten said. "Here in Douglas County, they took programs we always had and changed them but not necessarily made them better."

In the Thompson District, Crisman said he noticed more people were informed about what their school board was doing, and most wanted to give an opinion.

"I don't get the sense that the community is necessarily against those things," like performance pay, charters or school choice," he said. "They are against them being forced down their throats. It is clear they want all of that stuff out in the open."

Welner says what matters is the perception of how much a policy changes, not just how it is enacted.

"They're pushing public school policies beyond where most people want public school to be," Welner said. "That's based on national polling and based on some of the pushback movement for things like we've seen with the opt-out movement."

Nonprofit A-Plus Denver officials recently suggested doing away with the word "reform."

"While the term once referred to a fairly specific set of changes, it now means different things to different people," the organization explained in a newsletter. "For some Republicans, it's shorthand for vouchers. For Democrats, it means destruction of traditional district-managed schools. 'Education reform' has been so poorly defined and misused to further various agendas, we think it is time to retire the description altogether."

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Related Faculty: Kevin Welner