Troubling Stories That Broke During Holidays about Education in Denver and D.C.
The holidays are a busy time. It is easy to miss important news, and it is also a good time for unsavory news to be released quietly. Here are two tidbits you may have missed in the past week.
DENVER—According to the Denver Post and Denver’s ABC Channel 7 News, on Christmas Eve, a judge in Colorado ruled that the Douglas County School District (Denver, Aurora, Boulder) violated campaign laws when white papers were commissioned to praise the school board’s conservative, so called “corporate school reform” practices in the lead up to the November school board election.
Rick Hess, education policy staffer at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), was hired to “‘research, create and publicize’ a white paper that would describe the district’s reforms, explain what made them unique, and ‘describe some of the advantages of the model.’” Hess and AEI were paid $30,000—half from the school district’s public funds and the other $15,000 from the Douglas County School District Foundation, a 501(C)(3). The school district circulated Hess’s paper to 85,000 subscribers. According to Channel 7 News, “The final report uses superlatives like, ‘unusually ambitious,’ ‘remarkable,’ ‘bold,’ ‘illuminating’ and ‘cage-busting leaders,’ to describe the reform agenda.”
The judge also found against the school district for inducing the Douglas County School District Foundation to pay former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett $50,000 to produce