This story by Erica Meltzer appeared on Chalkbeat Colorado on October 26, 2022. It has been edited for length.
Listen to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, and you’ll hear about great things happening in education. Districts are getting thousands more dollars per student, teachers are getting raises, and a preschool program set to launch next fall will set Colorado’s youngest students on the path to success while saving families money.
Listen to Heidi Ganahl, and she’ll paint a far grimmer picture. More than 60% of Colorado students can’t read, write, or do math at grade level, based on state test scores. Schools are teaching “nonsense” rather than focusing on the basics, and students are suffering unprecedented mental health problems as a consequence of pandemic-era school closures for which Polis ultimately bears the blame.
Republican Ganahl, an entrepreneur and University of Colorado regent, has cast herself as a “Mom on a Mission” in her bid to unseat Democratic incumbent Polis, who made education policy central to his first term.
National polls find voters trust Democrats less on education than they used to. And Republicans such as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin have ridden parent dissatisfaction into office. Ganahl has used a similar playbook by decrying “woke ideologies” and telling her own story about her children’s elementary school hosting a play about a transgender raven.
Still, the economy and public safety have dominated the campaign far more than education: Just 5.5% of Colorado voters ranked education as a top concern in a recent Fox 31/Emerson College/The Hill poll.
Against that backdrop, Polis — who holds a commanding lead in the polls — has argued for building on foundations laid in his first term. He’s pledged to increase school funding, expand efforts to connect education and careers, and do more to turn around low-performing schools.
“My opponent’s a mad mom,” he said at the conclusion of a debate Tuesday. “I’m a happy dad. I know there are a lot of happy moms and dads out there that recognize Colorado is doing amazing work.”
Meanwhile, Ganahl calls for more “choice, competition, and transparency.” She’s promised to improve school safety, address mental health, get every child reading at grade level by third grade, and “give power back to parents.”
“I’m offering a brighter future with big bold ideas,” she said.
A little more than a year into Polis’ first term, COVID arrived in Colorado, and schools shut down, a life-altering event that would dominate the next two years. Starting in the summer of 2020, Polis urged a return to in-person learning, even as health department guidance made the logistics challenging.
During the 2020-21 school year, many superintendents said state public health rules made it nearly impossible for schools to stay open when COVID case rates skyrocketed, while Polis insisted schools were safe.
Ganahl would not say whether she would have ordered schools to stay open. Instead, she said she would have listened to parents who said the isolation of remote learning hurt their children.
“A lot of the dirty work that Jared Polis does is through his bureaucrats, his unelected bureaucrats, his agency heads so that he doesn’t have to take the heat,” Ganahl said.
Polis emphasized that many decisions about in-person learning were left to local communities. But he pointed to state responses like sending free medical grade masks and COVID tests to school districts, relaxing quarantine requirements, and prioritizing teachers for vaccines in 2021.
“Whatever it took for in-person education to occur, we wanted to work with districts to do that,” Polis said.
In order to give parents and students more choice, Ganahl wants to create educational savings accounts that would allow parents to use money that otherwise would have gone to the school district for other educational purposes. The details would depend on who controls the legislature or whether she puts a ballot measure to voters, but Ganahl suggested parents might get access to the full state portion of per-pupil spending, roughly $5,500 a year.
Ganahl said she had to move two of her children, one with dyslexia and another with dysgraphia, to a private school with small class sizes when they didn’t get the help they needed in public school. “I want every parent to have that choice,” she said.
But Democrats, who currently control the state legislature, have opposed giving public money directly to parents. A Magellan Strategies poll this spring found Colorado voters disapproved of this idea by wide margins.
Polis said parents already can enroll in charter schools or in another school district under Colorado’s open enrollment system, and schools are offering tutoring using federal money.
Low academic performance isn’t the only reason parents need options, Ganahl said. She said Colorado parents tell her about things “that they don’t feel are good for our kids or that they feel are distracting from reading, writing, and math.” They should be able to send their children to schools that match their values, she said.
She also said parents need more insight into curriculum, programming choices, and teacher training. To that end, Ganahl said she would revive a curriculum transparency proposal that died last year in a Democratic-controlled committee.
“It doesn’t mean that parents need to control the curriculum or say you can’t teach this or that,” she said. “But they do need to be kept up to date.”
The election is November 8.
Bureau Chief Erica Meltzer covers education policy and politics and oversees Chalkbeat Colorado’s education coverage. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
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