Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet on Why He’s Trying to Escape Washington

Education policy is headed back to the states. Just ask Sen. Michael Bennet.

The Colorado Democrat surprised pundits in April by announcing his bid for governor in the upcoming midterm election. Surrounded at his introductory press conference by a coterie of political notables, and buoyed by impressive early fundraising numbers, Bennet enjoys a healthy lead in a primary that won’t be decided for another 11 months. 

Winning the nomination fight would put him in a position to extend a Democratic stranglehold on the governor’s mansion that began in 2006. If elected, he would succeed Gov. Jared Polis, a fellow businessman-turned-politician who shares much of his reform-minded outlook on K–12 schools; John Hickenlooper, a longtime colleague who prodded Bennet to take a job as superintendent of Denver Public Schools in 2005; and Bill Ritter, who tapped him to serve as senator four years later. With Democratic majorities controlling the state legislature, he would be able to pursue his preferred strategy to lead Colorado students out of a severe bout of post-COVID learning loss.

Yet a relocation to the statehouse would also represent something of a retreat from national politics. While not quite a media superstar, Bennet has often found his way into Washington’s spotlight, leading the Democrats’ unsuccessful drive to permanently expand the Child Tax Credit during the Biden administration. He also sought the presidency in 2020, standing out for his comparatively moderate stances in a field that was quickly tacking left. 

Bennet describes himself as disillusioned by Washington’s stagnancy — and his criticism extends to his own party, which he says lost focus on children and families during the Biden administration. A decade after the end of No Child Left Behind, he believes the Democrats have allowed “a complete vacuum” to form on the issue of K–12 schools, opening the way for Republicans to charge ahead with an aggressive push to expand private school choice.

If anyone can offer a vision of educational improvement, it may be Colorado’s senior senator, who led a four-year turnaround of Denver schools that saw student achievement and high school graduation rates both shoot upward. Though the raft of policies that he used to achieve those results — especially heightened accountability for failing schools — engendered backlash, it is also cited as one of the most successful academic improvements ever seen in a district of its size.

In a conversation with The 74, Bennet said that he doesn’t intend to lead a revival of 2000s-style reform. Instead, he spoke broadly about building an education system that would usher high school graduates into middle-class careers.

“I just think this is a moment when people are feeling the economic challenges so acutely, and we’ve got to make the decision to do what every other industrialized and rich country in the world has done: put kids graduating high school in a position to earn a living wage,” he said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: You’ve been a fairly high-profile senator for 16 years, and now you’re aiming to leave Congress and lead Colorado. Do your plans suggest anything about your level of optimism for education policy at the national level?

I have very little optimism for the future of education policy as it’s made in Washington. In fact, a better way of saying it is that I am completely pessimistic about our ability to deliver the 21st-century education system that our kids and teachers and families desperately need. 

Washington is going in the opposite direction, if anything: The Democratic Party has no national education policy that I can perceive, and the Republican Party has a national policy of dismantling public education and voucherizing it — to the extent that they’re now incentivizing governors to fund tax credits for kids who want private education. That’s beyond the imagination of people who supported vouchers when I was a school superintendent.

So with respect to education policy at the federal level, we’re at a moment where all there is is wreckage everywhere you turn. That’s terrible for our kids because, just to take one example, our reading scores haven’t been lower for 32 years. The surveys I’ve seen of kids’ and parents’ satisfaction with public education in the wake of COVID are continuing to fall, principally because most kids feel like they’re not being prepared for the century we’re in. 

You mentioned the absence of concrete, consensus ideas about K–12 schools within the Democratic Party. How big of a problem is that, both substantively and politically? I ask because a number of polls have seemed to show Republicans gaining on the issue over the last few years.

Republicans clearly gained ground nationally on education in the aftermath of COVID. That’s shocking because the Democratic Party has always led on education in public opinion. 

I’m proud to come from Colorado, where [Gov.] Jared Polis has been a leader on this subject. We reopened schools in Colorado earlier than in a lot of other states, and I think the governor understood how damaging the school closures were to our kids’ education and mental health because of his deep commitment to education over the years. 

Coming out of COVID, the argument from the Republican Party has essentially been to privatize public education. I really don’t think the American people support that, but Democrats at the national level have provided a complete vacuum. I often ask, at my town halls and the Democratic meetings I have, “What was Joe Biden’s position on public education? What was the Democratic Party’s position at the last election?” Nobody can name anything. Sometimes people come up with free college or deferred student loans, but nobody comes up with anything on K-12. 

To the extent that we focused on anything — well, Biden did, though I disagreed with him — it was on student loan forgiveness, which leaves out the vast majority of families and kids in America. All of a sudden, we weren’t talking to parents who had children in our K-12 system, especially those who didn’t plan to go to college. We weren’t talking to the many young people who aren’t attending college but also aren’t prepared to hold a job. We weren’t talking to teachers or people working in schools, either. We just abandoned this project to the Republicans, which was a huge mistake.

Do you think the party’s difficulty in setting policy priorities was particularly evident during the Biden presidency? The failure to include a permanent expansion of the Child Tax Credit in the Build Back Better negotiations of 2021–22 sticks out to me, particularly because it’s been one of your signature issues in the Senate.

It’s definitely fair to say that we didn’t establish a set of priorities that were affordable for the American people. The Child Tax Credit is the most successful anti-poverty measure, and maybe the most successful domestic policy measure, that we have implemented since the 1960s. In the richest country in the world, our goal should be ending childhood poverty. 

I don’t think there’s any greater education reform we could pursue than ending childhood poverty in this country. It’s critical to our country’s future and to the economy’s present, and that’s why it was where I focused. I do agree that there wasn’t a huge amount of policy coherence [during the Biden White House], and it was just a question of what we could get done. In the end, Washington dysfunction didn’t allow the expanded Child Tax Credit to become permanent. Now we see a version of the CTC in Donald Trump’s trickle-down bill, but it has left out millions of the kids in America who could use the credit the most. 

Do you think it’s possible to achieve these kinds of goals at the state level instead? A number of states, including Colorado, have already implemented or expanded their own state-level tax credits to directly address child poverty.

I am very pleased that there are states like Colorado and Minnesota and Maryland that have taken that on themselves as a way of expressing the importance of giving kids a fair shot from the very beginning. None of that obviates the need to fix our education system and bring it into the 21st century, which we clearly need to do; but frankly, it’s just not on the agenda in Washington, D.C. There have been many days in Washington when I’ve felt that we’ve treated the nation’s children like they’re someone else’s children and not our own. 

We have a national interest in the fact that our reading scores are below where they were three decades ago. We have a national interest in the fact that our kids feel like the system we have — whether it’s K-12, higher education or workforce development — is not preparing them to succeed in this economy. It is of national importance that our kids and adolescents are having an epidemic of mental health problems, which simply did not exist when I was in school, in the wake of COVID and social media. And Washington is just not interested in that.

My view is that this is a moment when the states need to set an example for Washington. If I get the chance to be Colorado’s next governor, I hope we’re going to make Colorado the best place in America to raise and educate a kid.

Do you think Democrats, and state education leaders more broadly, need to coalesce a brand-new education agenda? The classic education reform playbook seemed to yield fairly steady learning gains through the 1990s and 2000s in a number of areas — like Denver, where you were superintendent — but have since fallen out of favor.

The results in Denver were extraordinary, but insufficient. We made a huge amount of progress compared to school districts all over the nation, many of which were engaged in the same kinds of reforms we were. We were able to do work in Denver that our community supported, including reforms that have been described as controversial but which had the support of most parents and kids.

It’s not important to re-litigate this now, but the bottom line is that Denver was one of the 10 worst-performing school districts when we started, and by the time Tom Boasberg [Bennet’s successor as superintendent] was leaving, we had risen to the top half of districts in math and reading. Our graduation rates were dramatically improved. I mean, there was a whole list of things we did. 

If we could say the same about America, we’d be feeling a lot better about where we are educationally. If we could say that about Colorado — I would say that no kids in any other district in the state saw the gains we did in Denver — we’d feel a lot better. But the reverse is true: We’re going backwards as a nation. In Colorado, there are school districts where the math proficiency rate is 7% for Latino students in eighth grade. The proficiency rate for reading is 24% among Latino and African American students. It’s still the fundamental civil rights issue we face as a nation, and we have not addressed it. The country is becoming less fair, not more, in education.

It is striking that, given the results you’ve cited, the Denver school board has worked to reverse some of the policies you implemented as superintendent. Last year, you and Boasberg held a press conference that — it seemed to me — was intended to defend the honor of the reforms you led. If elected governor, do you intend to fight for the same ideas that animated you as a district leader? 

I’m not coming back to be Colorado’s superintendent of schools. I’m not coming back to impose the same standards-based reform effort that we led in Denver. Times have changed, and we’ve seen the limitations of those reforms. But we also saw huge benefits from the way we engaged our workforce, the quality of implementation, and the ability for parents and kids to have interesting choices of schools throughout the district that met their interests and needs. 

Tom and I weren’t [at that press conference] to defend our honor. We’re proud of the work we did, though we didn’t do it perfectly. It was important for us to be there because the results are so clear. The outcomes were dramatically better than any similarly situated school district that I am aware of in American history. To me, the problem isn’t that our politicians on both the right and the left have abandoned school reform itself. It’s that we’ve abandoned our aspirations for our kids when it comes to their education, period. We can’t tolerate a system that creates the kind of outcomes we’re seeing.

So do you intend for your governorship to be more about issues that have developed since your time in the Senate, such as COVID learning recovery or the spread of four-day school weeks?

You’re right, there are a lot of districts in Colorado, especially rural ones, that have been operating on a four-day week for a long time. I was deeply worried when the city of Pueblo went to a four-day school week. I met with some parents at the Pueblo Boys and Girls Club and asked them what they were going to do with their kids on the fifth day. What they said to me was, “No one asked us whether we’d be okay with our kids not attending school on the fifth day. And by the way, none of us can afford child care.”

Is there any world in which the parents of Cherry Creek or Boulder County would be ignored in making a decision like that about school schedules? I can assure you, there would be no way that the superintendent or school board in those communities could ever get to a four-day week. Families would rebel over the child care costs alone. As I said, I’m not interested in re-litigating the reforms of 20 years ago. I’m interested in our state delivering an education for our young people that is relevant to the economy we have and that can put them in a position to succeed.

For more and more Americans, it feels like no matter how hard you work, you can’t get ahead, and your kids can’t get ahead. We’ve got to move our kids back to the center of our vision of what a successful education system looks like. We’ve got to focus on providing kids with economic opportunity — either when they decide to go to college or when they take a job that doesn’t require a college degree, but that can allow them to earn a decent wage and enter the middle class. We need to get much more serious about the state of our kids’ mental health, which is something I’ve focused on in the Senate, but that we haven’t been able to do anything about. 

Fundamentally it’s about enlisting the entire state to deal with these problems. There was literally nothing we could have done in Denver all those years ago without the support of a community that wanted better outcomes for their kids and had aspirations for their families that were the same as parents living in wealthy school districts. Urban parents and rural parents, parents of color and white parents, they all have that ambition. 

The fact that we have an obsolete system isn’t anybody’s fault. I’ve been around long enough to know the ways in which people can just keep clinging to the status quo. I just think this is a moment when people are feeling the economic challenges so acutely, and we’ve got to make the decision to do what every other industrialized and rich country in the world has done: put kids graduating high school in a position to earn a living wage.

If you’re successful in this campaign, you’ll be leaving Washington and focusing on the lives of Coloradans. I’m wondering what principles or policy ideas you think your party should try to draw into a national agenda on K-12 schools? I doubt it would just be fighting teachers’ unions or requiring more testing, which were some of the go-to answers in the 2000s.

Well, it’s not that. I think we’ve learned that we were over-testing in those days. We saw the limitations of standards-based reform, and we also saw the difference that could be made through good implementation and extraordinary leadership among principals and teachers. We saw what could be achieved by unleashing the entire community to make our schools better.

Colorado is ready for that. Our families want to focus on getting the benefits of high-quality education, and that’s where I want to focus. If we are putting young people in the position to embark on a middle-class life, we will know we have succeeded in fulfilling our responsibilities to them. And we will know that the resources that we’ve spent on education have allowed kids to fulfill their parents’ dream for them — to do better than they did, and to contribute to our democracy as well.

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