Groundwork for Change

Denver’s History of Education Reform and Systems Change

Over the past two decades, Denver has been a prominent test case for ambitious systems change in public education, illustrating both the potential of large-scale reform to improve student outcomes and the challenges of sustaining change amid shifts in leadership, educational priorities, and public support. The city’s reform trajectory began in earnest in 2005, when Michael Bennet arrived as Denver Public Schools (DPS) superintendent against a backdrop of widespread concern about the district’s performance and finances, which many viewed as a crisis. Enrollment was falling as families fled to suburban and private schools and DPS ranked near the bottom of Colorado’s large districts on virtually every academic measure. Bennet was not an educator by background and he approached the district’s dysfunction with the eye of a turnaround specialist focused on bringing dramatic structural change to the city’s schools.¹

Building a Portfolio System of Schools

The animating priority of his tenure and that of his successor Tom Boasberg was to relentlessly focus on academic outcomes and expand access to high-quality educational opportunities. The Denver Plan, unveiled by his team in 2005, provided an early organizing framework, connecting efforts on instruction, staffing, and school accountability to that shared goal. A 2007 joint resolution by Bennet and the Denver School Board further articulated the district’s vision to move away from a “one-size-fits-all, centralized, industrial-age enterprise” toward a system in which the district would build school-level capacity and leadership and incubate innovation.²

In the years that followed, Bennet and his team built the foundation for Denver’s portfolio model of schooling: a system in which the district managed a diverse set of schools — traditional, charter, and innovation — evaluated them against a common performance framework, closed those that failed, and opened new ones to take their place. The contentious closure of Manual, the city’s lowest-performing high school, in 2006 signaled the start of a new era of accountability for schools, which would yield improved outcomes for kids but also eventually come under increasing community blowback.

When Bennet departed for the U.S. Senate in 2009, his deputy superintendent, Boasberg, took the helm and continued to build a new architecture for DPS, making it a prominent example of citywide education reform. “The transition from Bennet to Boasberg was critical in keeping the momentum going in Denver,” recalled Brian Eschbacher, former executive director of planning and enrollment services at DPS. “There was such tight alignment and consistency among them, and this could have easily gone in another direction without that stability.”

Denver’s reform model rested on several interlocking pillars, grounded in an emphasis on providing schools with greater autonomy — regardless of governance type — in exchange for accountability for student outcomes. The School Performance Framework, launched in 2008 and refined in 2012, gave every school a color-coded rating based on growth, achievement, and equity, serving as a common accountability currency across all school types. The 2010 District-Charter Collaboration Compact committed charters to serving special education students at rates comparable to district schools, sharing facilities, locating in high-need areas, and joining district professional development, in exchange for equitable per-pupil funding across school types. In 2011, DPS launched SchoolChoice, a unified enrollment system that replaced more than 60 separate applications with a single ranked-preference form covering district-run and charter schools alike. A few years later, the Denver Plan 2020, an updated strategic plan adopted in 2014, sharpened the district’s ambitions into five core targets, including notably its first goal: 80% of students in every neighborhood will attend a high-performing school by 2020. The 2016 launch of the Luminary Learning Network — Colorado’s first independently governed innovation zone, in which four district schools gained autonomy over budgets and staffing while remaining DPS schools in exchange for meeting academic performance targets — represented a new frontier of this portfolio model. This was followed up by two more innovation zones: the Northeast Denver Innovation Zone and the Beacon Network Schools Innovation Zone. Denver became a city known for relatively high levels of collaboration across sectors. The city’s high-performing charter networks — including DSST, STRIVE Prep, University Prep, and Rocky Mountain Prep — offered visible evidence for supporters of the broader reform agenda. 

Denver’s approach also depended on a talent strategy capable of developing, rewarding, and expanding the supply of educators and leaders suited to a more autonomous and accountable system. In 2005, Denver voters approved a dedicated property tax to fund ProComp — one of the nation’s first performance-based teacher compensation systems, jointly designed with the teachers’ union — tying educator pay to student growth, professional development, and willingness to serve in hard-to-staff schools. Colorado’s 2010 Educator Effectiveness Act (SB 191), authored by TFA alum and then-state senator (and current mayor of Denver) Mike Johnston, further required student growth data to count for at least half of every teacher’s evaluation, which DPS implemented through its Leading Effective Academic Practice (LEAP) teacher evaluation framework. In later years, the district also embarked on ambitious efforts to strengthen professional learning and develop teacher leadership pathways in order to extend the impact of high-performing educators, improve staff retention, and expand the reach of professional learning and supports in a fast-growing, decentralized, and fragmented system.

During this period, Denver experienced substantial changes in both its system of schools and student outcomes. Overall, Denver families embraced choice, with nearly half of Denver students choosing a district or charter school other than the one assigned to them and over half of the citywide public schools existing as either independent charter schools or semi-autonomous district-run innovation schools. Academic performance in ELA and mathematics improved across the district, graduation rates rose, and the number of schools achieving high performance ratings rose from 64 to 122 between 2008 and 2017. DPS closed, replaced, or restarted 35 low-performing schools and opened 65 new ones over the decade.

Challenges and Evolution of Denver’s Reform Model

These shifts, however, unfolded alongside persistent and growing concerns about the pace, process, and community ownership of reform — tensions that became increasingly consequential as public support for reform began to ebb and controversy grew. One animating concern revolved around DPS’s continued equity challenges. While Denver’s reforms expanded access to higher-quality school options for many students, a growing body of research and reporting from the mid-2010s also made clear that progress on equity was incomplete: gains were not evenly distributed, and the district remained deeply stratified by race, class, and language. The 2016 Bailey Report, commissioned by the DPS board, documented persistent disparities in how discipline, suspensions, and school closures fell disproportionately on Black students. Annual analyses by the Colorado Children’s Campaign likewise flagged Denver as a district where access to high-quality schools, advanced coursework, and integrated classrooms tracked tightly with race and income. Leslie Colwell, a TFA alum and former vice president of K-12 education initiatives at the Colorado Children’s Campaign during these years, reflected that this work “forced Denver to confront the limits of the reform conversation, which at that point had really only focused mostly on governance issues, and ask: ‘Is it true that all families can actually benefit from the system that’s being built in Denver?’”

In response, DPS enacted a number of changes to improve access, such as new enrollment zones, free transportation, priority enrollment for students from low-income households enrolled at high-performing schools, and a redesigned school application process designed to remove barriers for highly mobile low-income and immigrant families. The district’s 2019 Black Excellence Resolution also codified the Bailey Report’s recommendations to prioritize Black student success and build an “equitable by design” and more “community-driven” school system. TFA alum Jen Bacon, then DPS school board vice president, was a key architect of the Resolution. The conversation about racial equity has continued to the present day, with the more recent 2024 La Raza Report complementing the Bailey Report and sparking renewed conversation about improving access to high-quality education for Latino students and families.

A lack of deep community engagement also hindered the long-term sustainability of reform efforts, especially as the national mood began to shift away from market- and accountability-driven approaches to education reform. Nate Easley, a former DPS school board president, reflected that district leadership at the time had sometimes moved fast and left the public behind: “We moved quickly because students needed help immediately. However, with some of our reforms, we didn’t bring people along with us. We should have been more intentional about building understanding and support, demonstrating how our reforms aligned with community priorities, and engaging the public in ways that fostered long-term commitment and continuity.”

The limits of community engagement were exemplified in community responses to school closures, school finance reform efforts, and the educator evaluation system. The 2010 decision to phase out Montbello High School — a beloved community anchor in a largely Black and Latino corner of far northeast Denver — and replace it with three smaller schools sharing the building became a flashpoint that left the neighborhood without a comprehensive high school for over a decade and fueled lasting grievance about the top-down approach to closures often imposed on communities of color. In 2013, a ballot initiative designed to rectify school funding inequities in Colorado also failed — exposing tensions within the reform coalition over whether its commitment to equity extended to the public investment required to achieve it. Meanwhile, ProComp was accumulating structural problems and became a significant source of frustration among educators, who too often struggled to understand their compensation and questioned whether it adequately reflected their experiences and priorities. While the district sought to reimagine the system, in February 2019, Denver teachers walked off the job for the first time in 25 years.

The softening of public support for the reforms ultimately manifested in significant leadership turnover in the district. In 2018, Boasberg announced his resignation, and his successor, Susana Córdova, remained in her role for less than two years — with much of her tenure focused on responding to the emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2019 and 2021 school board elections were a hinge point, with union-backed reform skeptics taking all seven seats on the Denver school board. The new board hired Alex Marrero as superintendent in 2021, and under his leadership, the district adopted the DPS Thrives roadmap, shifting the district’s focus from accountability and school quality toward community responsiveness, whole-child support, and restorative practices. This shift followed the board’s 2020 decision to move away from Denver’s local School Performance Framework and adopt the state framework while developing broader school-quality and continuous-improvement tools in an attempt to address concerns that school evaluation had become too technocratic, too complex for local stakeholders to use and understand, and too likely to pit schools and sectors against one another. The board also passed and revised Executive Limitation 12, which stripped innovation schools of the labor contract waivers that had defined their distinctive staffing models — precipitating the dissolution of the NDIZ and Beacon Network Innovation Zone. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Denver has also faced increasing financial headwinds due to declining revenue and enrollment, leading to school closures and consolidations that sparked controversy and were eventually followed by a new moratorium on future school closures. Over time, the district’s focus on school autonomy was replaced by a more top-down approach with centralized interventions and supports for struggling schools, including the launch of a centralized support system, the Elevate Network. 

Even as the district’s governing philosophy has shifted and the reform coalition that built the portfolio system has receded in recent years, important pieces of Denver’s portfolio architecture endure today. Unified enrollment, district-charter collaboration, and an innovation zone remain intact. Other components have been revised, replaced, or adapted in response to changing conditions, leading some to claim that the system is being “dismantled.” DPS continues to demonstrate academic progress on state and national assessments and stands out as a high-performing urban district nationally. Denver’s trajectory illustrates how ambitious reforms can produce lasting changes in system design and student outcomes while also revealing the limits of change when challenges of equal opportunity, community trust, and political durability are contested.

TFA Alumni Impact in Denver

Denver’s portfolio reforms were fundamentally about increasing the number of schools with consistently strong outcomes available to families through school autonomy, innovation, and performance accountability. When reflecting on that history, Chris Gibbons, the founder of STRIVE Preparatory Schools and a longtime charter network leader in the city, stated, “The impact of TFA on Denver was astronomical. The Denver story doesn’t look anything like it does without TFA.”

Data and conversations with systems leaders across the city largely supported this view. TFA’s records show that the number of TFA alumni working in education and adjacent sectors in Denver spiked during the Bennet and Boasberg administrations (Graphs A1 and A2). Interviews with systems leaders point to three areas where the collective impact of these TFA alumni in advancing and sustaining the portfolio reforms has been especially significant over the past 20 years:

• Expanding educational opportunity through high-quality school options.
• Strengthening reform-aligned talent systems.
• Providing state and local policy leadership in designing and enacting reforms.

The story that emerged in Denver was that of a network of values-aligned alumni leaders distributed across the education system — in classrooms, central offices, charter networks, advocacy organizations, and the statehouse. This network was not monolithic, and many alumni leaders noted that they did not often experience themselves as part of a highly managed or formally organized network, but the collective presence and actions of these alumni proved critical in helping reforms launch, take root, and evolve.

FIGURE 1: CONFIRMED TFA ALUMNI WORKING IN DENVER, 2005 TO 2025

FIGURE 2: CONFIRMED TFA ALUMNI WORKING IN DIFFERENT JOB SECTORS IN DENVER OVER TIME, 2005 TO 2025

Expanding Educational Opportunity Through High-Quality School Options

Given that a central focus of portfolio reforms in Denver was expanding the number of high-quality public school options — both district-run and charter — it is difficult to overstate the importance of TFA alumni in founding, staffing, and leading charter and district schools and also implementing improvement efforts across sectors. Denver leaders from that time period remarked that TFA alumni were often well-positioned to be leaders in this innovative model of education governance because they tended to bring an “outside the box” mindset, a “willingness to challenge traditional thinking,” and a relentless focus on improving outcomes for kids. Collectively, the efforts of alumni helped populate the portfolio with more high-quality options for families and expand students’ access to excellent educational experiences.

Strengthening Charter Schools and Cross-Sector Collaboration

One of the most visible expressions of this contribution was in Denver’s rapidly growing charter sector, where TFA alumni led and staffed many schools with strong academic outcomes that became central to the portfolio strategy and also served as proof points that reinforced the district’s broader agenda. This was especially true inside the city’s “Big Five” charter networks: DSST (formerly Denver School of Science and Technology), STRIVE Prep, University Prep, Rocky Mountain Prep, and KIPP Colorado — all of which were known for their high rates of academic success. Gibbons put it simply: “The role of TFA alums was totally transformative in this period for all of us, not just in STRIVE, but across the charter sector.” Gibbons recalled looking around one day at the height of Denver’s reform era and realizing that the vast majority of his principal corps and leadership cabinet were TFA alumni. He noted that in one particular year, he and the CEO of DSST had hired almost the entire TFA–Phoenix corps to come work for them. Gibbons reflected that he and other leaders sought out TFA alumni educators because they tended to be “data driven” and bring a “pro-results, pro-kids, anti-bureaucracy mindset” that aligned with the prevailing spirit of change in Denver.

The success of these schools also shaped how district leaders and educators talked about what was possible for students. According to TFA alum Andy Mendrop, a longtime communications staffer at DSST who now serves as VP of development, when DSST’s first graduating class made the front page of the Rocky Mountain News in 2008, with every single student admitted to a four-year college, “it became harder to say that change is impossible.”

TFA alumni data from the time demonstrates the reach of alumni talent in these schools (Table).

TABLE: NUMBER OF ROLES OCCUPIED BY CONFIRMED ALUMNI IN DENVER’S MAIN CHARTER NETWORKS, 2005 TO 2025

TFA alumni also helped build the cross-sector relationships that made Denver a national exemplar of district-charter collaboration and that strengthened schools in both sectors. Kimberlee Sia, a TFA alum who is a former CEO of KIPP Colorado and a current DPS school board member, played a central role in the district-charter collaborative council, a regular meeting space for charter leaders and district staff to work through shared policies. Superintendent Boasberg described Sia’s contributions as “extraordinarily influential” and “fearless” in pushing charters to accept the same equal access obligations as district schools, including serving the highest-need special education students, serving co-equally as boundary schools and taking all students within their boundaries, and accepting late-arriving students even at the expense of taking students off their waitlists. Reflecting on that period, Sia described the level of cooperation across sectors as “mind-boggling” compared with other cities where she had worked previously. “It was amazing that we [charter leaders] could pick up the phone and get support from a district office staff member, and that at the drop of a hat we could talk to each other and share ideas … It really felt like this was for kids. We were all rowing in the same direction.”

That collaboration was real, but it also had limits. TFA alum Jen Bacon, who taught at DSST and then served on the DPS school board before eventually being elected to the state legislature, noted that schools in Denver did not always fulfill the broader promise of sharing innovation across the system, as competitive pressures, a desire for brand protection, and non-disclosure practices made some schools reluctant to collaborate. Other charter leaders likewise shared that DPS had “never totally cracked the code” on cross-sector collaboration, or suggested that collaboration sometimes appeared more heavily concentrated within a few high-performing networks.

Today, Bacon is known as a strong advocate for improved charter school transparency as a state legislator. Likewise, Sia, in her role as DPS school board member, continues to push for stronger collaboration and learning across sectors, hoping to reinvigorate some of the best practices she saw in earlier years. She is urging DPS to more systematically identify and learn from “bright stars” in traditional, innovation, and charter schools and to create more opportunities for school leaders across governance models to share what works and tackle common challenges. Sia has also called for rebuilding formal cross-sector structures to strengthen systemwide alignment, such as the collaborative councils that previously brought district and charter leaders together but were disbanded as district leadership and priorities shifted over time.

Innovation Zones

TFA alumni were also at the center of shaping another pillar of the portfolio model, and one of Denver’s most distinctive reform strategies: the district-run innovation zones. These zones gave district schools autonomy over staffing, budgets, and school design while keeping them inside DPS.

The push to establish innovation zones in Denver came from a grassroots group of school leaders in 2016 who believed that district-run schools needed more room to design around the needs of their students and communities. According to one innovation zone leader, those educators “got together and basically challenged the system,” eventually obtaining support from “forward-thinking board members” who visited their schools, bought into their vision, and gave them the political backing to confront a central administration reluctant about the idea. TFA alum Bailey Holyfield, who currently runs the Luminary Learning Network innovation zone as its executive director, recalled, “It was not something that was originally popular with [Superintendent] Tom [Boasberg], it wasn’t popular with the union at the time, but those [school] leaders really advocated for flexibility and educator-centered design to the superintendent and central office” to begin the process of creating an innovation zone. 

One of those school leaders was TFA alum Zach Rahn, the principal of Ashley Elementary and a strong advocate for what would become the Luminary Learning Network. Rahn later helped manage the district’s innovation zone portfolio in a role similar to an assistant superintendent. Several leaders recalled Rahn’s entrepreneurial ingenuity as critical to the success of the effort and Brett Alessi, co-founder of Empower Schools and one of the primary architects of Denver’s first innovation zone (nonTFA alum), remembered him as the kind of “dynamic, outcomes-focused leader” who made innovation zones possible.

The long-term survival of the Luminary Learning Network — the only innovation zone still operating in Denver in 2026 — has also depended heavily on TFA alumni leadership. Holyfield became the network’s executive director in 2019 after serving in DPS as manager of tiered quality assurance, where she supported improvement efforts in underperforming schools. That central office experience has helped her navigate district politics, build relationships with the school board, and protect the zone’s autonomy at a time when other innovation zones were ending operations. Holyfield has also become a steady public advocate for innovation zones, including by testifying in support of legislation to strengthen and codify protections for them, such as SB 22-197, which created a clearer state process for resolving disputes between local school boards and innovation zones.

School Turnaround

TFA alumni have played important roles in enforcing accountability for performance, especially through the district’s school turnaround efforts. Ambar Suero, current TFA–Colorado executive director, noted that TFA alumni have often been hired by the district to lead difficult turnarounds in struggling district schools, including Skinner Middle School and Lake Middle School. Recent efforts to overhaul the district’s school turnaround approach to ensure a standard high bar of quality across district-run schools have also been influenced by alumni.

In the central office, TFA alum Joe Amundsen has spent more than a decade working on school improvement, gathering lessons from stronger schools and building supports for schools facing deeper challenges. Amundsen now serves as DPS’s executive director of school transformation and leads the Elevate Schools Network, a district turnaround initiative for some of Denver’s lowest-performing elementary and middle schools. The model embeds experienced principal coaches directly into schools and focuses on shared accountability, instructional leadership, and school culture systems. Some TFA alumni have questioned whether the Elevate Schools Network is the most efficient source of innovation and improvement. But Amundsen emphasized that the model is trying to solve real weaknesses of the earlier reform era; schools historically were too often given autonomy and resources without enough central support, making success too dependent on individual leaders to sustain. “It was so leader-dependent … You build this really innovative school model, and one or two people really know how to execute it, and once they leave, the schools come back down, and then we’re trying to continuously improve a system piecemeal,” Amundsen stated. Additionally, the emphasis on school-level autonomy, and the lack of a shared definition of what a great school should look like, fostered unstructured innovation in which schools typically moved faster than the central office could support them — in turn making coherent, systemwide supports and learning difficult to provide. Amundsen noted that many formerly successful school leaders have today transitioned into central office roles where they now hope to expand their reach to improve schools systemwide.

Entrepreneurship

TFA alumni also helped fuel the entrepreneurial culture that defined Denver’s portfolio model. Boasberg pointed to the district’s Call for Quality Schools as one of the clearest instances of TFA alumni impact in the city during his superintendency. The annual process invited educators from across the country to propose new school models, and Boasberg estimated that it helped the district open roughly 80 new schools over a decade. Many were designed to meet specific system needs, such as replacing low-performing schools, responding to population growth, or adding new program models such as dropout recovery and dual language immersion.

TFA alumni contributed to this work in two ways. First, they answered the call to found new schools (charter and district run). “TFA alumni were among the more innovative and entrepreneurial folks who applied — people who were willing to adapt to this kind of changing [governance] structure, take on leadership roles in schools, and even found their own schools,” Boasberg recalled. Second, alumni helped design and manage the process itself. Baxter, who served as DPS director of charter schools, helped name and operationalize the call, and TFA alum Joe Amundsen, then senior manager of school design, directly oversaw the opening of new schools.

While strategic priorities in the district have shifted away from school-level autonomy and innovation in recent years, that same entrepreneurial energy has continued outside the traditional district structure. Moonshot edVentures, an incubator founded by TFA alum Kat Ling, supports the launch of new schools and nonprofits designed to meet community needs, including specialized schools for students with unique learning needs. Other TFA leaders noted a similar pattern in nearby districts like Aurora, where some alumni have moved in part because they see more room to innovate and “follow their North Star.”

Strengthening Talent Systems

Denver’s reform strategy depended on having enough reform-aligned educator talent to support a proliferating, experimental, and decentralized portfolio system — educators who were willing to break traditional assumptions about educational delivery and were responsive to a different, accountability-driven set of incentives. As former DPS officials explained, rapid population growth, a highly mobile population, and the imperative to break the “widget” mold of traditional school systems meant that the local education environment simply could not produce enough talent to meet the district’s needs and so it was critical to import talent. Pipelines like TFA helped fill that gap, attracting innovative educators from across the country to Denver at a moment when the district was expanding options for families, opening new schools, and asking more of teachers and school leaders. Over time, many of those alumni stayed in Denver and moved into broader leadership roles. Between 2005 and 2025, at least 898 individual alumni served as classroom teachers and 242 individual alumni served as school administrators in Denver, filling at least 1,106 teaching positions and 288 administrator positions across district and charter schools. During the peak year of 2017, TFA alumni data suggest that at least 399 alumni were working as teachers in Denver schools and 104 alumni were working as school administrators (Figure 3). In that year, TFA alumni comprised about 7% of teachers and 17% of school administrators in the city.

Alumni were critical in building and aligning Denver’s talent infrastructure from inside and outside DPS. TFA alumni Sarah Almy and Kate Brenan, for example, launched Denver Teaching Fellows in partnership with TNTP to recruit and train career changers for hard-to-staff subjects and schools in the city, filling vacancies that would have otherwise hindered the success of the portfolio model. After joining the DPS central office, Almy oversaw a talent management team responsible for new teacher onboarding, principal recruitment pipelines, and the implementation of ProComp through which she operationalized the reforms from a talent lens.

FIGURE 3: NUMBER OF CONFIRMED TFA ALUMNI TEACHERS/ADMINISTRATORS WORKING IN DENVER OVER TIME, 2005 TO 2025

Note: From 2005 to 2025, alumni at a minimum comprised between 0.2% (in 2005) to 6.6% (in 2017) of total Denver teachers and between 1.2% (2005) and 18.7% (2015) of total Denver school administrators. Total Denver FTE teacher and administrator staffing accounts obtained from NCES. Confirmed alumni educator counts obtained from TFA. Source: Organization, “Source Title With Hyperlink,” Date.

Educator Quality and Accountability

TFA alumni also dramatically shaped Denver’s approach to educator quality and accountability. The Educator Effectiveness Act (SB-191) overhauled educator accountability in Colorado and tied teacher tenure to student academic growth. The law was authored by TFA alum and then-state senator Mike Johnston and received key support from alumni on his staff, including Damion LeeNatali (Johnston’s chief of staff who would later serve as Executive Director of TFA-CO), who helped craft the legislation and build legislative support for it, and Leslie Colwell (Johnston’s then-legislative director), who helped monitor its implementation (Mike Johnston was elected mayor of Denver in 2023).

Inside DPS, alumni were central to translating that state policy into district practice and incentives through LEAP, the district’s teacher evaluation system. TFA alumni Danielle Ongart (LEAP project manager at the time) and Sarah Almy (executive director of talent management) played leading roles in designing and implementing the system. Ongart helped draft and finalize the instructional rubric that defined teacher effectiveness, worked with the teachers’ union to frame it as a collaborative development tool rather than a punitive measure, and developed content-specific appendices to reflect the diversity of instructional models across Denver’s schools. She also advocated for the rubric to include student behaviors as evidence of a safe learning environment and helped build the professional learning infrastructure needed to take LEAP to scale.

Almy’s work focused on making LEAP’s accountability focus a reality in schools. She helped finalize the system’s design and oversaw its rollout, including the training and coaching of principals and teacher leaders on how to use the framework in observations and conversations about instructional practice. (The day-to-day implementation of the educator trainings and coaching was advanced by another TFA alum on her team, Sean Precious.) Over time, Almy also connected LEAP to other parts of the talent system, including teacher leadership and new teacher pipelines, so that evaluation was not isolated within human resources. “This was a huge opportunity, because we were defining effectiveness, we were being very clear for every teacher in our district with what good looks like in our district, and so it’s not a guessing game, and then giving them the tools to get better.”

Over time, the LEAP system came under strain due to its connection to teacher compensation and growing educator dissatisfaction with ProComp, which many educators deemed overly complex, opaque, and too focused on student test scores at the expense of other classroom priorities. In later years, Almy and her team collaborated with local educators to improve the system, facilitating focus groups and convening district-union working groups to strengthen transparency and advance pay reform. However, the 2019 teacher strike put ended many of these collaborative efforts, and the district walked back much of its evaluation approach in subsequent years. Still, Almy credits the work with changing the substance of conversations inside schools, a shift that persists in some ways to this day: “We fundamentally changed the conversations that teachers and principals were having about instruction. We’re having a much more honest conversation about performance.”

Teacher Leadership

TFA alumni also played a critical role in the launch of DPS’s innovative teacher leadership program, a district-wide initiative that restructured school hierarchies by having teacher leaders split their time equally between classroom instruction and coaching, observing, and evaluating a small cohort of peers. This emphasis on talent development was a crucial, interconnected component of the district’s broader portfolio strategy and emerged from the innovation going on inside the portfolio. The concept originated at the Denver Green School (which had a few TFA alumni as teachers), whose educator-led, collaborative model inspired the district to scale the approach more broadly. TFA alumni in the central office — including Almy, Erin McMahon (director of teacher talent management), Kate Brenan (senior manager of teacher career pathways), and Laney Shaler (teacher pathways manager) — were credited with designing the teacher leadership pathways, trainings, and implementation. According to district staff, the program addressed two needs at once: it helped retain strong teachers by giving them more responsibility and higher pay without requiring them to leave the classroom, and it gave principals more instructional leadership capacity by ensuring teachers were coached by subject-matter experts. At its peak, DPS had roughly 1,100 teacher leaders, making it one of the largest programs of its kind in the country and creating a pipeline for future school principals. “We developed the biggest teacher leadership program in the country, and I do think that notion of really trying to empower teachers to drive leadership at the teacher level, at the professional learning community level, was one of the most important things we did,” Boasberg recalled.

Providing State and Local Policy Leadership

TFA alumni played a key role in building the policy infrastructure that allowed Denver’s portfolio reforms to launch, expand, and endure over time, especially in the areas of school innovation, accountability, and funding. At the state level, several of the most important education policy debates in Colorado bore the imprint of TFA alumni. Johnston (the then-state legislator and current mayor of Denver) and other alumni on his staff helped author and advance the Educator Effectiveness Act (SB-191, which strengthened educator accountability and precipitated the LEAP program) and the READ Act (which aimed to improve literacy instruction), and he was a strong supporter of the state’s previously enacted innovation schools law. He also played a key role in leading and building bipartisan support for Colorado’s ASSET Act in 2013, which allowed undocumented students to pay in-state college tuition. In more recent years, TFA alum and current state legislator Jen Bacon has been a swing vote and power broker in the statehouse on a wide range of education legislation, including school finance reform, teacher evaluation, and charter school oversight, playing a key role in how the portfolio system continues to evolve today.

Perhaps no state legislative effort illustrates the role of TFA alumni more than the decade-long effort to overhaul Colorado’s school finance system, culminating in the 2024 School Finance Act. During much of the reform period, Colorado’s rigid school funding system and constitutional constraints on taxation were persistent constraints on Denver’s education change agenda. While the district was able to work around this by launching many portfolio initiatives with philanthropic support, those dollars could not resolve the underlying public finance constraints that made sustaining and scaling reforms difficult over time.

An early push to reform school funding came in 2013, when Johnston, LeeNatali, and Colwell helped lead Senate Bill 213 (later referred to voters as Amendment 66), which sought to modernize the state’s highly inequitable funding system. Although Amendment 66 failed at the ballot box, alumni involved in the effort described it as an important starting point: it clarified the political challenges facing school finance reform, exposed fractures within the broader reform coalition, and laid the intellectual and coalitional groundwork for later change. LeeNatali and Colwell also noted that TFA alumni were not uniformly aligned in that fight; another alum, Michael Fields, worked with the conservative organization Americans for Prosperity to oppose the measure.

Over the following decade, alumni were prominent among those who continued to press for funding fairness through advocacy, legislation, district finance work, and coalition-building. In a later role as vice president of K-12 initiatives at the Colorado Children’s Campaign, Colwell spent years building coalitions across ideological and geographic lines, including with rural districts, low-income districts, and more conservative leaders across the state. Her work helped support a 2021 Colorado Supreme Court interrogatory and related legislation (HB21-1164) that corrected long-standing interpretations of property tax law, opening the door to hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue. That victory helped pave the way for Colorado’s 2024 school finance formula rewrite (SB24-188), which moved the state toward a more student-weighted model prioritizing low-income students, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities. In addition to Colwell, alums Bacon (the state representative), DPS chief financial officer Chuck Carpenter, and DPS government liaison Deep Gupta were credited with helping drive the legislative sponsorship, technical analysis, and community engagement needed to pass the new formula.

More locally, inside DPS, alumni also helped design and execute policy ideas from the central office (Graph D). Inside DPS, Bennet and Boasberg built a culture of “distributed authority,” where middle managers and central office staff were expected to lead major initiatives, take risks, and shape policy through the work they owned. Baxter described the central office as a place of R&D policy experimentation, where the line between policy design and implementation became “really fuzzy.” Former TFA–Colorado Executive Director Sean VanBerschot remembered the charge from leadership this way: “Here’s your boundaries, don’t leave them. Now go, run!” Former DPS Board President Anne Rowe likewise recalled that the district’s bargain of “autonomy with accountability” applied to central office staff as well as schools, and that TFA alumni on DPS staff were valued as “talented risk takers” able to “think outside the box” on policy. Thus, TFA alumni were not always the top-level decision makers, but they often served as “extraordinary lieutenants” who achieved huge impact behind the scenes by generating policies and programs for the district.

FIGURE 4: NUMBER OF CONFIRMED TFA ALUMNI DPS OFFICIALS

Note: Total DPS administrators and administrative support staff obtained from NCES. Confirmed alumni DPS staff counts obtained from TFA. Source: Organization, “Source Title With Hyperlink,” Date.

Early in Denver’s reform story, TFA alumni also created informal spaces where policy ideas critical to the portfolio reforms could be tested and sharpened. DPS Board Vice President Barbara O’Brien (a non-alum) recalled being part of a “guerrilla group” of “little missionaries for change” that would meet regularly in the TFA offices. At various times, the group could include DPS board members, superintendents, state legislators, community advocates, and even occasionally TFA teachers and school leaders who happened to be available. VanBerschot was credited with being a key convener of the group, and essentially supporting a district brain trust that would test ideas, learn from practitioners, and develop a shared policy agenda on issues like school quality, educator effectiveness, and innovation. Former Denver School Board President Nate Easley reflected that VanBerschot’s leadership in that space was critical in deepening his own understanding of education reform after a career spent mostly on the program side of education.

The Urban Leaders Fellowship became another way alumni helped strengthen the pipeline of entrepreneurial policy leadership in Denver that continues to support and advance education change today. Founded in 2011 by TFA alumni Johnston (the then-state senator) and LeeNatali (his then-chief of staff) after TFA’s 20th-anniversary summit, ULF was designed to solve what its founders saw as a “market failure” in education policy: local and state policymakers needed research support and implementation capacity, while talented young professionals, including many teachers, wanted to enter policy work but lacked a clear pathway. The fellowship placed participants from across the country in summer roles focused on consequential policy issues while helping them build policy skills and relationships with policymakers. Colwell, who managed the fellowship in its early years, described it both as a talent magnet that brought ambitious people to Denver and as a community-building mechanism that helped many of them stay. One early fellow was Ongart (the LEAP designer), who first moved to Denver to participate in ULF and then went on to work in both DPS and the Colorado Department of Education.

Conclusion

Denver’s experience illustrates both the potential and the challenges of large-scale systems change. TFA alumni were deeply embedded in the work of designing the city’s reform agenda, building schools, developing talent, shaping policy, and sustaining change across the city. Their leadership, distributed across the education ecosystem, helped build the capacity for ambitious reform in the community. In the words of Baxter: “TFA alumni have played a fundamental role in the transformation of Denver’s education ecosystem. They have absolutely been leaders of the work — both in the practical sense, in terms of the actual execution, and in the moral sense, in terms of the actual moral commitment to the idea that all kids deserve an excellent education.”

At the same time, the evolution of Denver’s reform agenda and approach to change over time underscores that durable systems change often requires more than strong ideas and capable leaders. It also depends on balancing urgency with meaningful community engagement, pursuing equal opportunity alongside accountability, building trust with educators and the public, and creating reforms that can adapt and endure as political leadership and local priorities change. The significance of TFA alumni in Denver lies in the changes they helped drive and in the network of leaders and institutional capacity they have helped build — both of which continue to shape citywide efforts to improve public education.

Acknowledgments, About the Authors, About Bellwether

Bellwether is a national nonprofit that works to transform education to ensure young people — especially those furthest from opportunity — achieve outcomes that lead to fulfilling lives and flourishing communities. Founded in 2010, we help mission-driven partners accelerate their impact, inform and influence policy and program design, and bring leaders together to drive change on education’s most pressing challenges. For more, visit bellwether.org.