Douglas County Schools... "Modern Culture Warfare"

Since the 1950s, Douglas County has been a seat of the national radical libertarian ideology and thoughts on educating the public.  The movement received a boost in the 1960s when Charles Koch invested heavily the Freedom School, an early think-tank located in Larkspur in rural Douglas County.  

As a Freedom School disciple, economist Milton Friedman suggested in his essay, The Role of Government in Education, some justifications for government mandates and funding when it comes to education. However, he said it’s difficult to justify government administration of education. He suggested governments could provide parents with vouchers worth a specified maximum sum per child per year to be spent on “approved” educational services. (Cato)

Years later,  in  2011, the Douglas County School Board voted to establish the Choice Scholarship Program, otherwise known as a voucher utilized through a district charter school. Children residing within the school district would have an opportunity to use a voucher to attend a private school of the parent’s choice, using 75 percent of funding that had been approved for the child’s education in Douglas County’s public schools.  Many were not happy and the Choice Scholarship program was enjoined by the courts later in 2011 in a lawsuit filed American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, several Colorado organizations and some taxpayers. Ongoing litigation made it impossible for children to utilize the program, and after a path to the US Supreme Court, the program was abandoned in 2017.

Today, the cultural Great Divide is being lived in the halls of the Douglas County School District, pitting radical ideologues with national agendas and billionaires financial backing, against those who believe politics have no place in DCSD.  

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These timeless articles dive into the foundations of  the DCSD reality...

"It's a Political Prize " The Denver Post by  Jessica Seaman. February 16, 2022

The District has faced partisan school board elections for decades .  

Local school boards have become more partisan recently amid national debates about COVID-19 and how teachers ought to teach about racism but in Douglas County School District, tense, high-profile battles between educators, administrators and parents have a longer history.

The district — which recently saw two protests involving hundreds of teachers and students, allegations of violating state open meeting laws, and the firing of its superintendent all in a span of eight days — faced highly divisive clashes since reformers first took control in 2009.

Douglas County School District was on the “leading edge of the school board elections becoming pretty politicized,” said Paul Teske, dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver.

"Culture War Reader - Douglas County School District "- JSNE's inhouse  compilation of published articles, opinions and news reports ...2009 thru 2023.

"The Koch Network Says It Wants to Remake Public Education. That Means  Destroying It, Says the Author of a New Book on the Billionaire Brothers."  Washington Post by Valerie Strauss.  Oct 16, 2019.  

The Koch network is the influential assemblage of groups funded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and more than 600 wealthy individuals who share his pro-business, anti-regulation view of economics and positions on social policy, such as climate change denial.

The focus on K-12 education follows long involvement by the Koch brothers in higher education. As leaders of a conservative movement that believes U.S. higher education is controlled by liberals who indoctrinate young people, they spent as much as an estimated $100 million on programs at hundreds of colleges and universities that support their views.

Astroturfing - Koch Invented the Concept of Fake Front Organizations of "Concerned Citizens"   Wikipedia, Jan 1, 2025.

Use of one or more front groups is one astroturfing technique. These groups typically present themselves as serving the public interest, while actually working on behalf of a corporate or political sponsor. Front groups may resist public policies and advocates that may be damaging to the sponsor's interests by emphasizing minority viewpoints, instilling doubt and publishing counterclaims by corporate-sponsored experts. Billionaire backed astroturfs are plentiful in Douglas County in  2025. Examples - Foundation  Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR),  Moms for Liberty (M4L), Colorado Parent Advocacy Network (CPAN), Gays Against Groomers (GAG)

"How the Far-Right Uses Educational Takeover to Impose Its Agenda."  LitHub, September 2024 by Jason Stanley. 

 In recent years, for example, the United States has seen a wave of right-wing political interference in education focused on banning certain concepts, authors, and books from schools’ libraries and curricula. The unstated goal of these bans is to erase the perspectives and histories of marginalized groups, including most prominently the history of Black Americans, whose ancestors were enslaved and brutally subjugated in this country.

These bans target especially concepts and theories used to explain how that subjugation operated, how it has changed over time and persisted to this day, and how it might be challenged—concepts such as structural racism, intersectionality, and critical race theory (CRT). The concept of structural racism, for instance, is targeted because it explains racial subjugation not in terms of individual bigotry, but as a result of underlying systems and practices—whether in housing, schooling, banking, policing, or the criminal legal system. It explains, for example, that the racial wealth gap in America (which is so extreme that Black Americans possess just over 15 percent of white Americans’ wealth) is a product of racist policies such as discriminatory lending and redlining. The concept of intersectionality, introduced by the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, reveals the particularly acute harms inflicted on groups that are at the intersection of multiple oppressions.