Colorado’s Democratic U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo wasn’t the only incumbent to lose her seat to a turnover in the 8th Congressional District last week. It turns out the race for that same district’s seat on the State Board of Education ended in an upset of its own.
Republican contender Yazmin Navarro ousted incumbent Democratic state board member Rhonda Solis. While their face-off had a much lower profile than the one for Congress — in which Republican Gabe Evans narrowly defeated the first-term Caraveo — the stakes were much higher when it comes to education reform and school choice throughout our state.
And it was the champions of education reform and choice, particularly the state’s wildly popular public charter schools, who wound up the unexpected winners. Navarro ran on a platform that included the expansion of school choice, which came to be of critical importance to the charter movement statewide.
With term limits ending the tenure of a pro-charter Democratic board member in another seat on the board this year, a bipartisan majority that generally had supported charter schools was about to unravel. Solis, who lost a close race with Navarro, was no friend of Colorado’s groundbreaking charter-school movement. She was expected to be one of five votes in a new, anti-charter school majority on the nine-member body. Navarro’s unanticipated victory upended all that.