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In this moment of deepening distrust in Public Institutions, including Public Schools, it's important to recognize that much of this distrust is purposely manufactured."

- Nelia Peña

Nelia Peña began her journey as a public school teacher where she grew up: in Denver.

Peña had a strong commitment to justice but quickly realized the system was not built to truly center equity in her bilingual elementary classroom despite the district’s stated equity commitments. She began teaching in 2012 amid the “education reform era” initiated by the No Child Left Behind Act, which focused on holding K-12 schools accountable for student performance and led to the growth of state-mandated assessments, often tied to more rigorous state standards.

“I definitely went into it with a really strong desire to be a teacher for social justice, to help students develop critical consciousness,” Peña recalled. “Then I got to (the classroom), and that’s not what people were doing. People didn’t consider that ‘good teaching.’”

A bright spot amid her disheartening experiences came from her master’s in the Equity, Bilingualism and Biliteracy program in the CU Boulder School of Education and its BUENO Center cohort, which included many other Latinx teachers. There, she found validation for her frustrations and explored frameworks for reaffirming her students’ cultural and linguistic wealth.

“It was pretty transformative for me personally and professionally,” she said. “It gave me community and tools to re-center justice.”

Redefining Rigor

The program helped Peña (MEdu’20) speak up. When she was promoted to be a teacher leader—a hybrid part-time teacher and coach role— she challenged definitions of rigor that ignored students’ lived experiences.

“I led professional learning for the school focused on language instruction, integrating ideas around the intersections of race and language, honoring students’ ways of knowing, and how we could transfer equity work into concrete pedagogical practices,” she said. “We had these standards, and I was thinking about teaching in rigorous ways while centering our students.”

Peña, who taught for eight years, is now pursuing her doctorate at CU Boulder in the Equity, Bilingualism and Biliteracy program. Her focus is on further exploring how dialogue and translanguaging—or creating an environment where students use all their linguistic resources—can be integral for public schools. Schools have historically marginalized students’ language and ways of knowing, but she believes that can change.

“So often in school, what students bring with them is treated as ‘wrong,’” Peña explained. “But they’re drawing on their cultural and linguistic wealth. What would make sense for them in their families and communities? How can we value that? How would that feel different for students, and what would that do for our schools?”

The Allure of Innovation

Terri Wilson was an undergraduate in Minnesota—the first state in the U.S. to embrace charters schools and school choice—when she also noticed gaps in local schools.

While volunteering in Minneapolis- St. Paul schools, she realized many kids, especially those from immigrant families, were not being seen, valued or well educated in their classrooms.

“Schools in their neighborhoods had systematically been failing many of these kids,” she said. “For many of us working with these families, charter schools seemed like an appealing alternative.”

Wilson, then a triple major in philosophy, political science and education policy, was intrigued by the idea of innovative schools, so she decided to develop a charter school application for her senior thesis project. However, as she worked on the application, her certainty waned.

“I ended up being drawn toward questions about whether or not we should be creating a school of our own or pushing the public school system for more resources,” she said.

“My thesis was instead an examination of the democratic potential of charter schools and the contradictions.”

It was a fitting change of heart for Wilson, who is now a philosopher of education and associate professor in educational foundations, policy and practice. That thesis set the stage for her work with St. Paul community schools after graduation and her graduate studies. Today, her research focuses on school choice, parental rights and the democratic foundations of education. All these experiences sharpened her question: What does the “public” in public schools mean?

What Is “Public” Education?

Wilson has been partnering with several colleagues, including Kevin Welner, a longtime professor, director of the National Education Policy Center and education law expert at CU Boulder, on a scholarly piece about the definition of public education from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Those perspectives include Wilson’s philosophical view and Welner’s legal take, as well as insights of economists, sociologists, historians and others. Spoiler: The definition of “public” is undefined.

“There is no single definition that we have, as a society, agreed to about what we mean when we say ‘public,’” Welner said.

Funding is one part, but publicness also includes “civil rights protections, regulatory control and the role of the public in making decisions and governance.”

The U.S. approach, he noted, differs sharply from many European systems, where private schools can receive taxpayer funding only if they accept strict regulations. Schools must comply with rules around teacher qualifications, protections against discrimination, tuition limits, curriculum, admissions criteria, accountability and governance.

“We’ve never attached the level of regulation and protections for students or teachers that the European model does,” Welner said.

The U.S. is moving toward a model with weaker regulatory guardrails, driven partly by recent Supreme Court decisions.

By expanding the “Free Exercise Clause” into what Welner described as a “very powerful anti-discrimination clause” that protects religious institutions from—under almost any circumstance—being treated less favorably than nonreligious ones, the Court has opened the door for voucher-funded religious schools to claim exemptions from civil rights requirements. Some cases, including in Colorado, involve religious schools asserting the right to “engage in faith-based discrimination,” including against LGBTQ+ families. These are worrisome trends for scholars like Welner.

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“I used to say that our public schools are a foundational institution that props up our democratic society, but I am not sure we can say that now,” he said.

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Even so, Welner sees possibilities at state levels, where local policies can have clear benefits. For example, he cited the ways some states, like Colorado, New Jersey and Oklahoma, have strengthened investment in universal pre-K. As another example, he pointed to community-school initiatives in California and New York.

He called this moment a reminder that the struggles about publicness will continue with no clear end.

“We have to engage in the struggles and work toward a vision of publicness that we think is important,” he said.

Power to the People

Wilson urges supporters of public institutions to stay attuned to reality, not fear. Her research on parents’ rights and school-choice decisions has shown the influence of negative rhetoric about public schools.

“In this moment of deepening distrust in public institutions, including public schools, it’s important to recognize that much of this distrust is purposely manufactured,” she said. “It’s not neutral. It’s a result of steady campaigns to sow distrust, question effectiveness and build a sense of crisis.

“We can see this in efforts to reassert parental decision-making in education. While parental rights are portrayed as under threat, in reality, the U.S. has expansive protections for parents’ rights to shape and control their children’s education, health and well-being.”

Wilson is fascinated by the contrasting results of the Gallup polls every summer, where faith in public schools is low, including an all-time low of 35% of respondents saying they are satisfied with U.S. education. However, when parents are asked about their children’s school, responses are routinely more favorable.

“There’s a powerful and informative gap there,” she said. “If you ask people about their experiences with the local neighborhood schools or teachers they know, there are many openings there to tell different stories and to lean into those relationships.”

Rewriting the story won’t be easy, but Wilson remains hopeful.

“Institutions are just the people that are part of them,” she said. “When we talk about public schools, we’re talking about us.”

Wilson cautions against drawing a hard line between the public goods of education on one side and people’s private interests on the other. She sees room for commonalities. Preserving publicness in public schools may rely on our abilities to connect with and respect one another.

“We’re all agents of the democracy we want to see, but we have to understand what ‘democracy’ is and why it’s important to learn the skills, practices and dispositions of being able to talk to each other across differences,” she said.

Pockets of Possibility

Peña sees public schools as both deeply flawed and full of possibility.

“Their design from the start hasn’t really been to be a great equalizer, but instead for only certain students to succeed,” she said. Yet she believes in the pockets of transformation that emerge when educators center students’ humanity. “Education is the ingredient that changes so many people’s lives.”

Now, as a relatively new parent of a bilingual child in a same-sex-parent family, Peña’s outlook is deeply personal.

“I want my child to feel valued at school, and I want all children to feel that,” she said.

Despite the challenges, Peña remains hopeful that public schools can become places where every child’s language, identity and ways of knowing are treated as assets.

As she prepares to lean into her dissertation research in a Denver-area elementary school, she’s volunteering in the classroom, because she is committed to community-building over everything else.

“I see these pockets of really beautiful things that are happening, and these pockets of hope and possibility,” Peña said.

“Since entering this program, I’ve wanted to do research that shines a bright light on possibilities, on things that are going well that are also full of complexity and tension that ultimately illuminate something that we can build from.”

Illustrations: ©2026 Anna Godeassi c/o theispot