Denver Public Schools needed a new superintendent. What the district got instead was a masterclass in institutional dysfunction—a search process that exposed every fault line in the reform board’s governance and raised serious questions about who was actually running Colorado’s largest school district.

Tom Boasberg had led DPS for nearly a decade, presiding over the district’s aggressive expansion of school choice, charter school partnerships, and the performance-based pay system that would eventually trigger a teachers’ strike. When Boasberg announced his departure, the board launched a national superintendent search that was supposed to demonstrate the reform movement’s continued vitality.

The Search

From the beginning, the search was troubled. Community forums designed to solicit input on the next superintendent’s priorities felt like theater—public participation events where the outcomes were already decided. Parents and teachers who showed up to advocate for neighborhood schools and reduced testing left feeling ignored. Advocates for continued reform showed up to ensure the board stayed the course.

The board hired a national search firm, as school boards do, and the firm produced candidates, as search firms do. But the process lacked transparency at every stage. Finalist names were closely guarded. Community input was collected but not visibly integrated into decision-making. The board appeared to be conducting a search to ratify a conclusion it had already reached.

The Reform Machine

Denver’s school board had been shaped for years by education reform organizations, most notably Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), which had invested heavily in board races. The resulting board majority was ideologically committed to a specific vision: school choice, charter expansion, performance metrics, and superintendent leadership aligned with the national reform consensus.

This wasn’t necessarily wrong—school choice has genuine advocates among parents who want options—but it created a governance structure where the board’s accountability ran more toward national reform networks than toward the local communities whose children attended DPS schools.

Susana Cordova

The board ultimately appointed Susana Cordova, a DPS veteran who had served as deputy superintendent under Boasberg. Cordova was a known quantity—competent, experienced, and unlikely to disrupt the reform trajectory. Her appointment was both the safe choice and the revealing one: after a national search that cost months and significant public resources, the board chose the person who was already there.

Cordova inherited a district about to face its biggest labor crisis in a generation. Within months of her appointment, teachers would vote to strike over the same compensation system that the reform board had championed. The supersearch that was supposed to bring transformational leadership instead delivered continuity at the exact moment the district needed to change.

Governance Failure

The DPS superintendent search was a case study in how reform governance can become self-referential—a system that selects for leaders who will preserve the system, using processes that simulate public engagement without actually responding to it. The board got the superintendent it wanted. The question was whether it was the superintendent Denver’s students needed.