John has become the person that he is today thanks in no small part to the gift of a great public education. John attended Colorado public schools while growing up in Colorado, and he and his wife, Lisa, are proud to have three children that are graduates of East High School in Denver.

Public education is among the issues John cares about most. Twenty years ago, John helped found Invest in Kids, an early childhood education non-profit here in Colorado. Invest in Kids has partnered with the state of Colorado and now works in all 64 counties, helping thousands of families with crucial, evidence-tested early childhood education programs. John also serves on the board of Escuela de Guadalupe, a dual-language Spanish/English school in Denver that seeks to educate a new generation of Latino and Anglo leaders who are bilingual and bicultural. In addition, he volunteers as a high school Constitutional Law coach.

But there is so much more to do. As overall public-school funding has stalled and even declined, we are putting our future opportunities and prosperity at risk. Additionally, tuition at our public colleges and universities has become significantly more expensive, forcing too many college students to take on a lifetime burden of student debt to afford what was once attainable with a summer job and work-study programs.

It does not have to be this way. Now is the time to recommit as a nation to ensure that public education is well-funded and high quality for all. But the Trump administration is taking us in exactly the opposite direction — Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is moving full-force to privatize our entire education system. It won’t work. As the Washington Post summed it up: “We know better. With the experience of two centuries of public education, we have no excuse to believe public education can be left to the whims of well-meaning philanthropists… Our public schools are not ‘charity.’”

We must reverse this dangerous national trajectory and invest in public schools so that children from every single family in every single zip code have access to high quality public education—the same high-quality public education that helped create the American middle class and our democratic society.

As Colorado’s next United States Senator, John will work to once again make public education a top national priority, including by:

• Increasing federal support for early childhood education programs.
• Ensuring our teachers are paid more for the crucial work they do with our kids, and that class sizes are reduced to create the best learning environment possible.
• Fighting to lower the cost of college and replace what has become an unaffordable system of student debt with programs that give all Americans the financial opportunity to pursue higher education, whether in four-year colleges, community colleges or skill-based apprenticeship and certification programs.