The Colorado Imperative: Conversations on Learning, Leadership, and the Future

Why This Series, Why Now
Something has gone quiet in American education and the silence is costing our children.  

In laboratories, research hospitals, and university cognitive science departments, researchers are producing stunning new insights into how human beings actually learn. They have examined what conditions unlock curiosity and deep understanding, and what shuts them down. The science of learning has advanced more in the last twenty years than in the previous century. Meanwhile, most of our schools are still running on a factory built model.

It is not that educators, parents, and community members don’t care. But somewhere in the exhausting machinery of policy debates, budget fights, and culture wars, we have lost something essential: a shared, honest vision for what education is actually for, and the leadership willing to pursue it.


A Different Kind of Conversation
Former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that education in America is adrift — that we have lost our goals, our strategies, our metrics, and our vision. He is right. But this series proposes that the vision we need cannot be found by looking backward at what schools used to do better, or sideways at what other countries’ schools are doing now.

The vision we need must be built by looking forward to the world Colorado’s children will inhabit in 2035 and beyond. It also must go inward towards what we now understand about the remarkable, fragile, endlessly capable human minds we are asking schools to serve.
This is not a policy reform initiative. It is not a debate between entrenched camps. It is a community inquiry- rigorous, honest, and deliberately cross-disciplinary into two foundational questions that will shape everything else:

First: What have we learned about how humans learn, and what does that demand of us?
Neuroscience and cognitive science are transforming our understanding of how children’s brains develop, what they need to flourish — movement, outdoor time, play, genuine challenge, emotional safety, intrinsic motivation — and what our current system, with its rigid age-based progression, its reliance on high-stakes testing, its separation of learning from living, actually does to young minds. This knowledge should be changing everything. In most places, it is changing almost nothing.

Second: What must become possible for Colorado learners in the next decade and what kind of system would actually deliver that. 
Not what test scores should improve. Not what graduation rates should rise. But what capacities, what character, what creativity, what civic and human qualities do we want Colorado’s young people to carry into adulthood — and what combination of vision, leadership, and structural change would make that genuinely possible for every learner, not just those lucky enough to be born into the right zip code?


Who This Is For
This series is designed for Denver and Colorado’s civic leadership. This is intentionally broadly defined.

Elected officials and policy makers, yes. But also business leaders, philanthropists, nonprofit executives, faith leaders, educators, parents, school board members, and civic activists. People who are steeped in education issues and people who love children and community but haven’t found their entry point into this conversation.

What everyone in the room will share is this: a belief that Colorado’s children deserve a future that our current system is not preparing them for, and a willingness to think seriously, and differently, about what it would take to change that.

We are not looking for people who already have the answers. We are looking for people who are genuinely unsettled by the questions, and who are ready to lead.

Colorado has talented, committed people working in and around its schools. What we lack is a shared, forward-looking vision to organize around.  This vision needs to be grounded in what we now know about human learning, oriented toward the future our children will actually inhabit, and supported by a community of leaders with the courage and imagination to pursue it.

This series is an attempt to build that vision and that community.