I did not come to public life through ideology. I came through classrooms.
Before politics, I worked alongside students, families, and educators, many of them immigrants like me, navigating a public education system that can be both a ladder and a barrier. My work has always been grounded in two questions: What actually improves outcomes for students? And just as importantly: What are families looking for when they are trying to build a better future for their children and their communities?
That is the lens I bring to this race for state office. And it is also where I sometimes find myself reflecting on how our current political debates are framed.
Because too often, we find ourselves debating systems instead of focusing on outcomes, even as we all recognize that those systems have real challenges and are not working for every family. That’s where I think we have more common ground than we often acknowledge.
In the schools and districts I have worked in, we focused on what research, and experience, consistently show matters: teacher stability and student completion. That meant increasing teacher pay as a retention strategy, not a talking point. When educators stay, students benefit.
It also meant investing in targeted supports, early warning systems, expanded counseling, and culturally responsive family engagement, to improve graduation rates.
And we saw results: higher retention, stronger graduation rates, and deeper trust between schools and families.
But here is the part our politics sometimes struggles to hold: those gains did not come from one model of schooling. They came from expanding options and meeting families where they are.
Because families, especially immigrant families, are not asking ideological questions. They are asking practical ones:
Where will my child feel safe?
Where will they be supported?
Where will they graduate?
Sometimes the answer is the neighborhood school. Sometimes it isn’t. And yet, at the state level, we often frame education policy as a binary choice—particularly when it comes to charter schools.
This is where I believe we have an opportunity to do better.
The truth is simple, even if it is uncomfortable: charter schools are not a monolith. Some are delivering strong outcomes, especially for historically underserved students. Others are not. The same is true of traditional public schools.
So the responsibility of state leadership is not to defend a system. It is to ensure quality, accountability, and results, across all schools.
In community meetings, in school hallways, in conversations with parents, I hear the same thing again and again: We just want a good school.
Not a label. Not a system. A good school.
And as a state leader, that has to be the standard we organize around.
That means holding all schools, traditional and charter, to high expectations. It means investing in what works. And it means being willing to act when schools, of any type, are not delivering for students.
It also means moving beyond false choices.
We can hold two truths at once:
Traditional public schools are foundational to our education system and must be fully funded and supported.
Families, including immigrant families, benefit from having access to multiple high-quality options, including charter schools, when those options deliver results.
This is not a contradiction. It is a commitment to reality.
There is also a deeper issue, one that shapes who gets to lead.
As an immigrant candidate, I have felt the pressure to stay within predefined political boundaries. To represent my community, but only in ways that align with existing narratives.
But leadership requires something different. It requires the willingness to speak to complexity and to hold space for nuance, even when it would be easier not to.
Because at the center of this debate are not systems. They are students.
Students who deserve teachers who stay.
Students who deserve to graduate.
Students who deserve schools that work for them.
If we are serious about equity at the state level, we have to be serious about outcomes. That means building an education system that is accountable to results—and responsive to the families it serves.
And if we start from that shared understanding, from that common ground, we can build something better together.
That is the work I am committed to. And that is why I am running.
Anne Keke, PhD, is a Aurora Public Schools board director and a Democratic primary candidate for House District 41.