Almost 11 years ago, when I served on the Denver Board of Education, the board and then-Superintendent Michael Bennet published a lengthy manifesto detailing how we planned to transform and radically improve public education in Denver.
The now-defunct Rocky Mountain News ran an award-winning series of stories about the troubled state of Denver Public Schools, and the large number of Denver families who left the district to send their kids to school elsewhere. So powerful were the series’ conclusions about the district’s shortcomings, and so determined were the board and Bennet to chart a more productive course, that we co-authored a lengthy op-ed article that ran on the last day of the Rocky series.
We pledged to do much better and laid out in some detail how we would go about making needed changes.
“In the coming months and years, we must renew and rejuvenate the educational opportunities available to all of Denver’s children,” we wrote. In somewhat overblown language, we concluded our piece as follows:
“Ten years from now, let them say that Denver was the vanguard for reform in public education. Let them say, 10 years from now, that in Denver we saw what others could not, and laid down our adult burdens to lift up our children. Let them say that a spark flew in Denver that ignited a generation of educators, children, parents, and communities, and gave them courage to abandon the status quo for a shimmering future. We can do this in Denver; it is simply a matter of imagination and will.”
In 2007 our board believed we were starting a revolution. We were going to dramatically change outcomes for Denver students. We were going to construct a new educational system that served students first.
We believed that the goals in our strategic plan, known as the Denver Plan, would close the achievement gap and set a new path forward for all graduates of Denver Public Schools.
I am writing today to tell you that we failed. And, as a city and a school district we are still collectively failing our neediest students.
My conclusion calls into question the conventional wisdom about Denver Public Schools. Over the past decade, under the leadership of Bennet and his successor, Tom Boasberg, DPS has gained a national reputation as a forward-thinking, even visionary school district, which welcomes high-quality charter schools and grants the most deserving of its own schools unprecedented degrees of autonomy from the district bureaucracy. Enrollment has grown and student achievement has improved.
While elements of that sterling national reputation are deserved, and some real gains have occurred, they have been far too slow and inequitable. On perhaps the most critical measure of success, literacy in early elementary schools, low-income and minority students have improved at a much slower rate than their Anglo and higher-income peers. This has caused Denver’s abysmal achievement gaps to grow even wider.
In 2017 64 percent of students who did not qualify for free or reduced lunch were reading and writing at grade level compared to 26 percent of students who qualified for free and reduced lunch, a 38 percent gap. And only one of three low-income third-graders read and write at grade level.
Our aspirations of a decade ago have not been realized. Until and unless Boasberg and the Board of Education take concrete steps to fundamentally change the district to serve its students and schools, real progress will remain elusive. Over time, I have come to doubt whether this is even possible.
We believed we were constructing a new educational system that would more effectively meet the needs of our students. DPS developed detailed, ambitious plans to achieve “a great school system,” by developing great principals, and recruiting and training excellent teachers, and providing those teachers with better career options.
The district also committed to encouraging innovation, allowing greater school autonomy, engaging the community to raise expectations, monitoring school progress, and operating in a more transparent manner.
We failed on all counts. It is incumbent upon the current leadership team to confront these failures and as we noted in the 2007 Rocky op-ed: “in some cases, radically depart from the status quo to remain relevant and useful to the world.”
Ten years later, we need to ask ourselves whether DPS has placed the proper focus on meaningful student achievement, or whether it has focused too much energy on governance models (charter, innovation, traditional)? We need to ask, 10 years later, who, if anyone, is better off as a result of the reforms put in place by the school board on which we served. Students? Teachers? Principals? Communities?
I’d argue, unfortunately, that the correct answer is none of the above.
We felt a sense of urgency back in 2007. Today’s school board and district leadership express that same sense of urgency. But their actions belie their words. The district consistently acts in ways that contradict the board and leadership’s professed beliefs about autonomy and service, by burdening schools of all types with compliance-driven busy-work that stymies real innovation and progress.
The damage this inflicts manifests itself in many ways, with high turnover rates among principals chief among them. In that long-ago Rocky article, we argued, “nothing is more essential to a great school than a great principal.” I still believe this to be true. If a great principal is to use her brilliance to effect meaningful change, however, she must have the freedom to do what she knows is best for her building.
If the district had the principals it sought in place, and freed them to do their jobs with minimal interference, one would expect those principals to stay in their schools to see their efforts bear fruit.
But principal turnover has increased over the past several years. From 2010 to 2011, 20 percent of principals left their jobs. From 2015 to 2016, 23 percent of principals left. Either DPS still hasn’t put in place the principal corps it wants (in which case turnover may be a positive), or those principals grow frustrated by central office interference and move on, to other jobs in DPS or somewhere else (in which case turnover is a major problem).
A similar trend exists with Denver’s teachers. We wrote in 2007 “excellent teaching makes the greatest difference in student learning.” We wanted teachers to have more robust career paths that would keep them in the teaching profession over the long haul, as coaches, trainers, or teacher-leaders.
But teacher turnover rates haven’t changed much over the past decade. Between the 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 school years, 21 percent of teachers left their DPS jobs. Over the past two years, that figure was 22 percent.
This would all be tolerable if, over the past decade, we had seen significant success in closing Denver’s achievement gaps, which remain gaping. Despite DPS’ focus on equity, even as achievement has improved, gaps have remained large, and in some cases, have grown.
DPS deserves recognition for climbing from near the bottom of state rankings of districts into the middle of the pack. But that’s not good enough.
Another way to measure equity is to examine how many students are attending schools rated blue or green — the two highest categories in DPS’ five-level School Performance Framework (SPF).
Here we are using 2016 data. The 2017 SPF is mired in controversy because several researchers and advocacy groups have said DPS inflated results by giving additional weight to early literacy tests.
According to the 2016 SPF, 51 percent of Denver students attend either a blue or green school. But there are large differences based on geography, with more affluent areas having a higher percentage of students in top schools, and lower-income areas lagging behind.
While on-time graduation rates have improved across the board, big gaps exist here as well between white students and students of color, and more affluent and low-income students.
Ten years after the school board and superintendent drove a stake into the ground and vowed to take DPS to a new level, progress remains much too slow. Had we been able, 10 years ago, to peer into the future and see where we are today, we would have been keenly disillusioned.
Current board members, we need you to do better than we did.
I challenge you to make hard and courageous decisions, to critically examine the current system and determine the efficacy of the organization and the updated Denver Plan initiatives.
We need to fundamentally transform a tired system that has not served our most vulnerable students well for generations. It’s far easier to spin the statistics, justify the failures, and over-hype the successes than it is to admit that as a school district and as a community we continue to fail far too many of our children.
Board members, we need you to follow through on the promises from the long-ago Rocky article and “abandon the status quo for a shimmering future.”
I stand ready to support you in pushing the dramatic changes necessary to improve outcomes for all Denver students. I hope you will exhibit the leadership and courage to lead the education revolution Denver needs to truly become the national vanguard for reform in public education.
Theresa Peña was on the Denver Board of Education from 2003 to 2011 and was board chair for five years.
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