It’s no secret that Denver’s latest school board is wreaking havoc on the suite of bold education reforms that the Mile High City was known for over the past two decades. Parker Baxter and Alan Gottlieb recount the sorrowful saga at some length in the latest issue of Education Next.
As they write:
Denver Public Schools’ plunge over three years from one of the nation’s most carefully planned and promising examples of public-education transformation into a district led by a school board in disarray has multiple causes, and there’s plenty of blame to spread around.
Ultimately, however, it is the result of a concerted effort over more than a decade by organized and committed activists, local and national, who have opposed changing the governance and operation of school districts in any significant way.
The reforms now consigned to (or fast heading toward) the scrap heap took multiple shapes, consistent with the basic principle that comprehensiveness is essential if real change is to occur in something as complex and deeply rooted as public education. They focused chiefly on teacher quality (including a much-discussed merit-linked compensation plan), school accountability, and several forms of choice. For a long time—including fourteen years under superintendents Michael Bennet (now U.S. Senator) and Tom Boasberg—they enjoyed steady hands on the tiller and bipartisan support on the board and in the community. That’s strategically important in blue-ing Denver (and Colorado), and is important everywhere if changes are to endure. (Massachusetts was another long-running example of such support that’s beginning to show signs of unraveling.)
School choice took two important forms in Denver. The first was originally imposed by Colorado’s vigorous and early (third in the country) approach to charter schools, which included backup state authorizing of quality charter applicants rejected by districts. Denver resisted chartering at first—and got overruled more than once—but its twenty-first-century charter strategy was positive until the recent turnabout. As a result, Denver has a fine crop of charter schools—nearly sixty of them, attended by more than a fifth of the city’s pupils—including such highly regarded examples as the eight-campus Denver School of Science and Technology. Charters long benefited from a cooperative relationship with the district, including a unified enrollment system and a shared approach to special education. Now, however, the climate is chilling. Chalkbeat reported a year ago that “The Denver school district once represented fertile ground for charter schools. But shifting politics and declining enrollment mean Colorado’s largest school district is becoming less friendly territory for the independent public schools.”