“ board votes to close 13 school buildings.”

“ to close 7 schools, cut grades at 3 others despite heavy resistance.”

“: These are the SFUSD schools facing closure.” 

Such reports can leave the impression that districts are rapidly closing schools in response to declining enrollment and families leaving for charters, private schools and homeschooling. 

But the data tells a different story. 

School closures have actually declined over the past decade, a period of financial instability that only increased in the aftermath of the pandemic, according to research from the Brookings Institution. 

The , shared exclusively with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, shows that in 2014-15, the closure rate — the share of schools nationwide that were open one year and closed the next — was 1.3%. In 2023-24, the rate was just .8%, up from .7% the year before.

“I think it’s important for people to realize how rare school closures are,” said Sofoklis Goulas, a Brookings fellow and the study’s author. 

Last fall, showed how schools that have lost at least 20% of their enrollment since the pandemic are more likely to be low-performing. The Clark County Public Schools, which includes Las Vegas, had the most schools on the list — 19 — but isn’t currently considering closures. In Philadelphia, with 12 schools in that category, district leaders are to discuss closures.

When it released Goulas’s initial report, of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute argued that low-performing schools should be the first to close. But efforts to do so are often met with pushback from families, teachers and advocacy groups who argue that shutting down schools unfairly harms poor and minority students and contributes to neighborhood blight. Their pleas often push district leaders to retreat. Working in advocates’ favor, experts say, is the fact that many big district leaders are untested and have never had to navigate the emotionally charged waters of closing schools.

“Closing a neighborhood school is probably one of the most difficult decisions a district’s board makes,” said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a California state agency that provides financial oversight to districts. “They are going to avoid that decision as long as they can and at all costs.” 

Such examples aren’t hard to find:

• Just weeks after announcing closures, the San Francisco district to shutter any schools this fall.

• In September, outgoing Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez pledged to for another two years, even though state law allows the city to take action sooner. The district is in the process of absorbing to keep them from closing. 

• In October, Pittsburgh Public Schools ; several others were set to be relocated and reconfigured. About a month later, Superintendent Wayne Walters hit pause, saying the district needed more “thoughtful planning” and community input.

• Last May, the Seattle Public Schools it would shutter 20 elementary schools next school year in response to a $100 million-plus budget deficit. They later increased the number to 21. By October, the list had dwindled to four schools. Just before Thanksgiving, Superintendent Brent Jones entirely. 

“This decision allows us to clarify the process, deepen our understanding of the potential impacts, and thoughtfully determine our next steps,” to families. While the plan would have saved the district $5.5 million, he said, “These savings should not come at the cost of dividing our community.”

Graham Hill Elementary in Seattle, which fifth grader Wren Alexander has attended since kindergarten, was initially on the list. The Title I school sits on top of a hill in a desirable area overlooking Lake Washington. But it also draws students from the lower-income, highly diverse Brighton Park neighborhood.

Among Wren’s neighbors are students from Ethiopia, Vietnam and Guatemala. Wren, who moves on to middle school this fall, said she looks forward to visiting her former teachers and cried when she heard Graham Hill might close. She wanted her younger brother and sister to develop the same warm connection she had.

“I don’t think I would be who I am if I didn’t go to the school,” she said.

Tricia Alexander, her mother, was among those who opposed the closures, participating in outside the district’s administration building and before board meetings.

“We were really loud,” said Alexander, who’s also part of , an effort to advocate for more state education funding. She said there was “no real evidence” that closing schools would have solved the district’s budget woes. “In no way would kids win.”

±őłÙ’s shared by many school finance experts, who note that the bulk of school funding is tied up in salaries, not facility costs. Districts may save some money from closing schools, but unless coupled with staff reductions, it’s often not enough to make up for large budget shortfalls.  

‘So bad at this’

If enrollment doesn’t pick up, experts say, leaders who delay closures will have to confront the same issues a year later or — perhaps even more likely — pass the problems on to their successors. 

“If there continues to be fewer and fewer children 
then that doesn’t get better,” said Brian Eschbacher, an enrollment consultant.  

One Chicago high school, for example, had just last year. In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest district, 34 elementary schools have fewer than 200 students and 29 of those are using less than half of the building, according to a recent . The share of U.S. students being educated outside of traditional schools also continues to increase, according to a forthcoming analysis Goulas conducted with researchers at Yale University. 

“We don’t see a trajectory of enrollment recovery,” he said. “Things actually got worse in the most recently released data batch.”

But such conditions haven’t stopped advocacy groups from campaigning against closures. One of them, the left-leaning Advancement Project, has joined with local groups in Denver and Pittsburgh to make a case against closures nationally. 

“All children deserve to have a local, neighborhood public school in which they and their families have a say,” said Jessica Alcantara, senior attorney for the group’s Opportunity to Learn program. “±őłÙ’s not just that school closures are hard on families. They harm the full education ecosystem that makes up a school — students, families, school staff and whole communities.”   

Last May, Alcantara and other Advancement Project staff urged the U.S. Department of Education to treat school closures as a civil rights issue. Nine of the 10 schools the Denver district in 2022 had a majority Black or Hispanic student population. 

The advocates argued that in cases of enrollment loss, run-down facilities and empty classrooms, there are alternatives to closing schools. They to push for renovations and urge district leaders to use vacant spaces for STEM, arts or other programs that might attract families. Opponents of closures also say that districts sometimes underestimate how much of a building is used for non-classroom purposes like special education services, early-childhood programs and mental health. 

Eschbacher’s assessment of why districts often back down from closing schools is more blunt. 

“Districts are so bad at this,” he said. “If you just do a few things wrong, it could sink the whole effort.”

For one, leaders often target schools with under 300 students for closure, appealing to parents that they can’t afford to staff them with arts programs, a school nurse or a librarian. 

But those explanations sometimes fall flat.

“Parents always say, ‘I wanted a small school. I know my teachers and they know my kid. And it’s right down the street,’” Eschbacher said. If they didn’t like their school, he added, they would have likely would have chosen a charter or some other option. 

District officials also run into trouble if they try to spin the data. When Seattle officials talked about “right-sizing” the district, to the loss of 4,900 students since 2019-20. 

But Albert Wong, a parent in the district and a lifelong Seattle resident, knew there was more to the story. Not only is the current enrollment higher than it was from 2000 to 2011, the pandemic-related decline seems to have . In a , he argued that officials presented misleading data “to make current enrollment look exceptionally bad.”

Graham Hill Elementary, fifth-grader Wren’s school, actually saw a slight increase in enrollment this year, including a new class for preschoolers with disabilities. And while Pittsburgh schools are another 5,000 students over the next six years, enrollment this year held steady at .

To Eschbacher, the “burden of proof is always on the district” to make an airtight case for why students would be better off in larger schools. He has applauded the Denver-area Jeffco Public Schools, which has schools since 2021, for having , not just district officials, explain population trends to families at community meetings.

‘It wasn’t realistic’

Walters, Pittsburgh’s superintendent, can easily rattle off reasons why the district should rethink how it uses its buildings. Early last year, showed that almost half of the district’s schools were less than 50% full. 

“We’ve lost about a fourth of our population, but we have not changed anything to our footprint,” he said. 

Meanwhile, the average age of the district’s buildings is 90 years old, and many lack , forcing some schools to send students home in sweltering weather.

But a consulting group’s showed that Black and low-income students and those with disabilities would be disproportionately affected by the changes. Several drew attention to those disparities, calling  the effort “rushed.” 

Walters agreed and put the plan on hold last fall, saying he lacked “robust” responses to parents’ tough questions about how schools would change for their kids.

“It doesn’t mean that we don’t see a path forward,” he said. “But it wasn’t realistic that we would have those questions answered within the timeline that we’ve been given.”

In March, parents pushed for , causing the school board to postpone a vote on the next phase in the closure process.

As the Jeffco district demonstrates, some school systems are following through with closures. The school board in nearby Denver unanimously voted in November to close seven schools and downsize three more. 

But that’s after community protests pushed the district to put on a plan to close 19 schools in 2021. Advocates argued that families in low-income areas, who had been heavily impacted by the pandemic, would be most affected. Then the district only in 2023, and now board members are considering on closures for three years.

School boards closing a dozen or more schools are often catching up with work their predecessors let pile up, said Goulas of Brookings. 

“Closing a single school allows for easier placement of students and minimizes the political cost and community stress,” he said. “When a district releases a long list of schools to close, it likely indicates that they waited for conditions to improve, but this didn’t happen.”

Angel Gober, executive director of 412 Justice — one of 16 organizations that called on the Pittsburgh district to drop its plan — acknowledged that their fight isn’t over.

“I think we got a temporary blessing from God,” she said. But she wants the district to explore a host of alternatives, like community schools and corporate support, before it shutters and sells off buildings. “We do have very old infrastructure, and that is an equity issue. But can we try five things before we make a drastic decision to close schools for forever?”

Adding to the legal challenges over the U.S. Department of Education’s efforts to rid schools of DEI, 19 Democrat-led states sued Friday over an April 3 “dear colleague” letter.  

The threat to withhold funding if states don’t sign what the complaint calls “a novel and unlawful certification” would be “catastrophic for plaintiff states’ students from kindergarten through high school,” the attorneys general wrote.

Collectively, the Democrat-led states stand to lose almost $14 billion, including Title I money for low-income schools and funds for students with disabilities. The complaint asks a federal district court in Massachusetts to declare the April 3 letter unlawful and prevent the department from taking any action based on its interpretation of anti-discrimination laws and the Supreme Court decision that ended racial preferences in college admissions.

States and school districts resisting a U.S. Department of Education ultimatum regarding diversity, equity and inclusion got a temporary reprieve Thursday. Two federal judges — one in and another in the — blocked the department’s ability to withhold federal funding from those that didn’t to its interpretation of non-discrimination laws or agree to end what officials called “impermissible” DEI programs.

A third judge in suspended for now a Feb. 14 “” letter warning districts against racial diversity efforts. The deadline to sign a form certifying compliance was Thursday.

States and districts are “no longer under the immediate threat” of losing funds if they “continue to offer long-standing lawful programs or don’t sign” the form, said Katrina Feldkamp, assistant counsel at the Legal Defense Fund. Representing the NAACP, the law firm is among several groups, including unions, school districts and advocacy groups, involved in three separate lawsuits over the department’s anti-DEI guidance. 

In a statement, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers — part of the Maryland case — called the court’s ruling “a huge win for students, families and educators.” 

The department’s follow-up on Feb. 28 appeared to soften officials’ stance on practices it considers illegal, saying cultural and historical observances were acceptable as long as all students were welcome to participate. But the certification requirement took a firm tone, cautioning states that they could face substantial financial penalties if they sign it and are then found to be in violation. 

“The court finds that threatening penalties under those legal provisions without sufficiently defining the conduct that might trigger liability violates the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on vagueness,” Judge Dabney Friedrich of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said in her oral ruling granting a preliminary injunction. The department’s documents, she said, “placed a particular emphasis on certain DEI practices without providing an actual definition of what constitutes DEI or DEI practice.”

At the time of publication 12 states, including Arizona, Arkansas and Montana, and the District of Columbia, had signed the certification. Twenty-two, including California, Michigan and New Mexico, declined to sign, and 17 either hadn’t announced their decision or did not respond to calls or emails from ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. Madi Biedermann, spokeswoman for the Education Department, said she didn’t know if officials would share the full count of states complying. She didn’t respond to a request for comment on the court rulings. 

Signing the form indicates compliance with Title VI, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin, as well as the department’s view of a 2023 Supreme Court ruling against racial preferences in higher education admissions. 

State chiefs who didn’t sign argued that the Education Department didn’t clearly define DEI and ignored proper procedures for collecting such information. Overall, the documents have left leaders bewildered over whether they stand to lose millions in federal funds. In Denver Public Schools, for example, roughly $36 million in Title I funds for high-poverty schools and another $20 million for special education services are at stake. Like state chiefs in several other blue states, Colorado’s Susana CĂłrdova to sign the document. 

“I think all districts across the country are forced to grapple with this question of ‘What would you do without it?’ ” said Chuck Carpenter, chief financial officer.

Title I funds in his district, Colorado’s largest, cover salaries for school social workers, help to reduce class sizes and support interventions for students who are behind academically. 

“These are very much on-the-ground expenses,” he said. “This doesn’t get caught up in the bureaucracy. This is for real kids and real people.”

Several GOP state chiefs welcomed the department’s message. Arizona state Superintendent Tom Horne , “Thank you for fighting for our Constitution and laws!” along with his signature. Oklahoma chief Ryan Walters posted of himself at his desk signing the form. 

“No DEI in Oklahoma schools,” he said. “We will talk about merit and American exceptionalism, and we’ll have the best school system possible, thanks to President Trump.”

While some state and district leaders likely viewed the form as a “box to check,” others may see it as “provocation,” said Jackie Wernz, a civil rights attorney and consultant who worked in both the Obama and first Trump administrations.

“The department’s shifting guidance in recent months has created a lot of confusion in the field,” she said. “±őłÙ’s not always clear whether this is a legal compliance issue or a political messaging moment.”

Even some critics of DEI agree. Steven Wilson, a senior fellow at the free market-oriented Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research in Boston, argues that many schools, including high-performing charter networks, went astray by embracing anti-racist teaching approaches. 

He pointed, for example, to author that “worship of the written word” is evidence of white supremacy and framing around social justice issues. 

“These teachings are enormously destructive,” said Wilson, who founded the Ascend charter school network in Brooklyn, New York. “I would be hard pressed to think of a more damaging message to impart to teachers of Black and brown children than that the worship of the written word is whiteness.” 

But Wilson views the department’s threat to federal funding as equally harmful. “The audacity” of tying the compliance form to funding for programs that serve students in poverty and those with disabilities, he said “has to be vigorously contested.” 

‘Historically underserved’

Title I, the biggest federal education program, totals over $18 billion. Part of the 1960s War on Poverty, it has “really been a cornerstone of federal funding in K-12 for the better part of a century,” said Jess Gartner, founder of Allovue, a school finance technology company that’s now part of PowerSchool. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, currently funded at $15 billion, came a decade later in 1975. 

Officials can’t withhold those funds with “a wave of the hand and a strike of the pen” or because “someone won’t sign a form,” Gartner said. “There is for reporting, investigating and determining that discrimination has actually occurred.” 

In 2023, under former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, the department withheld federal funds from Maine for not meeting state testing requirements. But that was after two years of being out of compliance, and officials the state could reserve for administrative costs — not the money that goes to schools.

The Trump administration has demonstrated that it will abruptly cancel funding that has already been approved by Congress. That’s why finance officers like Carpenter in Denver are on edge about how the department will respond to states that didn’t sign the form. 

Title I funding supports about half of the Denver district’s 207 schools, where immigrant and non-English-speaking parents especially rely on liaisons like Boni Sanchez Florez. He helps them access after-school classes, mental health services and low-cost internet. But  Florez also encourages them to take leadership roles and speak up about issues that affect their children, like .

“It’s hard enough for them to walk in a building with a staff that is predominantly 80% white. How do you build that trust in a community that doesn’t trust the system?” asked Florez, who moved to the U.S. from Mexico as a child. “If I’m in my dad’s shoes 30 years ago, I would want people to reach out to me.”

Nearby in Jeffco Public Schools, Colorado’s second largest district, roughly 100 staff members are directly paid with Title I funds, said Tara Peña, chief of family partnerships and community engagement. They include three “family ambassadors” who work out of a mobile welcome center — a customized bus that hosts enrollment fairs, book giveaways and what Peña called “goodwill events.”

The welcome center staff signs families up for Medicaid or free lunch programs and teams up with other community groups to distribute school and hygiene supplies.

“A loss in federal funding would be very destructive and be very impactful to the supports and the services that we provide to our most vulnerable students,” Peña said. “The students who’ve been historically underserved would continue to be the ones that would be harmed.” 

‘Four years?’

The potential cuts to funding also come as districts across the country are finalizing their budgets for the upcoming school year, with federal funds in mind. Before McMahon announced the certification requirement on April 3, most had already issued contracts for staff for this fall. 

In California, which receives over $2 billion in Title I funds and almost $1.6 billion from IDEA, the deadline to issue any layoff notices was March 15. 

That means districts would still be obligated to pay employees whose salaries come from those sources “whether they get funding or don’t,” said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a state agency responsible for financial oversight of districts. “Districts did not contemplate such a loss before the March 15 layoff window.”

Districts in Michigan, another state that declined to sign the form, are in the same predicament. For now, the Detroit Public Schools Community District — where roughly 25% of the budget comes from federal sources — has committed to not letting any employees go. But Jeremy Vidito, chief financial officer, said that could just be a temporary solution if the department fully cuts Title I. 

“Maybe we can bridge two years with our fund balance. But four years? There’s no way,” he said. “It will mean school closures. It will mean reduced services for our kids and walking back the intervention programs.”

With a student poverty rate of  more than 80%, the nearly $125 million Detroit receives in Title I funding pays for counselors, social workers, and art and music teachers, as well as  high school administrators who are focused on keeping ninth graders on track for graduation. 

For LaQuitta Brown’s son Kermari, a 7 year old with autism, art has been especially important. He struggled to speak until last year, but he could communicate with his mother by drawing pictures, Brown said. Through special education, he receives speech and occupational therapy. His mother also depends on a mobile vision screening program for his checkups.

“He wouldn’t be where he would be without those services,” she said. “It takes a village, especially when you have a child needing special attention.”

Title I also supports high-dosage tutoring in Detroit, one of the reasons, Vidito said, why the district outperformed most other large, urban systems in a from researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities. Last school year, the district also saw in reading than the state as a whole.

“We are seeing results,” he said. “We have committed to educating all kids, but if we start to defund education, then we’re stepping back from that commitment.”

Most right-leaning think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, welcome the department’s certification requirement and its interpretation of the decision. 

That opinion didn’t mention K-12 schools, but it has “broad implications for the use of racial preferences in public education services at the K-12 and postsecondary levels,” said Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “The majority opinion and supporting opinions deal with rooting out racism writ large from education.” 

But Wilson at the Pioneer Institute said the AFT lawsuit is “one of those relatively rare moments” of agreement he has with AFT President Randi Weingarten. She said the anti-DEI directives would hamper schools’ efforts to teach accurate history, including the harms of slavery and persecution of minority groups. 

“If that is what [the department] has in mind as a federal prohibition, that would be devastating.” he said. Trump, is “claiming, rather flamboyantly, to devolve education back to the states while announcing this unprecedented intrusion into what schools and districts may teach.”

ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s Mark Keierleber contributed to this story.

As an underlying technology, AI does seem different — more conversational, more flexible, more powerful. Most notably, past ed tech products have relied on multiple-choice tests that don’t always accurately assess a student’s understanding of different concepts. Now, AI can analyze and react to open-ended student responses, helping to boost critical thinking skills and deepen comprehension. In addition, AI provides real-time visibility into each student’s performance so teachers can be more strategic with classroom discussions.

Here are three guiding principles to help educators be rigorous when selecting AI tools to pilot and scale as they lean into this new chapter of teaching:

First, rather than look to develop an “AI strategy,” district leaders should create a strategy for teaching and learning and use AI to power specific aspects of it. They should start by identifying goals and priorities, then ask: What can AI do to help our district achieve them?

In both our districts, the most urgent focus was increasing student achievement. To help schools achieve this goal and narrow down potential tools from the on the market, district leaders centered objectives on implementing high-quality instructional materials, increasing teacher effectiveness and improving student engagement and well-being.

Our districts landed on that creates high-quality, interactive experiences for students with personalized feedback and support to deepen their understanding of the curriculum. It also directs educators’ attention in real time to the students who most need help. By combining the power of top-rated curricula and AI, teachers can embed intervention-type support into core instruction.

Second, ed tech providers should design their tools with teachers, students and district leaders, not just for them. Part of the reason educators have not gotten needed quality and usability out of products in their schools is that vendors exclude teachers and students from the development process.

A big part of why teachers and students in our districts are enthusiastic about this is that educators were able to offer feedback directly to ed tech company leaders who regularly visited our schools — and then implemented that feedback. This fall, Sumner County teachers asked to make the AI writing support more bite-sized, giving students an initial score, one piece of feedback at a time and the ability to revise their writing multiple times and update their grade. A Denver Public School leader asked whether AI could identify the most common misconceptions students were having in class, which led to an expanding suite of real-time analysis tools. Students asked for more clarity into their progress at each step, more celebrations and the ability to customize their experience.

Because every voice was valued and the solutions evolved to meet stakeholders’ needs, both student achievement in English Language Arts and teacher satisfaction have increased. In Sumner County, the six schools using the tool have shown significantly more progress on their English assessments than the six schools not using it, and 90% of teachers reported that the product made their jobs easier and more enjoyable.

Third, educators must break the ed tech habit of having students work silently on their own personalized pathways with headsets on and without interacting with their classmates. Instead, AI should emphasize the and foster connection, inclusion and discourse. 

At our districts, a top priority is the effective implementation of high-quality instructional materials. While various schools have chosen different, top-rated curricula, they share a vision of classrooms with rich and interesting texts, student writing and lots of discussion both in small groups and the full class. District leaders want AI products that bring schools closer to this vision. Rather than dedicating 20 minutes a day to a supplemental, skills-based tool that students work on silently, teachers should have tools that make collaboration easier and give students more confidence to bring their insights into full-class discussions. 

AI brings new possibilities for better ed tech, but schools will realize this potential only if district leaders lean into this moment, guided by their goals and values. If they do, they can create future-ready schools that prioritize transformative student outcomes and human connection.

is at a historic low. and the rapid expansion of private school choice are causing widespread declines in enrollment and . The need to improve and expand educational opportunities is more urgent than ever.

A proven transformation strategy exists. Denver Public Schools’s pre-pandemic approach to educational improvement student achievement. The system was facing many of the districts across the country are now struggling with: financial instability, low performance and declining enrollment. It required rethinking and redesigning the very role of a school district. And it worked. 

The latest from the University of Colorado Denver’s Center for Education Policy Analysis provides clear, empirical evidence that Denver’s transformation of its public schools between 2008 and 2019 caused large gains in student achievement citywide, including for children the district has historically failed to serve. The study shows that significant, sustained, systemwide improvements in learning are possible, including in large school systems with high levels of student need. 

When Denver launched its reforms in 2007, it was in the bottom 5th percentile of all districts in the state. Its four-year graduation rate was 39%. After a decade of reform, the district rose to above the 60th percentile and raised its graduation rate above 70%.

The new study found that students overall who experienced two years of reform received the equivalent of six months to two years of additional schooling. Over five years, those benefits jumped to between 18 and three years of additional learning. Black and Latino students received at least an additional two years, and English learners got an average of an extra 18 months in math. 

By evaluating the improvements of students who started school in the district before the reforms began and continued to attend while they were in place, we demonstrate that these improvements were not due to changes in demographics, but are the direct results of the reforms. Their annual effects grew as they were implemented over time and more widely. Each year of reform produced larger effects than the year before. The longer students were enrolled in the district during the reforms, the more they benefited. 

These effects on student learning were significant and to those resulting from post-Hurricane Katrina school improvements in New Orleans.

So how did the district do it?  

Denver fundamentally altered the role and structure of its local school system, shifting away from a rigid, centralized institutional approach toward a more flexible and responsive model based on adaptation, differentiation and continuous improvement. 

Under the of now-Sen. Michael Bennet and former Superintendent Tom Boasberg, the district confronted decades of low performance with a shift to a portfolio model to encourage choice for families, empowerment for educators and accountability for performance.

Every year from 2008 until 2019, the district evaluated all schools, issued public requests for proposals for new schools from internal and external providers, and implemented a process for intervening in persistently low-performing schools through closures, replacements and district-led school turnarounds.

The reforms implemented in Denver mark that an elected school board voluntarily relinquished the exclusive power to operate schools within its boundaries while maintaining its authority to govern all schools in the district. In doing so, the district rejected the traditional model of singularity in favor of one built for multiplicity.

Denver’s portfolio district strategy included:

• A systemwide focus on ensuring for all students through a common enrollment system while allowing for flexibility and innovation in how education is delivered;
  
• A framework for public reporting and accountability with a common set of performance metrics for all schools;
  
• A consistent enrollment and expulsion system;
  
• A strategic focus on attracting and developing effective teachers and school leaders by on new and and holding them accountable for .
  
• A flexible funding model that allocates dollars based on student need;
  
• An annual process for evaluating schools, intervening in persistently low performers with internal and external partners, closing schools when necessary and replacing them with new ones;
  
• Support for , between traditional public schools and public charter schools and decentralized authority with shared responsibility between school and district leaders for the success of all students.

Perhaps the most important lesson from Denver’s transformation is about the possibility of improvement and the need for leadership. The district still faces many challenges, but public education there is dramatically better in terms of measurable student learning because of its decade of reform. 

Today, as school systems nationwide grapple with challenges similar to those of the Mile High City in the early 2000s, Denver’s experience offers a proven alternative to the traditional model. Denver’s approach remains one of the most controversial, consequential, comprehensive and longest-lasting school reform initiatives in U.S. history. Its success illustrates that with vision, commitment and a willingness to innovate, districts can create dynamic educational opportunities that enable all children to learn more and do better academically.

Transformative change does not come easily, but Denver’s example shows that dramatic improvement is possible.

In school libraries and cavernous auditoriums, the Denver school board on Monday began a week of listening to students, parents, and teachers in 10 schools facing possible closure.

What they heard was emotional at times.

“This is the first school I’ve ever been in where I have not seen a single instance of bullying,” Robin Yokel, an English language arts teacher at Denver School of Innovation and Sustainable Design, told board members.

“It is heartbreaking to see us continue to put lip service toward ‘students first’ and make choices that are not students first — they are finances first. Our students deserve better than that.”

Superintendent Alex Marrero last week in Denver Public Schools. The school board is set to vote Nov. 21 on whether to follow through with the closures.

Denver School of Innovation and Sustainable Design, International Academy of Denver at Harrington, Castro Elementary, Columbian Elementary, Palmer Elementary, Schmitt Elementary, and West Middle School are up for closure.

Kunsmiller Creative Arts Academy, Dora Moore ECE-8 School, and Denver Center for International Studies would be partially closed if the board votes yes.

The school meetings Monday stood in contrast to — a proposal . The meetings in 2022 were run by mid-level district administrators. Last-minute scheduling and overlapping meetings meant school board members were sometimes there and sometimes not. Parents’ questions were often met with “I don’t know.”

The engagement this time is similarly short, with just two weeks between Marrero’s recommendation and the board’s vote, drawing familiar criticism about a rushed process. But district officials described the process as improved.

to visit two schools per day over five days, accompanied by top administrators. Each school will have four meeting times: one in the morning during student dropoff, one over the lunch hour, one in the afternoon during pickup, and an evening public comment session.

Yet despite more robust planning, some of the sessions Monday were sparsely attended.

The board visited International Academy of Denver at Harrington, an elementary school in near northeast Denver, and DSISD, as it’s known, a high school in the central part of the city. The level of engagement differed at each school. ±őłÙ’s a trend that will likely continue this week as some school communities mobilize to fight back, while others, resigned, look toward next steps.

DSISD is the smallest school on the closure list with just 60 students. Dozens of parents, students, and teachers described it as “the best kept secret in DPS,” “a once-in-a-lifetime school,” and a safe haven for LGBTQ and neurodiverse students.

“The amount of bullying that my child and many others have faced in a regular DPS school is heartbreaking,” parent Susan Klopman told board members gathered in the school’s library, her voice wavering as she began to cry, “and it’s not happened here.”

She and others said they understand that it’s hard for the district to keep a school open with so few students, especially since Denver funds its schools per pupil and backfills the budgets of schools with low enrollment. But they questioned whether the monetary savings of closing DSISD, which is located inside another school that will remain open, is worth the human cost.

“Some of us just literally won’t make it in larger schools,” said freshman Owen Bucca.

Over the lunch hour at Harrington, more than a dozen teachers filtered in and out of the bright school library, where three board members sat waiting for them.

The teachers asked why their school was chosen for closure. Harrington, they said, does an excellent job serving a high-priority population. Fifteen percent of the students are Black, 70% are Latino, and nearly half are learning English as a second language.

Based on its state test scores, Harrington is rated yellow, or “improvement,” which is higher than some of the surrounding elementary schools. It was also an early adopter of “science of reading” literacy curriculum that the district is only now rolling out to other schools.

“These students are thriving,” said fifth grade teacher Kristen Smith, who has taught at Harrington for 10 years. “Is it worth it to allow them to have a small school?”

The board members’ answer was financial. When Denver schools have fewer than 215 students, the district helps pay for the basics. At 122 students, Harrington is one of those schools, receiving more than $600,000 in additional funding this year, according to district data. (DSISD received about $868,000. DPS’s total budget is about $1.5 billion.)

That money, board member Michelle Quattlebaum told the teachers, “has to come from somewhere.” For the past few years, federal pandemic relief funds, known as ESSER dollars, helped buoy the district’s budget. But that funding dried up in September.

“There are not enough students in the building to sustain what you’re doing here,” Quattlebaum said. “For the past few years, to make that happen, your school leader had to apply for budget assistance. Guess where it came from? ESSER dollars. Guess what we no longer have? ESSER dollars.”

She added, “±őłÙ’s not fair. And if I can just be honest, it just sucks. These are hard conversations. They’re hard and difficult things to experience. But please know — please, please know — this is not just about the numbers. We recognize this is impacting people.”

While board members said the morning session at Harrington was better attended, no one from the school came to the afternoon meeting. The only person who signed up to speak at the evening public comment was a parent from another school.

The board will hold a larger public comment meeting on all of the recommended closures on Nov. 18, three days before the vote.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at

ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ and the Progressive Policy Institute’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project recently convened this online panel on Denver and the future of education reform. The speakers include Colorado State Senator James Coleman; Alex Magana, head of Beacon Network Schools; State Rep. Jennifer Bacon; and Nate Easley, former Board Chair of Denver Public Schools. 

Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s newsletter to be the first to hear about future events.

Recent coverage of education reform and innovation from ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ:

• Campus Road Trip Diary: 8 Things We Learned This Year About America’s Most Innovative High Schools
• Conor Williams: Wait. Did Education Reform Just Become Inescapable?
• ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Interview: Cara Fitzpatrick on ‘The Death of Public School’
• Opinion: Charters Are the Most Popular Form of School Choice. Democrats Must Get on Board

Denver Public Schools leaders highlight how they plan to transition armed police officers back into everyday life for students and staff, among other changes, in the .

Throughout the next school year, DPS will bring armed police, known as school resource officers, back to its campuses after the district’s school board voted 4-3 on the policy earlier this year. Members who voted against the policy emphasized how having armed police in schools , which is why the board originally took SROs out of the district in 2020.

Superintendent Alex Marrero will have discretion to remove SROs who do not follow district policy, and the district plans to monitor citations and arrests to determine if marginalized individuals are disproportionately interacting with officers. Marrero where they were stationed this spring.

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The new safety plan follows multiple instances of gun violence in the district this year, particularly an incident , when a student shot two administrators. The DPS Board of Education the next day held an emergency meeting. The members unanimously voted to temporarily bring back armed police officers to schools and directed Marrero to create a long-term safety plan.

Scott Pribble, a spokesperson for the district, said that over the next school year, families will see more mental health resources and support in addition to the return of school resource officers at the district’s secondary schools. Staff will also undergo additional safety training throughout the summer, and the district will conduct safety audits.

In an effort to increase accountability for SROs, the board will review data on citations and arrests quarterly and will need to approve them.

Interpreting the policy

The plan is broken down into three focus areas: personal conditions, school conditions, and system conditions. It highlights the current state of a variety of safety practices and protocols across the district and sets goals for what it hopes the future will look like for each tool used to improve safety.

Personal conditions include the mental, social, emotional, physical and behavioral health and safety of each person within the district, as the district wants to provide support that can help each student and staff member feel safe.

“DPS recognizes that addressing youth violence and student safety requires a proactive and preventative approach,” the plan says.

School conditions look at how those in each building work to create a safe and welcoming environment. Each school will also have an individual safety operational plan and a school emergency team, as well as regularly conducted safety audits.

“When creating these school conditions, DPS seeks to foster caring, consistent relationships among both individuals and groups, including students, educators and families,” the plan says. “Relationships like these promote resilience, serve to protect people, and reduce the impact of chronic or acute stress, ultimately creating school buildings where all people and the community can thrive.”

The system conditions portion of the plan looks at systems both within the school community and outside that impact school and student safety. Here the plan outlines the possibility of adding weapons detection systems, which will be decided on a school-to-school basis, youth violence prevention at the elementary school level, community hubs, and the importance of out-of-school engagement.

“The issues throughout the neighborhoods are also reverberated in the schools throughout the district,” the plan reads. “DPS takes an active role in partnering with the City of Denver, parents, students and community members to help address many of the issues; However DPS is constantly evaluating different ways we can support not only the learning environment of our students, but also the individual support systems of our students.”

The next step in implementing the plan is for Marrero to draft a “reasonal interpretation,” which the district spokesperson said is the superintendent’s understanding of how he will be evaluated by the board in carrying out the policies they approved. Then specific goals and metrics for measuring success will be developed with the board from there.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on and .

Six Colorado news outlets, including Newsline, are suing Denver Public Schools to gain access a recording of the district board’s in which board members discussed school safety plans and emerged with a new policy.

Members of the district’s Board of Education held a special meeting following a shooting last month at Denver’s East High School, which left two administrators injured. The incident was the on or near East High property in as many months, and the 17-year-old suspect was later found dead in Park County of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Board members spent the majority of the lengthy meeting behind closed doors, and upon returning to the public, voted unanimously to without any public discussion.

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Under Colorado’s Open Meetings Law, elected bodies such as school boards cannot make decisions on new policies or legislation out of the public eye. There are some exceptions that allow for closed-door executive sessions, including board consultations for legal advice, discussions on personnel matters and on individual students. Topics listed for discussion at the March 23 executive session included “security arrangements or investigations” related to the March 22 shooting, and details about individual students “where public disclosure would adversely affect that person or persons involved.”

The lawsuit’s plaintiffs include Newsline, The Denver Post, Colorado Politics/The Denver Gazette, KDVR Fox 31, Chalkbeat Colorado and KUSA 9News. Each of the news outlets filed a Colorado Open Records Request for the executive session recording and were all denied.

Rachael Johnson, an attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Steve Zansberg, a First Amendment attorney and president of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, are representing the coalition of news outlets. Zansberg said of the Colorado Sunshine Law.

Zansberg said the first issue the complaint addresses is the lack of proper notice regarding what board members would discuss behind closed doors. He said Colorado law says that when a public body fails to adequately announce its topic of discussion, the meeting is considered an “unlawfully closed public meeting,” not an executive session.

“They just went behind closed doors and discussed public business,” Zansberg said.

Even if the board properly announced the topics of discussion for a lawful executive session, Zansberg said the fact that board members left the five-hour discussion with a policy change and no public discussion is a blatant vilation of Colorado’s Open Meetings Law.

If there is probable cause to believe that a publicly elected board made a decision in an executive session, a judge will review the recording of the session and determine if this was the case, Zansberg said. Public bodies in Colorado are prohibited from adopting not just new policies, but any position on an issue behind closed doors.

“It was what the case law says was ‘a rubber stamping’ of a decision that had already been made behind closed doors, and that too violates the Open Meetings Law,” Zansberg said.

A ‘tremendous amount of public interest’

Jeff Roberts, executive director of CFOIC, said there was an expectation that board members would have a public discussion following the private meeting where they discussed a high-profile situation with consequences for the entire district. He said there has been a “tremendous amount of public interest” in school safety plans and changes around school resource officers.

“Both the open meetings law, and there’s a separate statute about school board meetings, both of them say policy decisions are not permitted in executive sessions,” Roberts said. “For executive sessions, there are certain authorized topics that they can discuss behind closed doors, but when they’re talking about changing a policy, which is what they did here, that’s something that needs to be done in a public setting. That’s the intent and the spirit of these laws.”

The only time an executive session is not to be recorded is when an elected body receives specific legal advice from an attorney. DPS’s general counsel, Aaron Thompson, was present in the executive session, but it’s unclear what role he played in the board’s discussion and if there is a recording of the private portion of the meeting.

The minutes from the executive session also on how long board members discussed each topic, another requirement of state law.

The district has the right to release the recording of the meeting at any time, and Zansberg said this would be the best thing the district can do to save taxpayers “the cost of having to defend this indefensible position.” If that happens, there’s no reason left for the plaintiffs in the complaint to continue litigating.

“I would again urge the Board of Education to exercise its discretion and release this recording,” Zansberg said.

Depending on how the district decides to respond to the suit, Zansberg said it can take a few months for the courts to issue a decision.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on and .

Now, as that restructuring has come under increasing scrutiny from local opponents, researchers say that it led to some of the most significant learning gains ever measured. A by scholars at the University of Colorado Denver finds that over a little more than a decade, the city’s schools transformed from one of the worst districts in Colorado to one that outperforms more than half the districts in the state. Four-year high school graduation rates leapt from 43 percent to 71 percent during the same period, and the progress was shared by a diverse array of student demographics.

The results offer powerful evidence in favor of the so-called “,” an educational strategy that began to take hold in major urban school systems in the mid-2000s. Deliberately conceived as an alternative to the traditional methods of American school governance, the approach emphasizes greater autonomy for educators while focusing district authorities on centralized functions like enrollment and transportation.

Denver was among the cities that fully embraced the model, experts have argued, making its successes particularly notable in education policy circles. Douglas Harris, an economist at Tulane University who has spent years studying reform efforts in New Orleans and elsewhere, said the new study had demonstrated proof of significant growth in Denver schools.

“The effects are clearly large,” Harris said. “Just as a loose approximation, if you leapfrog that many districts, clearly you’ve seen a lot of improvement.”

But that improvement was accompanied by fierce opposition among many Denver families, teachers, and public school advocates, many of whom spent years protesting the course pursued by district leaders. While the closure of dozens of low-performing schools engendered the greatest controversy, the detractors have also claimed that top-down direction from the superintendent and school board generally eroded the community’s faith in the system. Those complaints eventually cascaded into a successful campaign to “flip the board,” replacing reform-friendly members with a new majority that has viewed the portfolio strategy much more skeptically.

Parker Baxter — the study’s lead author and an energetic advocate of the Denver reforms — said that the central finding in his work was “simple and profound”: that learning undeniably increased for the average Denver student over the 11 years he studied, and that no group was harmed.

“The debate is framed in terms of whether these reforms helped or hurt the district overall, and this [study] provides the opportunity to evaluate that,” said Baxter, who worked at Denver Public Schools from 2008 to 2011. “The evidence we have is that students benefited from these reforms, even if they were not personally impacted by them.”

‘Remarkable’ range of positive results

To get at the impact of the portfolio shift, Baxter’s study dives into test score data from 2008 to 2019 — a period that encompasses most of Denver’s reform era.

That phase began a little earlier, of Superintendent Michael Bennet. Now a U.S. senator, Bennet spent three and a half years attempting to change a school system that ranked among the worst in the state. Under Bennet and his successor, Tom Boasberg, the portfolio model took shape.

Over 60 new schools were created in the decade that followed, while nearly 40 closed their doors permanently. Parents were presented with a bevy of novel school options, including a quickly expanding sector of charter and “innovation” schools. Those new offerings were integrated into a unified, district-wide application system that allowed students to freely select among different choices. 

Boasberg, who left the district in 2018 after nearly a decade to take on leadership of the Singapore American School, said that each of those alterations was an ingredient in the success of the reforms, but that the indispensable factor was far simpler: a focus on attracting and retaining better instructional talent to schools, whatever their particular type.

Ideological heat around school choice and accountability tends to obscure the single-minded focus on quality during the implementation of the reforms, Boasberg added.

“There’s a lot of political ideology around governance models,” he argued. “We really didn’t care about that. We were about: Are you a good school, and do you serve all kids? The governance model was not important to us.”

To what degree Denver’s improvements were attributable to the portfolio reforms can be debated, but their scale is impressive. Before the 2008–09 school year, Denver was one of the 10 lowest-performing school systems in Colorado on both math and reading tests, performing below the 5th percentile of districts statewide. In 2018–19, it had risen to the 60th percentile in reading and the 63rd percentile in math. In comparison with a group of similarly low-performing districts in the state, Baxter and his coauthors found, the reforms triggered growth equivalent to between 1 and 1.5 extra school years over the period studied.

That general progress spilled over into secondary areas, such as district enrollment, which increased by nearly 20,000 students between 2004 and 2019. While white children saw the largest gains overall, results were also positive for African American students in literacy. Hispanic and low-income students saw positive results in math and English, though they were not large enough to be considered statistically significant.

Baxter called the range of positive results, across both subject areas and racial categories, “remarkable.”

“The fact that we see significant positive results for students with disabilities, or for African American students in math — we would not necessarily expect a reform, even one that had such a positive impact systemwide, to also have these positive impacts for the most vulnerable subgroups.”

Denver Public Schools declined to comment for this story.

Model ‘hasn’t gotten very far’

Whatever the good news from the last decade of school governance, however, the next decade is much in question.

After the successful 2019 effort to flip the school board — replacing members who had largely backed Bennet and Boasberg’s approach with a new group that enjoyed more support from the local teachers’ union — a pronounced change in direction has taken place in the district. Superintendent Susana Cordova, a veteran of the reform regime who stepped in , soon left town herself after a brief tenure marked by poor performance reviews. The board’s new majority also voted to that had drawn criticism from educators. 

Nevertheless, three years into what might be deemed the “post-reform” period, many of the hallmarks of the portfolio model remain in place. The pace of school closures has slowed almost to a halt, but schools of choice still enroll a substantial portion of Denver students, and charter and innovation schools maintain wide autonomy in terms of hiring, curriculum, and scheduling. Boasberg said that the interlocking reforms embedded during his time in office would be difficult to do away with — if only because they remain broadly popular.

“The pieces do fit together, and that’s a really important part of it,” Boasberg said. “Why would you want to change the funding system to give less money to poor kids? Why would you want to have charters serve fewer English language learners and kids with special needs? Why would you want to take choices away from families?”

The future for the portfolio approach is perhaps murkier. After reaching a high point in the middle of the 2010s, school reform in major districts has stalled due to both political pressure and internal exhaustion. The model’s exemplars — New Orleans, which largely swept away the pre-reform landscape following Hurricane Katrina, is perhaps the prototypical example — have achieved substantial gains. But a large group of cities that attempted the portfolio pivot, from New York to Chicago to Washington, D.C., never completed the transformation.

Harris observed that, after years of hype and advocacy, the portfolio vision “hasn’t gotten very far.” That said, he added, its central ideas of expanded choice and unified district functions have left their mark in systems enrolling millions of students.

“Making structural changes in the education system is a very slow-moving enterprise, and the fact that we do have this idea — call if portfolio, call it what you will — that has infused a large number of urban districts, even in an impure form, is significant.”

School closures are awful. I won’t argue otherwise.

But they are almost certainly on the horizon. Due to enrollment shifts and falling birth rates, many districts nationwide are experiencing a surge in empty seats. For a few years, federal funding tied to pandemic recovery may allow districts to delay difficult consolidation decisions. However, there will come a time when the expense of staffing, maintaining and operating an outsized number of schools becomes untenable — and closures will be the only option.

The numbers tell the same story in city after city: of the available placements in Indianapolis are occupied. After shrinking by several hundred thousand students since 2000, to lose another 28% of its enrollment over the next eight years. Shifts in Boston have left the district with the equivalent of . Chicago, which famously in 2013 under then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, subsequently self-imposed a five-year moratorium on closures. Then, in 2021, a new state law prohibited closures and consolidations until 2025. Meanwhile, enrollment has plummeted. In fact, Chicago has 80,000 fewer students than it did in 2013. This school year, show over 40 schools with fewer than 200 students.

We are confronted by a national wave of enrollment decline in our urban systems.

Unpleasant though school closures may be, there are steps leaders can take to mitigate their negative effects on families. The most irresponsible approach is living in denial even when closures have become inevitable.

Denver Public Schools recently provided a high-profile example of what not to do. Its fiasco began in June 2021, when the school board passed a resolution directing district leaders to address declining enrollment. Ten schools were eventually identified for closure — including some that required additional subsidies of more than $500,000 each school year to maintain basic services for students, due to their small size. After community pushback, Superintendent Alex Marrero . By the time the school board was set to vote on the closures, Marrero removed three more schools, leaving just two. The board ultimately and sent Marrero’s team back to the drawing board. To sum up, the district spent 18 months to make no decision at all.

It breaks my heart to see schools close. Most often, the effects are felt primarily by lower-income families. Neighborhoods lose beloved institutions and vital pieces of their social fabric. But there comes a point when it is no longer responsible to consume an outsized share of scarce public resources to provide subpar educational experiences in near-vacant schoolhouses.

Districts would be well advised to make closure decisions early and as judiciously as possible — and communicate to families how and why those decisions are made. Then comes the most important part: executing closures in a way that’s least disruptive for affected families. Done well, there is potential for students to land in better schools — and when this happens, students often than they did in their former placements.

I have some personal experience with a promising approach to school closures in New Orleans, where my organization, EdNavigator, has done work since 2015. Families in closing schools there receive two critical pieces of support. First, students are given preferential treatment in the city’s open-enrollment system. Essentially, if a vacancy exists, a student from a closing school has the first opportunity to claim it. This preference increases the likelihood that a student will land in a desired school rather than being defaulted to whichever school has excess capacity, as happens in many districts. (In some cases, this means that students in low-performing closing schools end up getting shunted to other low-performing schools that might be next on the closure list themselves.)

Second, our navigators offer personalized counsel to families on which schools they should list on their applications. This is particularly important because families did not choose to leave their current placements. It is unlikely they have been keeping tabs on alternatives.

suggests these interventions make a difference. Families requested and were assigned to higher-performing schools than students in comparison groups, and they were more likely to remain in those placements over time. Initial results for student learning showed improvement in both reading and math during the first year students attended their new schools.

My advice to cities grappling with falling enrollment is to begin planning now. Engage in robust processes to take community input on which schools will close and when. But do not drag your feet hoping for a miracle that saves you from the scourge of closures altogether. That miracle is not coming. Instead, invest your time and resources in helping families transition, as New Orleans has done. Give families a real voice in determining their child’s new placement — and offer assistance in the pursuit of seats in charter schools, as well as traditional district schools. Moments like these are not the time to resurrect fruitless district-charter wars. Then, follow students closely as they acclimate to new buildings to ensure they aren’t lost in the shuffle, that their social work and special education services transfer seamlessly, that they make new friends.

The pandemic has already done enough harm to our children, in and out of school. Mismanaging the response to enrollment shortfalls that show no signs of abating will only make matters worse.

Since the pandemic hit, everything in education has gotten so much harder.

Over the last two years, teachers have faced enormous challenges. They have provided social-emotional support to students who lost family members. They have switched at a moment’s notice to online learning, taken temperatures, isolated from loved ones when COVID struck their classrooms and persevered through illness themselves. All this on top of their primary purpose: to educate children.

As a result of this pressure from the pandemic, many college graduates are choosing not to pursue careers in education. But I believe we are at a unique moment in time to fix this and not only recognize teachers for the professionals they are, but also pay them what they rightly deserve.

As a CEO of a charter school network in Denver, I’m committed to providing the best place for teachers who are committed to upholding the school’s values and for all students to realize

their full potential through a rigorous and loving elementary education. While I know that money isn’t the reason anyone goes into education, I have heard loud and clear through surveys and listening sessions that compensation needs to be more competitive for teachers.

Rocky Mountain Prep has overhauled the entire compensation schedule for all lead teachers for the 2022-23 year so it is higher than surrounding school districts’. This is a multimillion-dollar investment that recognizes there is no greater impact on students than the quality of the teacher at the head of the classroom.

The first change is to the salary scale. Compensation aligns with years of experience and is incredibly competitive for the Metro Denver market. For example, first-year lead teachers at Rocky Mountain Prep will go from a base salary in 2022 of $47,250 to $52,000 in 2023. By comparison, first-year lead teachers earn $47,291 in Denver Public Schools and $43,471 in Aurora Public Schools.

The second change is recognizing teachers who work in Title I schools, serving the children most affected by poverty. In addition to existing stipends, Rocky Mountain Prep is adding a $2,000-a-year bonus for all lead teachers at each Title I school. 

The biggest change is the introduction of the PEAK Teacher program, which will award extra compensation and opportunities to educators who exemplify Rocky Mountain Prep’s core values: Perseverance, Excellence, Adventure and Kindness. Too often, teachers leave the classroom because other careers offer what education doesn’t: generous pay, opportunity to grow and develop, and autonomy. For the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years, we will recognize our network’s 16 top-performing teachers, who offer both the rigor kids need in order to achieve the highest levels possible and the love that is essential for inspiring children to do their best.

These educators will receive salaries of $80,000 to $110,000 per year. They will each get their own professional development budget to spend as they see fit, the opportunity to weigh in on key network-wide decisions, recognition at all-network events and a special dinner and celebration in their honor.

PEAK Teachers will serve as ambassadors of the vision of Rocky Mountain Prep at their schools and play important roles in speaking to members of the broader Denver community about education and the work happening in our classrooms.

Such salaries and perks would be seen as simply expected for those who excel in their work in other professions. Yet in education, they are nearly unheard of. The best teachers deserve more than a “Best Teacher” mug and discounts at stores. They deserve to be paid like the hardworking, skilled, talented professionals they are.

Tricia Noyola is CEO of Rocky Mountain Prep.

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Scott Esserman, a parent and former classroom teacher who was endorsed by the union, held a strong lead Thursday night in the race for an at-large seat representing the entire city. In a crowded field of five candidates, he had garnered more than 39% of the vote.

Current school board President Carrie Olson had a commanding lead — 69% of the vote — over her challenger in District 3, which spans central-east Denver. Olson is a former Denver teacher who was endorsed by the union. She is the only incumbent running for reelection.

The races were tighter in southwest District 2 and northeast District 4, with union-backed candidates Xóchitl “Sochi” Gaytán and Michelle Quattlebaum holding leads in their districts as well. The District 2 race was particularly tight, though Gaytán’s lead over opponent Karolina Villagrana widened from 64 votes Tuesday night to 486 votes Thursday.

Denver elections officials said Thursday night there were 44,690 ballots left to count and that counting would continue Friday. A large number of ballots — 35,000 — were dropped off during the last three hours of voting Tuesday, which is extending the time it takes to tally all the votes, officials said.

Union-backed members have held a majority of seats on the seven-member Denver school board since in 2019. Before then, Denver had been a national exemplar of education reform and cooperation with charter schools.

Reached Tuesday night, Esserman said that although the union-backed candidates were outspent by pro-reform groups pushing for a different slate, the election results so far were “a testament to the kind of change people are ready to see” in Denver Public Schools.

“The vast majority of voters and members of our community are interested in seeing us do what’s best for students, and that’s what we’re going to do,” he said.

In the past two years, the union-backed board has undone or halted many reforms put in place by previous boards.

For instance, the board voted to reopen two comprehensive high schools — and — that previous boards had dismantled. Current board members also the controversial school ratings system that previous boards used to justify closing low-scoring schools in an attempt to improve academic achievement. The union opposes such closures.

The union also opposes the expansion of independent charter schools. The union-backed board attempted to delay the opening of a new DSST charter high school, but the State Board of Education that decision.

The union has spent big to hold on to its board majority, but supporters of education reform have spent even bigger to try to win back control. They say the union-backed board hasn’t focused enough on academics, especially during the pandemic.

As of last Monday, state campaign finance reports show independent expenditure committees associated with reform groups had spent more than $1.07 million in support of three candidates: Villagrana, Vernon Jones Jr., and Gene Fashaw. Such committees can spend unlimited amounts of money in elections but cannot coordinate with candidates.

Meanwhile, reports show the Denver teachers union had given more than $157,000 directly to four candidates: Esserman, Olson, GaytĂĄn, and Quattlebaum. The statewide teachers union gave at least another $75,000. Independent expenditure committees funded by teachers unions had spent more than $184,000 in support of those candidates, reports show.

Esserman had raised more money — $106,650 — than any other school board candidate in Colorado, even with expensive races in many suburban districts, according to an analysis of campaign filings by .

The winners of the election will oversee , craft a new strategic plan, and grapple with several long-simmering issues, including  and continued disagreement over the role of independent  and semi-autonomous . They will also help lead a district that is still navigating the COVID-19 pandemic.

Update:

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

The staff and board of stepped up this spring, recognizing an urgent need to develop an ambitious vision and catch-up plan that would support all children in getting back on track following more than a year of disruptions and struggles. Our objective: To ensure that, despite the significant challenges brought on by the pandemic, all our scholars will remain on track with grade-level performance, while receiving any and all supports they may need (academically, socially, emotionally and beyond).

At U Prep, we are unwavering in our belief that all children, from all backgrounds, can learn at the highest levels. They are brilliant, beautiful people and absolutely capable. Eighty-five percent of our students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches and 94 percent are students of color. In 2017, scholars at our Steele Street campus in Denver had the highest math growth in the state (out of all public elementary schools) and the eighth highest English Language Arts (ELA) growth, after a single year.

We take great pride that U Prep increased academic proficiency by more than 30 percent during that year while educating an equivalent student population to who we serve today, with more than 70 percent of our seats serving English Language Learners. You can read about that success .

As we now turn our focus to catch-up efforts in the wake of COVID, we’re leaning on that past experience along with our to drive our strategy.

Over the next two years, we are leveraging dollars to ensure that children who’ve fallen the furthest behind during remote learning will now make the most rapid growth. And, while we drive that academic work forward, which we believe is critical in fulfilling our mission of providing every child with a life of opportunity, we are also expanding our partnership with the to ensure children and families alike receive any and all additional mental health support they may need.

Our learning recovery approach is being guided by three key pillars:

— Grade Level is Grade Level: All scholars will be given access to grade-level content regardless of their level of current performance.

— Rapid Acceleration: We deliver moderate to significant interventions through additional staffing and a variety of targeted supports so that children get what they need when they need it.

— Family Partnerships: Every family deserves to know exactly where their child is, in relation to grade-level expectations. Built on a foundation of trust and honesty, educators engage with families as genuine partners who play an active role in their child’s “catch-up.”

Grade Level is Grade Level

No matter what you’re doing to catch kids up, you cannot stop putting grade-level content and work in front of them.

A fifth-grader who might be reading at a third-grade level must still be exposed to fifth-grade text and curriculum. We firmly believe that the more time a child is immersed in grade-level content alongside effective supports, the more growth they’re able to make.

Teachers regularly run critical grade-level assessments to gauge where children are, and create a game plan for aligning supports that will increase access to that grade-level work. Simultaneously, our school leaders have made significant investments in data analysis and are able to swiftly develop action plans that can support effective instruction with meaningful and rigorous grade-level curriculum.

Rapid Acceleration

This coming year, we will operate our K-5 campuses as if there were three small school models within them (while all staff, children and families remain deeply connected to the larger school).

Grades K-1 will operate as normal as possible (close to our ideal state), while we implement moderate interventions in grades 2-3. For our fourth and fifth graders, we will be committing to significant interventions; their needs in catching up and preparing for middle school (and beyond) is very different from our first graders’s needs, and we know that our remaining time with this oldest cohort is short.

With Rescue Plan dollars, we’re hiring an additional teacher at each campus to support grades 2-3, and two extra teachers to support grades 4-5 at each campus – one for each grade level. This means far more direct support and targeted individual and small group interventions for the children who are furthest behind and most need it. We will use assessments to further gauge unfinished learning and will then adjust instruction as needed with extra staff ready to play their part.

Beyond the school day, we have nearly 60 children (rising fourth and fifth-graders) in intensive tutoring this summer through a partnership with . This multi-week support provides scholars who are the furthest behind with a chance to begin their catch-up efforts now and build momentum heading into the school year ahead. In a bid to remove as many barriers as possible, all costs associated with the tutoring, as well as transportation, are covered by U Prep.

Tutoring will not conclude with summer’s end. Both U Prep campuses in Denver will provide afterschool tutoring Monday through Thursday throughout the school year, building on the knowledge and skills being acquired during core content instruction. Like the work over the summer, this tutoring opportunity will target upper elementary aged scholars and all costs will be covered.

Family Relationships

Strong home-to-school and school-to-home relationships must remain central in our efforts to catch kids up. This requires ongoing, honest conversations. Families deserve to know where their child actually is in relation to grade-level standards, and to understand the impact that this highly disrupted 15 months of school has had on learning.

One example of this belief being put into practice: Last December, U Prep had all students come to school in person during the height of remote learning to take part in literacy assessments, our “Literacy-palooza”. Parents reserved a time slot that worked for them, drove up to the buildings, were greeted with a hot cup of coffee and pastry, and waited while each child entered the school for a one-on-one test (with full health and safety guidelines in place). After their tests, kids selected brand new books to take home and add to their personal libraries.

Even during the most challenging of times this past year we found a way to communicate directly and honestly with families about where their child stands. They always deserve to know, and from that position of shared knowledge, we can build a shared plan. (What are we doing at school? What can you be doing at home? How can we do this together?).

Continuing to invest in relationship building, this summer we are making home visits to not only all of our new U Prep families, which we do each year, but to all of our returning fourth and fifth-grade families too. Through the year, every family will participate in four parent-teacher conferences, one each quarter, to make sure families have a crystal-clear view of how their student is progressing academically, socially and emotionally, and to ensure our partnership is strong and healthy. Every one of these moments, whether in conferences or home visits, is another chance to also learn from our parents’ expertise about their child – they are their first and primary educator and we have to be constantly learning from their expert knowledge.

A Challenge — and Opportunity

The three pillars of our catch-up plan, combined with our core values and historic success at targeting support, position us to do right by all children and families we serve. The U Prep board, together with the school teams, makes a promise to every child that they will be educated on the path to a four-year college degree and a genuine life of opportunity.

While the last year plus was an absolute test in maintaining our mission, the years ahead will be an even greater test of our level of care and commitment. We are ready and beyond excited to lean in to the opportunity ahead — to do anything and everything possible to ensure every student catches up.

That is our responsibility and one we take extremely seriously.

Recardo Brooks is a member of the board of University Prep and the parent of an alum. The tuition free public charter schools serve 727 children in Kindergarten through 5th grades at two campuses in Denver.

Last August, when Florida’s Hillsborough County Public Schools began upgrading air filters in their K-12 buildings, the event was so significant that to document one of the first installations, at a Tampa elementary school.

When RAND Corp. researchers last spring with a list of 13 items that would make them feel safe about in-person schooling this fall, parents’ top priority wasn’t teacher or student vaccines, social distancing or regular COVID testing.

It was ventilation.

Perhaps that’s because COVID-19 has made our most basic act — breathing — newsworthy.

But therein lies the problem: In 2021, with an airborne virus still infecting Americans at a rate of , the heating and cooling systems in many U.S. public schools are nothing short of awful. Whether billions in new federal aid will be enough to help school districts upgrade an aging system anytime soon remains an open question.

While data on the scope of the problem are scarce, what little there are suggest that schools are looking at billions of dollars in deferred maintenance. A few examples:

• In Worcester, Mass., the district last summer said it would spend to upgrade heating and cooling systems in its 44 schools, some of which date back to the 1800s. Nearly half of its schools were built before 1940;
• In Denver, the school board spending $4.9 million to upgrade school heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems in more than 150 buildings after former Superintendent Susana Cordova said parents had been asking her specifically about HVAC upgrades.

Like many issues, this one hits low-income students hardest.

In a of school facilities by the National Center for Education Statistics and Westat, researchers found that schools serving the largest percentage of low-income students also had the largest percentage of air ventilation/filtration systems rated “fair or poor” in permanent buildings.

The study found that in schools with the highest concentration of low-income students, 33 percent had such troubled systems. In schools with the lowest concentration, it was 27 percent.

In the RAND survey, nearly three in four parents put school air quality at the top of their school wishlist. Even among a subgroup of parents who were unsure whether they’d even send their kids back to school, ventilation came in as the most important safety indicator.

The dilemma is resonating beyond parents: Last fall, the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), with the New York State Labor Department on behalf of 44 employees in nine public school campuses across New York City, saying most school buildings were improperly ventilated. It also said the city’s “minimalistic” ventilation standards don’t prevent the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. The group wants inspectors to determine whether schools are ventilated and filtrated to adequately protect teachers, students, and staff.

Kyla Bennett, the group’s New England director, said the conditions in these schools were “pretty horrifying.”

“The inspections that they had done, most of the schools did not have windows that opened (in) the classrooms. They didn’t have the correct supply ventilation or exhaust ventilation in the rooms. I mean, some of them literally had zero ventilation.”

She understands why windows in some cases don’t open. “There’s noise out there. There’s pollution. …There’s danger, especially for small children, if the windows open wide enough. But the bottom line is that in order to make the schools safe for not just the students, but for the staff and the teachers, we need to improve the ventilation in the schools.”

Nathaniel Styer, a city schools spokesperson, said the district’s public schools “were some of the safest places to be during this pandemic because of our focus on ventilation and safety. We ended the year with a .03 percent positivity rate, which never went above 1 percent and was consistently far below the city average. Our schools are safe and if any repairs need to be made to ventilation systems the impacted classrooms are closed until the problem is fixed.”

Styer said the district only uses classrooms in which ventilation systems are working and operational, with the means to bring fresh air inside, circulate it, and ventilate the air outside. He also said every room was inspected multiple times by professional engineers and union inspectors.

The high costs of building repairs — as well as other priorities and the political gridlock gripping Washington, D.C. — likely mean that most families won’t get their school ventilation wishes granted by the time students return this fall.

Last December’s Covid-19 stimulus measure, as well as President ”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s proposed infrastructure legislation, could change conditions in schools. The stimulus includes $54.3 billion for states and school districts to shore up school facilities, including HVAC systems. But schools’ total price tag could be billions more, recent estimates suggest.

”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s could help as well. It proposes $50 billion in direct grants and another $50 billion leveraged through bonds to upgrade and build public schools. While its fate remains up in the air, a bipartisan group of congressional lawmakers last week of the proposal. A summary of the “Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure” plan by the Problem Solvers Caucus endorses upgrading schools’ internet systems, but school ventilation.

Needed: $1 million — or more — per building

Much of what we know about school infrastructure these days comes from a 2020 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which and found that 54 percent needed to update or replace “multiple building systems” including HVAC. An estimated one in three schools needed to update their systems, it found. And 41 percent of districts needed to update or replace HVAC systems in at least half of their schools, totaling about 36,000 nationwide.

The price tag for upgrading these systems: about $1 million per building. If half of the 36,000 buildings get upgrades and the rest get entirely new HVAC systems, it could cost schools about $72 billion, the non-profit Learning Policy Institute .

Among educators themselves, the problem is hardly hidden — actually, most of them would agree with RAND’s findings, calling ventilation an urgent problem. When the American Society of Civil Engineers earlier this year graded infrastructure systems nationwide, ventilation upgrades topped schools’ most pressing concerns. More than half of districts — 53 percent — reported that they need to update or replace multiple building systems, including HVAC. The report estimated that schools need a in repairs. Taxpayers are currently investing only $490 billion, the group said, leaving a $380 billion shortfall.

While the engineers’ group gave the nation’s overall infrastructure a , it was even tougher on our public schools, handing them a .

It noted that in the decade between fiscal years 2008 and 2017, state capital funding for schools fell 31 percent, the equivalent of a $20 billion cut. In that period, 38 states cut school capital spending as a share of the state economy.

One of the report’s authors, California civil engineer Dan Cronquist, said in an interview that HVAC upgrades and replacements topped all other school officials’ concerns, including roofing, lighting, safety, plumbing, and even asbestos, lead, and mold remediation.

Air quality, he said, is “a big issue,” but he acknowledged that educators have a lot on their plates. “School buildings are not as a high-priority in some districts as other expenses.”

When GAO researchers visited school districts in six states last year, they found that security “had become a top priority,” often taking precedence over spending on building systems such as HVAC. It also found that in about half of districts nationwide, funding for school facilities came primarily from local sources such as property taxes.

In most cases, schools can’t rely on federal funding for ongoing, needed repairs, unless they’re located on military bases, receive federal Impact Aid, or are charter schools.

Upgrades don’t necessarily mean better air quality

suggest that schools use “multiple mitigation strategies” to lower the risk of exposure, such as improving building ventilation, as well as masks and distancing. While most buildings won’t actually require new ventilation systems, CDC says, upgrades or improvements “can increase the delivery of clean air and dilute potential contaminants.” In buildings that are already up to code, it suggests using window fans, improving filtration, and using portable high-efficiency particulate air filtration systems, among other measures.

Even if they get upgrades, schools may not automatically enjoy better air quality if they don’t maintain and operate the systems properly.

In a study , before the pandemic hit, researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Davis, visited 104 California classrooms that had recently been retrofitted with new HVAC units. About half had high CO2 concentrations, researchers found, and many were “under-ventilated,” likely due to improperly selected equipment, poor maintenance, or other issues.

The researchers concluded that better oversight of HVAC installation, as well as periodic testing and CO2 monitoring, would improve ventilation.

As for conditions in New York City schools, the PEER complaint is on hold after the state Public Employee Safety and Health Bureau said it didn’t have jurisdiction over COVID-19 cases, Bennett said. “We’re looking at our options, but there’s no quick solution here.”

She added, “The bottom line is that this pandemic, this isn’t the end. This is something that’s going to be hanging over our heads — whether it’s COVID-19, that still hasn’t gone away, or whether it’s the next pandemic — we need to make sure that the ventilation in our schools is better than it is, because it’s not a safe working environment.”

As in other urban districts, it’s an undertaking that demands pinpoint coordination between principals managing hybrid schedules, teachers still awaiting vaccination shots, and families who aren’t totally sold on giving up remote instruction. But despite the logistical hurdles, and even in COVID outbreaks at schools and colleges throughout Colorado, some of the anxiety around returning to school is .

If the district’s leaders have begun to address one excruciating hangover from 2020, however, they’ll soon be seeking relief from a second. Atop the myriad complications related to coronavirus-related learning loss, Denver Public Schools found itself rudderless after Superintendent Susana Cordova suddenly resigned in November. Interim superintendent Dwight Jones, appointed through July but not expected to stay on, is spearheading the district’s response to the greatest academic crisis in American history.

Cordova’s departure capped off a year of tension simmering beneath the COVID threat. Denver’s seven-member school board, dominated for over a decade by advocates for charter schools and tough accountability measures, was transformed in 2019 by the election of three newcomers who received support from the local teacher’s union and pledged to rein in the district’s agenda. They stuck to that promise throughout a chaotic 2020, leading education observers to wonder whether they are witnessing the end of one of America’s biggest experiments in urban school reform.

With the search underway for a new superintendent, and more than half the board’s seats up for election this November, one member said he was eager to move past years-old disputes and refocus in the post-COVID era on bolstering educational equity for students who desperately need it.

“Denver is no longer a pro-reform city, nor is it a full-on teacher union city,” said Tay Anderson, one of the three board members elected in 2019. “[The new] superintendent is going to need to be able to walk into the situation understanding that these polarizing sides of education that people like to paint — that narrative died in previous elections, and now we’re moving forward with new visions for the Denver Public Schools.”

But some locals are publicly asking whether a vision truly exists to replace the one that prevailed for over a decade. Paul Teske, dean of the public policy school at the University of Colorado Denver, said that the coming year could reveal whether the local political class had turned permanently against education reform.

“In a way, what we have is a test of the stickiness of the reforms,” Teske said. “Everybody’s reading the tea leaves, at least on the Democratic side, about whether the pendulum’s swung completely to the left, back to the teacher’s union. Or are choice and accountability stronger than we think, and maybe the two can co-exist?”

A ‘rock star’

The district was taken by surprise when then-Superintendent Cordova announced her resignation in November. Three months later, information about the cause of her departure have been sparse, but public outcry has not.

Sympathetic parents and former officials within days of the announcement, with some alleging that the board pushed Cordova out, and a cadre of Latino community leaders later were “deeply concerned and dismayed” by the news.

Those sentiments were echoed in reactions from local officials. In , 14 former board members blamed the loss of Cordova on a hostile work environment fostered by new members who “undermined her leadership and treated her in a way that was neither fair nor democratic.” The all-female signatories also asked whether her two-year tenure would have gone more smoothly had she — like her long-serving and controversial predecessors, Tom Boasberg and Michael Bennet — been a white man.

An even more explosive exchange was triggered later in November, when Denver Mayor Michael Hancock and former Mayor Federico Pena weighed in. In a jarring show of combativeness, they the “dysfunctional” school board of undermining their superintendent and demanded they step aside from selecting her replacement.

The first Latina superintendent of a majority-Latino district, Cordova by some as a potential candidate to replace Betsy DeVos as U.S. secretary of education. But her tenure was marked by severe challenges, beginning with a teacher’s strike that shut down schools just a few months after she was appointed in 2018. The teachers returned to work fairly quickly, but only after securing a salary increase by sweeping layoffs at the central office. (A representative of the local teacher’s union, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, declined comment for this article.)

The strike was part of a local insurgency against the wave of changes instituted during the decade-long Boasberg era, including a swift expansion of the city’s charter sector and the closure of several schools that were struggling academically. Cordova was unanimously selected to succeed Boasberg, but as a high-ranking figure within his former cabinet, she struggled to escape her predecessor’s shadow. Van Schoales, president of the reform advocacy organization A+ Colorado, said that it was “totally obvious” that her tenure as superintendent was shortened by a poor relationship with the school board.

“To me, it’s no wonder that people around the country would see her as a rock star,” said Schoales. “But to this board, anybody that was in the Boasberg administration — even if, within the administration, she was often fighting to improve neighborhood schools — was screwed.”

Cordova, who took a deputy superintendent position in Dallas in January, declined to comment and has revealed little publicly about her reasons for quitting. Whatever the contributing factors, some believe that she was discouraged after the release of her first and in August. The middling grades she received — along with the board’s stated desire to purge a “lingering collective mindset” associated with the previous, reform-minded regime, perhaps by “eliminating redundancies” among her staff — raised the question of whether her contract would be renewed at the end of the 2021-22 school year.

Mark Ferrandino, who served for six years as the district’s chief financial officer, to lead the Colorado Department of Revenue just days after Cordova’s resignation. In an interview with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, he said the tone of the evaluation “was different than what I heard from members in our interactions.”

“The review seemed to be more about her predecessor than her job, and the inability to move past what was and to look at what was currently in progress,” Ferrandino recalled.

Board member Tay Anderson said that claims of Cordova being thwarted by his colleagues were “lies and rumors,” and that the former board members who had co-signed the open letter “undermined the very offices that they once held.”

“The majority of the board members that signed on to that letter were all board members with education reform ties that were defeated in elections, or that retired and their seats were eventually turned over to new people. It’s okay for those folks to have opinions, but at the end of the day, we have a job to do, and that’s for our students.”

Different visions

Whatever frustrations existed between the board and its former superintendent, there are strong indications that Denver Public Schools will continue moving in a different direction than the one it charted for over a decade.

The city’s charter sector, which enrolls of its students, is one area that will almost certainly be impacted. Just a few weeks before Cordova’s resignation, the board drew headlines the opening of a new high school from the high-performing DSST Public Schools (formerly known as the Denver School of Science and Technology) network. The move was by members of the Colorado state board of education, whose Democratic chair called the proposed delay “extremely troubling.”

Earlier in the year, the board the city’s school performance framework, which was used both as an informational tool for parents exercising school choice and as a trigger for district interventions based on academic underperformance. A remnant of the Boasberg era, the framework was widely considered technocratic and convoluted, even by those in the reform camp. But while parents can still consult school ratings issued by the state, there is little sense of what local metric, if any, will replace the one that was discarded.

The spread of coronavirus has muddled the transition by introducing policy complications that couldn’t have been imagined during the 2019 elections. With schools closed for most of 2020, some families to compensate; in response, the board from taking that step, warning of possible “long-term negative implications for public education and social justice.”

The chaos and improvisation imposed by COVID-19 also made it difficult to assess the effectiveness of Cordova and her team, Anderson noted, especially as board members set out to keep their campaign promises.

“I got elected in Nov. 2019, and the pandemic began in March,” he said. “Through the time that we didn’t have a pandemic, we had other district issues we were working on, and I was trying to fulfill my 100-day plan. So we weren’t able to see Superintendent Cordova govern outside of a crisis.”

One question, complicated over the past year by the exigencies of public health, is whether the current board will propose a comprehensive vision for how to improve school performance. The district once adhered to such a roadmap, dubbed Denver Plan 2020, but it expired at the end of the year. The board began developing a new plan last January, but soon as they pivoted to dealing with the pandemic. At the same time, members pushed forward last year on a number of progressive initiatives unrelated to COVID, including with the Denver police department and approving .

Ferrandino, the district’s former chief financial officer, said he agreed with the decision to temporarily punt on long-term planning, arguing that lockdown conditions would have made it too challenging to solicit appropriate input from the public. But the broad shifts sought by the board would require more consensus and communication, he added.

“If you’re changing things, you need four [members] to give clear direction,” he observed. “Big change in any organization needs focus. When you have 20 priorities you have no priorities, because you’re not sending a clear message of what people should focus on.”

Magnifying the ambiguity is the constant stressor of COVID. While most major school districts are plotting a return to normal this spring, the University of Colorado’s Teske said that Denver’s recovery process seems to have shunted huge substantive issues of both personnel and policy into the footlights.

“It’s been weird. Well, I don’t know if it’s been weirder than everywhere else in the country, but with all the background stuff going on, it seems like everything right now is on pause to deal with [COVID].”

As our public education system continues to experience unprecedented challenges related to the pandemic, the Progressive Policy Institute’s David Osborne and Tressa Pankovits thought now would be a good time to offer a how-to guide on creating innovation schools.

In this 74 Interview, Osborne acknowledges that many districts are barely managing to operate — never mind innovate — during a crisis that also involves a collapsing economy and a national reckoning on race. But the author of 2017’s sees a not-too-distant future when a vaccine is widely available, the system has begun to return to some level of normalcy and education leaders will have to consider fresh solutions to the fallout.

“At that point, we’re going to have a lot of frustrated parents who have seen up close that their kids are not getting the kind of education they need,” Osborne said. “Hopefully, district leaders will be looking for ways to accelerate progress and help their schools catch up because their kids will have lost ground and have fallen further behind grade level.”

In Osborne’s and Pankovits’s recently released , the co-authors draw lessons from the experiences of “Innovation Network Schools” in Indianapolis, “Renaissance Schools” in Camden, New Jersey and other districts. They discuss key “success factors,” lay out implementation steps, and include model state legislation to allow and encourage districts to create such schools.

The common thread for innovation school is their ability to operate independently of the central office bureaucracy.

“The data on this is really clear. If we’re just talking about public schools in urban communities, the more autonomy they’re given — as long as it goes with accountability — the more effective they are,” Osborne said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: Your research indicates that innovation schools and zones have the flexibility necessary to create and replicate an assortment of diverse learning models. Why do you think this concept is important in our current education systems? 

Osborne: It’s important that in any education system, the people who actually run a school — principals, other administrators and often teachers— are usually involved in making decisions of the school and those same people need to be able to make the key decisions. They know the kids and they know what their needs are. Taking cookie-cutter approaches that come down from the central offices just doesn’t work for all schools. So, most people assume that a principal of a public school has a lot of power. The truth is they don’t. Typically in an urban district, they can’t pick their teachers. The teachers get assigned to them by the central office. Additionally, they can’t fire anyone who’s got tenure (which happens after two or three years teaching in some districts), affect the pay scale at all, reward anyone, or even change the length of the school day or the school year. If kids are falling behind, they can’t implement Saturday morning school sessions for them, and the list goes on and on. They control typically less than 1 percent of the budget. So they really aren’t managers, they’re administrators. When you have kids in front of you who aren’t going to succeed in the “cookie-cutter school”, which is often the case in the inner-city with low-income kids, the people running the school need data and they need to do things differently. If we continue on with the centralized, hierarchical, standardized approach that most urban districts take, we’re just tying those principals’ and teachers’ hands and frankly, they can’t be as effective as they need to be. And in return, the people who suffer are the kids. So it’s really an equity issue and a justice issue.

In your guide, it’s interesting that you recommended that education leaders should encourage teacher-run schools in their innovation schools portfolio. Can you tell us a bit more about how teacher-led schools contributed to student achievement overall? 

Researcher and professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Richard Ingersoll, has done extensive research on this and basically what he finds is that the more empowered teachers are to help run the school, the more effective the school is on average. In our research, I visited several teacher-run schools, some charter and some innovation schools. One of the best teacher-run schools I’ve visited is called the Denver Green School, a public elementary school in Denver, Colorado. There are now two of them because they have replicated. The word “green” in the school’s title means it has a significant focus on environmental education. The school is run by 10 teachers who basically make up a partnership team and the other teachers are essentially employees of the partnership team, but if they want to join the partnership team they can apply. ±őłÙ’s pretty much organized like a law firm where you have partners who run the practice and they also pick who’s going to handle personnel, the budget, etc. At Denver Green School, the partners assign tasks to different teachers and when I was there, they had two or three administrators who taught half time and worked half time on administration stuff. I’ve seen teacher-run schools where every teacher is equal and while they choose a few administrators to do the administrative tasks, they make decisions collectively.

• Read more:

There are really no traditional symbols; there are just lots of different models. There are approximately 150 teacher-run schools across the country, where half or more are charter schools and the rest are district schools.

 Amid the global pandemic, education leaders, practitioners and stakeholders are having more conversations around re-imagining education. Moving forward, do you think more districts across the country will be amenable to implementing innovation schools? 

I think so. There was certainly some momentum before the pandemic where approximately 20 urban districts around the country were either deeply into this or experimenting with it in one form or another. It takes different forms in different places, depending on the local politics and the local leadership and so on. But the pandemic made it obvious to all of us and particularly the parents, that many public schools and public school districts were not able to pivot very quickly or very effectively to remote learning. It was a huge challenge to say the least. If you have a system where teachers and administrators were accustomed to not making many decisions or not being in charge and just following orders from the central office, they’re not going to be in the habit of rethinking how they could work quickly and effectively and the system won’t have drawn the kind of talent that likes to do that. If you want entrepreneurial people running your schools, you have to give them a lot of autonomy, and if you haven’t done that in the past, you’re not going to have those people in position.

Additionally, I recently saw a survey of charter school parents which indicated that on average, charter schools have responded more rapidly and more effectively to the shift toward remote learning than district schools, and that’s certainly what we’ve seen anecdotally.

On the flip side, are you afraid the pandemic and school closures could have a huge setback? Especially considering that many districts are presumably going to be focused on just reopening and delivering the basics, not necessarily looking to innovate or try something new. 

Yes, I think at the moment since March, discussions of sort of major structural changes in school districts that could have a real impact on student learning have been paused because the pandemic has been such a huge challenge. I think they will continue to be paused until a lot of the kids have been vaccinated and we can go back to some version of normal, but at that point, we’re going to have a lot of frustrated parents who have seen up close that their kids are not getting the kind of education they need. Hopefully, district leaders will be looking for ways to accelerate progress and help their schools catch up because their kids will have lost ground and have fallen further behind grade level.

The data on this is really clear. If we’re just talking about public schools in urban communities, the more autonomy they’re given — as long as it goes with accountability — the more effective they are. When you examine the districts that have improved the fastest in the last 15 years, statistically they’re located in New Orleans, Washington D.C., Chicago and Denver—all of them have done it through different kinds of autonomous schools. In New Orleans, you have all charter schools and in Washington, D.C. charter schools that make up 47 percent of the schools, but in Chicago and Denver, a lot of them are autonomous district schools, that are often referred to as innovation schools, contract schools or some other moniker. So, it’s not like there’s a debate about the data. We know that this works better for urban kids and hopefully more of our district leaders will be looking for what works better once this COVID era is over.

Can you talk about some of the challenges associated with the innovation schools model?

I would say the biggest challenges are political. The minute you say that school leaders, whether they are principals or a group of teachers, should have the power to hire and fire, the teachers unions will oppose it because they consider that one of their jobs is to keep any members from being fired and they typically fight any effort to remove teachers who have proven to be not competent.

On top of that, in any bureaucratic system, when you say to some of the units, we’re going to give you a lot of autonomy, the rest of the system typically reacts negatively. It’s a very human reaction, “What are we? Chopped liver? Those guys are special and we’re not?” Also, the central office almost always resists this because the people who work there have been trained and have developed over many years, a view that certain decisions should be made by the central office, and not by the schools themselves. So if they’re in the purchasing department, it’s their job to buy the textbooks and choose the textbooks. If they’re in the transportation department, it’s their job to do the bus schedules, which drives the length of school day. If they’re in the professional development unit, it’s their job to figure out what the teachers need and the way to predict professional development. When you give schools autonomy, they are able to make all those decisions and that both runs up against the mentality of central offices.

It also is inconvenient for the central offices because now they have two sets of rules. You’re dealing with the traditional schools with one set of rules and then there’s a whole different set of rules with the autonomous schools. For instance, in some cases, the money for things like professional development goes to the autonomous schools and they get to decide where they spend it. Suddenly, the central office loses some of its budget and it needs to respond to these school leaders and what they think they need. In places like Denver, San Antonio and many others, it’s been a struggle because it often takes years to convert the mentality of the central office and that process is still going on in those districts and others.

You argue that states should have both an intervention law (the stick), and innovation school legislation (the carrot). When implementing innovation schools, how can education leaders get buy-in from all stakeholders within their educational communities to avoid any pushback? Where have you seen this done well? 

So let’s talk about different stakeholders and let’s start with teachers. There are a number of ways to get teachers to buy into the innovation schools model, but I think the best way is through teacher-powered schools. For example, in Springfield, Massachusetts, which has an empowerment zone of 11 schools now, each of those schools has a leadership team of five teachers, one who is elected by the principal and four who are elected by the teachers, and they work with the principal on the plan for the next year, every year. They are part of the decision-making about the future direction of the school, and that’s attractive to educators. They also like autonomy because let’s face it, most teachers know that their schools are kind of in a bureaucratic, straightjacket and they would like more autonomy.

The other thing that’s been effective is that a lot of places use innovation schools just to turn around failing schools. In Indianapolis, you can also become an innovation school by being a strong district school where the teachers want to convert to innovation status because they want that autonomy. Last I counted, there were five out of 20 or 21 innovation schools that were conversion schools and now there are 26 innovation schools. From what I’ve heard, the teachers there are the biggest cheerleaders of this concept. They’re people who have been district teachers that were a part of the unions, so they have credibility with their colleagues. Innovation schools can be used to not only convert failing schools, but also for strong schools who are just converting with the same teachers into an innovation school status.

With families, I think the lesson that everyone has learned is that if you’re going to start an innovation school or close down a district school to reopen an innovation school in that same building, in any of those cases, you have to go to the community. ±őłÙ’s important to talk with families, document the problems with the failing school, and introduce them to the new leaders of the new organization that’s going to run the school. ±őłÙ’s also important for those leaders to make a tremendous effort to reach out to the families. If they come from an organization that runs other schools, the leaders should offer to take the families to those other schools to see what they’re like. That will open a lot of parents’ eyes very quickly. If they say, “Well, I’ve seen what my kid’s school is like and this school is three times better,” that’s exciting. You can win over parents. It’s not that hard, but so often in public education, I guess because of the traditions of school systems, we don’t do that. We don’t try. We’ve had systems that just assume the parents are passive and once their kids get assigned to school, that’s it. They have to show up. We have to break that habit and become much more proactive about really selling these new schools to parents on their merits.

Those are two really key stakeholder groups and then you can talk about the business community because they have a clear financial and material interest in having a better educated workforce. They are usually pretty easy to convince, especially if you have the data about improving student performance.

How do you perceive the incoming Biden administration and its educational mindset as either hurting or helping the innovative schools movement?

I don’t think it will have a lot of impact. If the Biden administration were able to fulfill his campaign promises to dramatically increase Title I Funding for schools with lots of low- income kids, that would help a lot because money is important. I doubt they’re going to be able to because our deficits are just higher than they’ve ever been in history even. Our federal debt as a percentage of GDP is higher than it was at the end of World War II. The deficit is going to be a huge constraint on the Biden administration, regardless, and I assume the Republicans will control the Senate, which means they will have some control over the purse strings. So I’m skeptical that we will get that infusion of big new money. The Biden administration could decide to push innovation schools, we’re certainly hopeful that they’ll consider that.

Ultimately, there’s not a lot of appetite at the federal level for repeating something like Race to the Top, where they were being very proactive and trying to lead districts and states in one direction or another. I think there was such a backlash against the Common Core and evaluation of teachers, using at least 50 percent [of student] test scores [in teachers’ evaluations], both of which were part of Race to the Top, or were encouraged by that program. I think that backlash was so strong that the Biden administration will probably be fairly careful and not that active in trying to push state and local districts in any specific direction. While I would love it, I’m a little skeptical that they will encourage innovation schools. The truth is our education systems are run at the state level and the federal goal is fairly recent and fairly minor, so the battle is really at the state and local level going forward when it comes to autonomy and accountability for public schools.

In Denver Public Schools, elementary school students fully returned to in-person learning Oct. 21 after seven weeks of remote learning. Teachers worked hard to create relationships with children and families before they were able to meet in person. I have marveled at the resilience of connection as children and teachers formed bonds through the use of Google Meets, Seesaw, and Google Classroom.

Despite the many challenges, COVID-19 has surfaced the chance to truly disrupt long-standing inequities in the education system. We can prioritize the voices, perspectives, and well-being of Black and Brown children who have been marginalized for too long. We can rethink many of our assumptions, notably the primacy of standardized state exams that has led to pernicious drill-and-kill test prep that is the antithesis of learning. We can address basic questions that have largely been neglected, such as:

• How will we connect with students and families whose voices have not traditionally been elevated? How will we use their perspectives to improve and deepen school-family-community partnership?
• How will we work to ensure that school norms, values, and cultural representations reflect and affirm the experiences of students, families, staff, and community partners?
• What actions can we take to ensure that our approach to social and emotional learning (SEL) affirms the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the students and families we serve?

As a person of color, I especially welcome these opportunities. This year at Samuels Elementary, my school in southeast Denver, our long-standing commitment to SEL will help power these conversations and drive our work to create a school community where all students thrive.

Thankfully, we have a solid structure to build on. Having prioritized SEL for the past four years, our teachers, assistant principal, SEL coaches, and staff are collaborating to create equitable learning environments in support of all students. We also have expanded services to hone in on and address the specific needs of our students and families through our Wellness Team, which consists of a full-time school nurse, full-time school psychologist, full-time counselor, and full-time restorative approaches practitioner.

We’re all working together to create a common language, common beliefs, common practices, common support, and common understanding of what those supports look like at the school level, so that we can maximize the relationships that we have with children.

We’re not flying solo. With help from the , we benefit from numerous external partnerships that reinforce and supplement our work once the formal school day is over. Notably, provides access to mental health therapy and wraparound supports for families. Guidance from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has been informing our long-term efforts, and most recently, a from CASEL and 40 other organizations is supporting those strategies.

We are supporting students with an that teaches such core skills as self-awareness and relationship skills. Mindfulness practices help students reflect on their emotions and calm down if needed. We are balancing our traditional focus on academics with much more intentional work in creating safe environments where students feel supported, connected, and loved. Our focus on relationship-building and personalization is all the more imperative, given our staggering mobility rates; last year nearly half of our pre-K through 5th-grade students were new during the school year.

We also are supporting adults in multiple ways, knowing that , reflection, and self-care are essential for effective student support. Six additional days of planning time allow us to better anticipate and meet the needs of our very diverse students (over 40 languages are spoken), 80 percent of whom are classified as low-income. Regular online conversations have helped staff stay connected and resilient during these trying times.

And the biggest growth opportunity ahead is dedicating more intentional exploration of within our schools. We will be reexamining our own biases, decisions, and actions. We will explore how they contribute to systemic racism in order to move ourselves and others toward racial equity and justice. Teachers will be enriching their curriculum with a much more diverse set of texts and . Students will be more actively involved in designing their own learning through projects, discussions, and similar activities.

Students also will have many more opportunities to demonstrate leadership. In each class, students generate a and student leaders monitor progress toward the agreed-upon norms. At the school level, SEL Youth Leaders plan, support and lead school events including Culture Camps, Specials Nights, and Family Nights.

We are closely measuring progress and holding ourselves accountable for growth—not just with academic test scores but with broader measures including .

Our growing ecosystem of educators, families, community partners, and students is taking advantage of this pause to refocus on equity and embrace this critical work. Our students will benefit. Our staff will benefit. Our communities will benefit.

Cesar Rivera is principal of Samuels Elementary School in southeast Denver.

Anser is an school, meaning it focuses on learning through projects and expeditions that regularly take students outside the school’s walls. Learning away from the classroom is nothing new for veteran Anser students.

What is new, for at least part of many days, is that the classroom itself will be outside the school walls as well. ±őłÙ’s an accommodation designed to decrease risk of COVID-19 transmission at the 375-student, K-8 school.

“We’ve put together a map where each grade level gets assigned a certain area of the playground or the parking lot,” said Anser Organization Director Heather Dennis. “So teachers know they can take their class outside anytime they want.”

Across the country, schools — some charter, some private, some district-run public — are figuring out ways to minimize the spread of COVID-19. Since studies increasingly show that the virus transmits less readily outdoors than in, creative leaders and teachers are figuring out ways to get their students into the fresh air.

In Denver, one district-run middle school — — plans to hold classes in event tents when schools resume in-person learning, currently scheduled for late October. “We can safely accommodate 110 students under each canopy — 36 square feet per student,” said Kurt Dennis, McAuliffe’s executive principal. “This will provide us with the equivalent of another 12 classrooms and concerns regarding ventilation will not be as much of an issue.”

Seasoned outdoor educators like many Anser teachers in Garden City know from experience that learning outside the classroom poses unique challenges, but also enriches the educational experience for almost all students, if done well.

But a growing number of educators are pushing for more from moving outdoors than just a temporary accommodation. They say the pandemic-caused disruption presents a golden opportunity to shift the dynamic so that spending more time outdoors, learning through experience and in the larger world, becomes a permanent fixture in American education, forever altering how kids learn.

“±őłÙ’s hard to talk about silver linings in a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, but this could be one of them,” said Wendy Wyman, who until this summer served as superintendent of the Lake County School District in the high Rockies of Colorado. “It gives us an opportunity to reflect on our practice and learn. And getting kids outside leads to more active, experiential learning. Most kids thrive on that.”

±őłÙ’s easy, of course, for teachers, principals, and superintendents practiced in outdoor education to extol its virtues. Planning a shift to the outdoors can be daunting, however, for educators used to the comfortable, controllable confines of a school building.

, a Boise-based nonprofit that develops new schools and the leaders to run them, interviewed several savvy outdoor educators to gather tips for schools that are pondering a move to more time outside the school walls, even if it’s only for the short term. They stressed that whether the school is urban, suburban, or rural; private, public or public charter, best practices remain the same.

Here are four key takeaways:

Managing risk

First, make sure everyone feels safe. Increase everyone’s comfort with the concept of learning outdoors by involving them in assessing and managing the risks involved. Nate McClennen, head of innovation at the independent in Idaho and Wyoming, said his school focuses intensively on risk management. Teachers and students alike participate. Making sure everyone feels safe is a necessary precondition for a healthy learning environment.

He defined risk management as identifying human and environmental hazards. “The intersection of those two potential hazards is where we have to manage risk,” he said. “±őłÙ’s important that our teachers feel comfortable whether they are working with students in or out of a building. It entails how you conduct classes outside, how you lead a group when walking down a city street or on a hiking path.”

Be prepared

Second, do the basic preparation of securing supplies and equipment that make learning outdoors possible. Give each student a large clipboard, and equip teachers with handheld white boards. Make sure to buy boosters for WiFi so that the signal reaches the outdoors.

Figure out ways to make students physically comfortable. If an outdoor classroom is on a hard surface, move desks and chairs outside. If it’s on grass or a softer surface, consider buying folding chairs or portable camping chairs.

That’s what the did for its students. All students from third through eighth grade at the K-8 school got their own Crazy Creek chair, festooned with the student’s name and the school logo. Kids will keep their chairs until they graduate.

“Our students carry those Crazy Creeks into and out of the classroom,” said Principal Todd Stiewing. “We have them set them down socially distanced from each other. It just adds that different quality: ‘OK, now it’s time to do Crazy Creek learning.”

Bundle up

Third, make sure kids have adequate clothing for conditions. “There’s a saying from Sweden that’s there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes,” said Wyman, whose school district sits at 10,000 feet above sea level. “You can learn outside under almost any conditions with the right clothing.”

In districts like Lake County, where the majority of kids come from low-income households, schools must be prepared to provide warm coats, boots, and snowpants to students whose families can’t afford pricey gear. Lake County schools have access to a grant-funded gear library, but not all schools or districts will be so fortunate.

Establishing relationships with service organizations that can help solicit and manage donations is a viable workaround. Lake County has a close partnership with the local chapter of the Knights of Columbus, which manages a donation program each fall.

In the COVID-19 era, schools will have to provide students with the gear for an extended period, rather than on an as-needed basis. Otherwise, the necessity of laundering outerwear will become burdensome.

Screen break

Fourth, even if a school or district is forced by circumstances into extended periods of remote learning, educators can and should have most lessons include an outdoor component. Every educator interviewed for this article stressed that as kids spend more learning time in front of screens at home, the need to get them outdoors becomes increasingly important.

“The rewards from getting outdoors, for fulfilling the human need to be outside, can’t be overstated,” said Michelle Dunstan, Anser Charter School’s education director. “Even if it’s just sitting in the grass reading, it’s incredibly important.”

McClennen said his Teton Science Schools always have stressed what he called place-based learning. This means, under normal circumstances, using the community as a classroom. Now, however, a student’s house or apartment and the surrounding area, can be the classroom.

“We are continually preaching that everything we typically do — taking kids outside the classroom and using the community to engage them — should be applicable no matter if you’re online, doing a hybrid version, or on site. You want to make sure learners are experiencing the world around them and not just staring at a screen.”

Finally, schools should be thinking now about how new practices they’ve been forced into by circumstances can create a positive and permanent shift in how they view and structure learning environments and opportunities.

This means “increasing teacher comfort level with having a classroom that can be done anywhere, online, in school, in community,” McClennen said. “We just haven’t trained around that very much. ±őłÙ’s not something that is taught in schools of education. Schools aren’t really set up that way.

“How do we help schools adapt so post-COVID they can use this as a great learning environment? So that there is no fear, no worry, because students and teachers are already well versed in it.”

Making this shift thoughtfully and with adequate preparation is vitally important, because doing it haphazardly risks creating a backlash, said Becca Katz, who runs a grant-funded Lake County Public Health Agency program called

“My hope is that we decide after this pressing need passes that it was worthwhile in and of itself to move learning outdoors,” Katz said. “But that will only happen if teachers have a successful experience. Teachers really need to get the support they need in this area.”

Last fall, we launched a social-emotional learning program at Rocky Mountain Prep with our third- through fifth-grade students. Compass Circles, originally created by Valor Collegiate Academies in Nashville, provides a framework for teachers to host regular meetings with small groups of students from the grade level they teach. When in person, participants sit in a circle and go through structured rituals in which they discuss how they are doing emotionally and support their peers and colleagues in doing the same.

When schools began shutting down last spring, we moved our Circle practice online using videoconferencing platforms, for both students and staff. Once a week, our third- through fifth-graders join a Zoom room with the other members of their Circle and go through the same sequence they would have in person.

We start with a deep breathing exercise to help the students center themselves and think about the emotions they are feeling. After that reflection time, there is a check-in in which each member of the Circle shares who they are and how they are doing that day. The facilitator identifies members of the Circle who may need additional support and goes back to them in an effort to open them up to more connection and support from their peers. Sometimes, this support manifests as students sharing their own reflections. Other times, Circle members commit to reaching out to that person later on.

Once all members of the Circle have had an opportunity to share their feelings, the facilitator transitions to the ritual of badge work. This involves students presenting projects they have worked on throughout the year that explore the identities and habits of themselves and others.

One example is a badge called “If You Really Knew Me,” in which students describe parts of their lives that normally wouldn’t be shared in a classroom context. They talk about things like who in their lives they are closest to, moments when they felt afraid and the hardest thing they have ever had to do. This allows students to see their peers in a different way and identify areas where they are similar.

After the student shares their badge work, the classmates respond with what they heard, what that tells them about the student and how that motivates or inspires them. It is common to see students display more empathy for their peers after the presentation than you typically would in a classroom that doesn’t use these practices.

Compass Circles are “challenge by choice” — no one is required to participate, and no one is asked to share anything that might prove uncomfortable.

In the final component of Circle, students and the facilitator share appreciations with one another. Students think back to moments throughout the week when others have supported them and publicly thank them. Then, there is a closing cheer or phrase, spoken in unison, to signify the end of Circle.

At our midyear evaluation of this program, 96 percent of teachers said they believed Circle is an important exercise for students and worth the time and resources invested in the program.

Students and staff who were feeling isolated, both before the pandemic and since, had a space to share that safely. Compass Circles provides structured time for someone to say, “I’m struggling with this. I need help.”

This allows our community to think about what students might need in order to do their best work and feel most comfortable during the school day. Is it a check-in from a friend at recess? Maybe some one-on-one time with the teacher during math? It enables us to approach one another with empathy and love. For any school that deeply values adult and student culture and feels something is missing in developing authentic connections, Compass Circles allows for that.

We noticed in the spring that even while virtual, our students remained committed to supporting each other. When having conversations, rather than just relating their own experiences, students went out of their way to support one another and reach out to friends who were having a difficult time. This showed them that the emotions they felt were very typical, and that in itself helped with some of the feelings of isolation.

This new frontier of remote learning and the isolation caused by school closures can make us feel disconnected. Particularly in high-stress times, like the current crisis, we need even more opportunities to pause and reflect — not just about work or school and productivity, but how we are really doing. ±őłÙ’s one of the first steps in beginning to process what is happening in the world. Circle practices can be a valuable tool for students, teachers and leaders to connect, be seen and be supported during this time.

Sara Carlson Striegel is the principal of Denver’s Rocky Mountain Prep Southwest. 

Let’s get real about the unprecedented nature of now. We are witnessing an unraveling the likes of which we’ve never seen in our lifetimes. And it’s happened so fast.

One week ago, I was in meetings where we were planning the entire months of April and May. So many convenings, conferences and commitments that we were all going to attend. All that has been wiped clean from the slate of my life. I’m sheltered here at home, focusing on my work at the , staying engaged about how this is challenging our and keeping an eye on our small business at .

It has become unequivocally clear to me that the word we must start using with an honest urgency is crisis. 

Over the past decades, we have heard that word bandied about in our political and social culture ad nauseam. Maybe that’s why it’s taken some time for the word to really sink into our daily use now.

But the truth is right there in front of us: The stock market collapsed multiple times over the past week. Political finger-pointing and media hysteria play on a loop. Millions have lost their jobs, primarily in the service and hospitality industries, creating a dramatic economic tidal wave in our economy. The complete distancing of our daily in-person interactions. A chilling stasis taking hold over our local economies, potentially for months. Our education system’s massive shutdown and the uneven, inequitable distribution of home learning support. Each day has contained too many moments of scary, tough realities. This is a crisis. And it’s far from over.

A crisis is scary. ±őłÙ’s hard and painful. And most importantly, it’s real. What we’re experiencing now has nothing in common with the crises of the past decade. The events of the past decade now look like a lost, tired and decadent society at war with itself as it spins ever more into distrust and confusion. And just at our moment of maximum fracture (does anybody remember impeachment and the Dem primary?), we are now overtaken by a real crisis that has already led to a loss of life and well-being. Even if the COVID-19 panic turns out to be less than expected (unlikely at the time of this writing), the impact has been profound.

Yet, a crisis is not always a lost cause. An old Italian philosopher said, “The crisis occurs when the old is dying and the new is not yet born.” It is now clear we are watching the emergence of something new. The question now is not what is dying, but what is being born.

I imagine many in the education space have different, or distinct, takes on what is happening. They can’t wait to push their virtual learning platform or pontificate on how autonomy has helped or hindered this crisis. I don’t blame them. This crisis will have massive funding implications and dramatic political ramifications. It will obliterate many nonprofits that cannot match the moment.

I have long believed that the future is one of openness, abundance and community-driven redesign of public systems. Already in this crisis, the stories of those who are working together to serve, solve and save those in need are the light we need to shine to get us through the darkness. I hope that this is what is being born. But I could be wrong. I have a sense it will indeed get much darker (with both resources and education system capacity getting scarcer) before dawn and that any chance to better the world will be met with enormous resistance.

But before we start doing any of that, we must take a lesson from the superintendent of Cañon City, Colorado: George Welsh, a truly remarkable leader who for the past few years has helped his district adopt the mantra “Maslow before Blooms.” That is, we have to put the immediate physical needs of our families () before the learning agenda (). It is critical guidance we need in these times.

First, let us put aside petty education battles and collectively name what our first, second and third priorities must be: the immediate needs of our students, families and elders. There is massive need on a scale that is only beginning to unfold. Our traditional notions of “need” must now be thrown out the window in 2020. The work there will both guide the way forward and show us what this new world demands of us. Only if and when we work to support our communities can we move to the next stage of the conversation. Kids around our country and world deal with these challenges during wartime, famine or disasters regularly — we just have not experienced it on this scale. If we are in the business of human development, which I believe we are, then this is a time more than ever to get grounded on supporting the entire child. Too many of my Zoom conferences this week tell me the education community will struggle with this. But unless we focus on our students and families first, we will not deserve their trust in this new world.

Second, my ask to all of us now is to accept both change and continuity. Hold both in perspective. In this time of rapid transition, it seems clear that the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 will radically change our lives and our ways of operating in education. Many will declare the future to look like this or that. But much of that was already happening. Massive shifts in the way we educate children and unwind the worst of the previous century’s system have been underway for decades and belong to both sides of the now-antiquated education reform debates. Before we declare a path forward, we must hold both truths.

Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, let us dream together of a new world. A crisis builds new capacity because the old has been shaken and we get to foster emergent newness into being. Let us practice abundance instead of scarcity as we dream. This time in isolation should be a time for reconnecting with ourselves, because that is where all change begins. Next, we should connect with family, old friends and colleagues and start dialogues about what is possible. Then we can bring more and more communities into the conversation and strive to hold abundance as our dreams reach tension, as they inevitably will.

Maybe then we can bring a new and better world into existence. One that creates real and meaningful opportunity and lives for all children and adults. One that our communities deserve.

I believe we can.

Landon Mascareñaz is vice president for community partnership at the Colorado Education Initiative and a state board member for the Colorado Community College system. 

Dynamics like this can keep school district leaders up at night, wondering if they have forecast enrollment shifts correctly and planned accordingly. Getting enrollment data wrong could mean millions of dollars in budget shortfalls, overcrowded schools or additional school closures. For urban districts, these dynamics are more complicated than ever before: Rising housing prices in many cities have , impacting families’ housing stability. Birth rates reached another in 2018, and new kinds of school choices have made enrollment patterns less predictable.

During my seven years as executive director of planning and enrollment services for Denver Public Schools, our urban district was among the fastest-growing in the country, gaining more than 20,000 students over 10 years. Since 2017, that trend has slowed, with growth continuing in some neighborhoods but not others. But our team was well-positioned to deal with these changes because of a series of strategies that allowed us to detect, assess and respond to changes in the student population proactively.

Unfortunately, too many large districts lack the tools to respond nimbly to complex population trends. They can take a cue from Denver and other cities by adopting five practices that can prevent unforeseen enrollment, planning and budgetary disasters. More often than not, districts with these systems in place have adopted versions of the for district management, with autonomous, accountable schools, equitable parent-choice systems, and a central office that focuses on quality assurance, support and high-level strategic planning rather than day-to-day school decisions. But any district can consider adopting some or all of these strategies, whether or not the “portfolio” model is in place.

Ìę● Annual school planning processes evaluate enrollment trends and forecasts for all schools in a system, alongside progress toward a set of broader outcomes, such as goals related to school quality and student achievement. This is one of the easiest strategies for any district dealing with enrollment fluctuations to implement.

Traditionally, districts analyze citywide enrollment and building capacity trends with relatively low detail and rigor, and do so infrequently. But student populations can change significantly between evaluation cycles. More successful districts establish annual school planning processes that deeply analyze and publicly report on trends in enrollment, capacity and school performance. Planning cycles typically occur in the fall, after academic performance results are released and enrollment counts are set for the year, but before budgeting begins for the year ahead. These districts link academic outcomes with data related to sustainable enrollment levels, facility condition and capacity, and choice patterns. They disaggregate student data by socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, native language or special education status to reveal changing patterns in student needs and achievement. More sophisticated districts are attuned to varying dynamics of different regions or neighborhoods within the district.

Districts already have access to all the data needed to analyze enrollment and performance annually in a rigorous way, but the information is owned by different teams. Having an analyst or coordinator pull the information and organize it costs very little, particularly after the first year, when the information just needs to be refreshed.

Since 2011, DPS has published an annual to inform district and city leaders on the key trends. During a time of rapid growth, we used this report to identify neighborhoods where new schools were needed or student population and demand for schools was on the decline. In several instances, this annual planning analysis was a factor in decisions to consolidate schools due to low enrollment.

Consolidations or closures are among the most emotional experiences for school leaders, educators and community members, and they should not be taken lightly. Using clear data to support those decisions and identifying trends early so changes do not seem reactionary, sudden or illogical makes the process smoother.

Ìę●  Unified enrollment systems allow families to apply to all public schools in the city using one process. They create more predictable and stable enrollment between spring and fall, generate invaluable information on family preferences and, most importantly, reduce confusion and inequity. The chaotic, decentralized enrollment processes that many large districts use put unnecessary burdens on families. There are often vastly different applications, decision dates, timelines, forms and requirements for different schools. Families might sit for months on waiting lists for multiple schools and choose only at the last possible moment, causing what school leaders call the September shuffle of sudden student roster changes all across the city.

In contrast, families in cities with fully unified enrollment systems can apply to any district, charter or magnet school with one timeline, one application, one lottery system and more supports for navigating the process. Making the enrollment experience easier and fairer for all families especially helps educationally disadvantaged students, whose families may not have the time or resources to navigate confusing enrollment processes that rely on personal connections. Unified enrollment also produces a rich set of data that supports leaders, particularly during times of instability. Demand data show which schools or programs families are most interested in, which can indicate where, geographically or programmatically, a district may need to expand or replicate specific school models. For planning purposes, unified enrollment data help district and school leaders align on the emerging enrollment picture for the year ahead, because enrollment timelines happen more reliably in the spring. This allows the central office to collaborate with school leaders to better understand how student population trends may impact enrollment changes and make necessary budgeting or staffing changes in the spring, instead of as the school year is starting.

Two years ago, launched to unify enrollment for Indianapolis Public Schools district and charter schools. Before unified enrollment, it was very difficult to get a pulse on enrollment trends across the city, as charter school and district enrollment systems operated in separate silos. More accurate enrollment information across both district and charter schools has supported the replication of higher-performing, high-demand schools, and served as a warning sign when demand for a school is low. In part due to the data from the enrollment system, the district recently its high school programs by closing underenrolled schools and restructuring four other schools into college- and career-magnet programs.

Moving to a unified system can take more than a year and include technology, policy, community engagement and change management elements that require significant resources to ensure a successful outcome.

Ìę●  Student-based budgeting funds schools based on enrollment and associated supplemental factors, such as additional support for students needing special education services or English learners. Often, this comes with greater school-level autonomy over budget decisions.

Most districts build budgets using anticipated staffing and programmatic needs, not specific student needs, and offer school leaders minimal control over their total budgets. Because this does not factor in enrollment projections or explicitly consider differences in student needs, it can lead to inequitable funding among schools. These budget methods can also mask the severity of enrollment drops or sudden spikes: If enrollment levels drop and schools become smaller, schools could quickly become financially unstable.

Student-based budgeting allocates funds per student enrolled, adjusting for different educational needs (after meeting core educational requirements). When paired with the annual school planning processes described above, student-based budgeting serves as a key annual check on enrollment. Leaders can consider how schools with large enrollment changes may need modified funding, staffing and space; understand the total amount of funding needed to supplement small school budgets; and weigh potential trade-offs with other funding priorities.

In 2014, implemented student-based budgeting in conjunction with new school models and a citywide high school choice system. This has allowed money to follow the student to the classroom door, helped the district respond to changes in levels of population growth and encouraged schools to accept a greater number of choice students because they receive additional funding for those students.

Ìę● Opening new schools and closing existing schools are two central processes that rely on an annual evaluation of student population changes and a forecast of future student and family needs. They also represent the emotional ends of the spectrum: Ribbon-cuttings make for great photo opportunities, while school closures are among the most challenging actions that district leaders have to take. It is important to operate both school openings and closures consistently and logically, so districts have the right amount and types of schools in the right places to best serve all students. Leaders often procrastinate on openings, closings and consolidations and make ad hoc decisions without clear processes and standards. These tasks may not seem urgent when enrollment is stable, but during times of rapid enrollment change, they are essential.

Two things can happen when districts do not have clear processes for opening and closing schools. A district may think a new school is needed because of overcrowding or anticipated population growth in a neighborhood, but by the time it opens, there may be empty seats because the growth forecast was inaccurate, was too short-term or did not account for students choosing other school options. Or, if a district waits too long to close a school, students can be hurt educationally by time spent in an under-resourced building and then left stranded and unsure of where to go next. If districts had higher certainty that an underenrolled school would lose even more students in the future, they could plan a process for closure or consolidation that minimized disruption and ensured students had strong options.

An of districts have a formalized process that allows for new schools to seek authorization to open or existing schools to set forth a plan for expansion or replication. Well-designed opening processes within a school district should include rigorous analysis of community need, interest in a particular school model and enrollment plans with budgets tied to assumed enrollment levels. In growing areas, a new school in the right place can relieve overcrowding and attract new families. In areas with flat or decreasing student population, the bar for opening a new school will likely be higher, but it is possible that a new school with an in-demand model serving particular populations of students could be beneficial even if enrollment is declining.

Having transparent, consistent, long-term processes and supports for closures is also key to engaging the community in what is already a tough situation. Arbitrary decisions or ones that seem to select closure candidates based on political influence will alienate any potential trust between a district and the community. Districts that use multiple data points, such as enrollment, quality and facilities, combined with community input, can reduce the degree to which students are negatively impacted by closures. Oakland Unified School District’s seeks to address a challenging budget situation that will require several school closures by establishing board policies, publishing relevant data across both district and charter schools, and conducting and publishing survey results, all with clear leadership from the superintendent. Additionally, to help impacted students attend a higher-quality school, many schools are offering an opportunity ticket to improve students’ options through school choice.

Ìę●  Collaborative organizational structures support the strategies described above. Enrollment management intersects with academics, talent, finance, facilities, assessment, research and more. Collaboration among these internal teams can help a district better respond to changes in student populations.

In many districts, expectations for internal teams are too focused on compliance and efficiency. Each team has its own rules, processes, incentives and cultures, and cross-functional efforts can feel more like a power struggle than a process of insight generation and productive collaboration. More successful districts emphasize intentional collaboration as part of their annual strategy and planning processes. Denver Public Schools’ biweekly Strategic School Decision meetings bring top district leaders together to present on a specific topic. In one discussion of how to minimize disruption to educationally disadvantaged students due to the closing of a large public housing complex, context and options provided by different teams offered a deep understanding of the short- and long-term impact to students and yielded a recommendation to provide additional supports to the school to maintain a vibrant program in light of the neighborhood changes.

Some of these strategies are more difficult to implement than others, but together, they can enable an effective long-term approach to student population changes, instead of lurching from crisis to crisis. Here are some roles that district leaders and partners can play:

Ìę● Superintendents should understand the long-term enrollment outlook for different regions of their districts, including housing, birth rates and school choice factors. They should challenge their leadership teams to work together to identify potential problems and create durable solutions. In the long term, superintendents should ensure that their departments have the resources, data systems and day-to-day processes to regularly generate enrollment insights and forecast trends in enrollment and family needs.

Ìę● Board of Education members should ask their superintendent for a risk assessment on how future enrollment changes may impact district finances, operations and academics. Board members should have an in-depth understanding of the dynamics at play in their neighborhoods. In the long term, they should encourage district leaders to take an embedded, proactive stance toward enrollment management. Instead of revisiting long-term plans every four or five years and reacting in shock every fall when enrollment does not meet expectations, board members should support an annual school review to allow community conversations to happen in a timely manner.

Ìę● Partner organizations, ranging from advocates to government agencies, should seek to draw connections, since housing, health care and transportation all impact the K-12 education system. Improved collaboration can maximize the collective benefits to a city and reduce unintended consequences. These partners can also support the district in challenging community conversations, either through facilitation support, independent data reviews or engagement with families in schools directly impacted by decisions.

School districts may not be able to stop long-term enrollment change, but improving the understanding and impact of these trends can empower district leaders to adapt. Ultimately, a longer-term strategic focus can limit the chances of an enrollment shock, bringing more stability and sustainability to their mission of providing great schools to educate children in every neighborhood.

Brian Eschbacher is an independent consultant focused on long-term planning and enrollment solutions, and former executive director of planning and enrollment services for Denver Public Schools. This piece was supported by Bellwether Education Partners through the ±è°ùŽÇÂá±đłŠłÙ.Ìę

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham co-founded Bellwether Education Partners. He sits on ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s board of directors and serves as one of the site’s senior editors.

A Friday night town hall on school choice for black families that started with a heated wrangle and impassioned defense of race and choice ultimately conjured resolve to work together as one.

“We all think we’re different animals,” said Democratic Colorado state Rep. James Coleman, a member of the town hall panel. “We’re all the same animal. We are all the same group and organization. We have got to stop acting like we’re all individuals.”

Around 200 families and community advocates attended “Is School Choice the Black Choice?” — an education town hall at the Potter’s House Church of Denver led by broadcast journalist Roland Martin. More than 200 others tuned into a live stream online. The event was the sixth stop in a 10-city tour hosted by Martin and ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. The events aim to engage black families and stakeholders on issues of educational equity, student achievement and parent involvement.

The animated discussion Friday night was not unlike the conversation in Atlanta in February, where Martin held the second of his school choice events. There in Georgia, panelists implored their fellow black parents and advocates to work together, rather than fight over the politics of school choice, because they “are on the same side.”

Much of the school choice bedlam has to do with incentives and interests — critics rebuke choice for taking tax dollars from traditional public schools and, in some of its forms, for being able to operate with less accountability for student outcomes, among other issues. Advocates are a chorus of the “one size does not fit all” philosophy — that school choice is critical to families’ abilities to send their children to the schools that most fit their individual learning needs, particularly for children from low-income backgrounds or students of color.

That rift was palpable Friday night in Colorado.

“If schools aren’t working for your child, you don’t just keep taking them there and hope it’s going to get better,” said Parents Challenge Executive Director Deborah Hendrix. “When I talk about choice, we make choices in everything else — what car we drive, what house we live in, what clothes we wear, what restaurant we go to — so why don’t we have the same choice in how we educate our children? As a parent, this is my No. 1 asset — my children — and I need to make sure I’m doing right by them regardless of the system.”

Joining Hendrix and Coleman on the panel were Jennifer Bacon, a Denver Public Schools Board of Education member; Papa Dia, founder and executive director of the African Leadership Group; Wisdom Amouzou, co-founder and executive director of Empower Community High School; and Hasira “Soul” Ashemu, executive director of Breaking Our Chains.

Ashemu pushed back: The very system of choice that Friday’s town hall was advocating for in the black community was one born out of segregation, he said. Although the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board declared “separate but equal” education unconstitutional, the decision lacked an explicit mandate for integration, so many districts and states conjured ways to dodge the court’s ruling.

Two years later, Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia had gathered more than 100 signatures from Southern lawmakers supporting the “Southern Manifesto,” which defied school integration and created a foundation for a set of laws, known as Massive Resistance, that ignored the Supreme Court’s decision. In many cases, the resistance allowed districts and states to shutter schools altogether rather than integrate, or to pull public funding, which forced localities to close schools — and that money was then reallocated to white students to attend segregated schools of their choice. And thus, Ashemu noted, the concept of school choice was born.

But, Martin challenged, “You can’t show me a system in America white folks didn’t create.”

So, Bacon said, it’s time for a culture shift.

“Sure, we have choices; sure, the school has the data for my kid to go to college, but someone else decided for me that this is what my kid needs. The families and the students who have to make the choices aren’t the ones deciding what they are,” she said. “We haven’t created a system that has leaned into the freedom of defining what choice is. People aren’t liking those choices because they haven’t had a hand in building what it is. They really don’t get to create the menu. It doesn’t feel like a choice for them.”

In Denver, segregation persisted for years after Brown — until a 1973 decision in found in favor of the plaintiff families suing for equal treatment and declared that the school board was guilty of a deliberate segregation policy. In response, DPS started a busing program to integrate schools.

In Colorado today, 250 charter schools serve more than 120,000 students — 13 percent of the state’s public school enrollment, . That’s twice the national proportion. Across the country, 3.2 million students attend 7,000 charter schools, representing about 6.5 percent of the country’s nearly 50 million public school students.

Colorado’s charter school law was enacted in 1993, and after numerous updates, it is now ranked the second best in the country — behind Indiana — by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. The alliance issues an annual report that ranks states based on their charter laws “ for high-quality charter schools by providing, among other things, flexibility, funding equity, non-district authorizers, facilities support, and accountability.”

It praised Colorado for allowing an unlimited number of charter schools and offering notable accountability and autonomy to charters — although full-time virtual charter schools still lack accountability. While the state has made progress in providing more equitable funding and facilities to charters, the report states that work remains.

And although Denver has been heralded as a leader and pioneer for some of the country’s most innovative and successful non-traditional schools of choice, a resistance has started to form in recent years. Now, a pivotal school board election next month could “flip the board” from a group of choice-friendly leaders to one that seeks to place a limit on the number of charter schools in the district.

Charters aren’t the only form of choice in the state. Colorado’s Public Schools of Choice law allows students to enroll in districts for which they are not zoned — otherwise known as open enrollment. The state also has more than two dozen magnet schools educating more than 12,000 students. And for four years, Colorado operated the Douglas County Choice Scholarship Pilot Program, a voucher program that offered 500 tuition vouchers for students to attend private schools — including religious schools — using public dollars. The Colorado Supreme Court suspended the program in 2015, declaring it a violation of an amendment to the state constitution that bars state support of religious organizations.

After widespread feedback about poor treatment of black students and teachers in DPS, that interviewed educators about their experiences. The results were striking. More than 90 percent of those surveyed said that racism was rampant across the district. Among the other findings: Nonblack teachers don’t expect black students to excel academically, many teachers simply fear black students, and the district hasn’t provided resources to black students at the same rate of growth as English language learners.

“African-Americans in DPS are invisible, silenced and dehumanized, especially if you are passionate, vocal and unapologetically black,” one educator said in the report. “We can’t even be advocates for our kids. It feels a lot like being on a plantation 
 there is a lot of fear and black folks are pitted against each other.”

What’s worse, overall, Colorado’s achievement gap — the difference in academic outcomes between ethnic groups — has not closed in a quarter century, , commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card. In 2017, the first year in which NAEP broke down scores by major districts, Denver’s achievement gap was among the widest in the country.

The situation is so dire in Denver that the district’s school board unanimously passed a resolution earlier this year requiring all DPS schools . (Bacon led the initiative.) For black students in DPS, 1 in 5 are proficient in math and reading on state exams, Bacon said Friday.

“One of the biggest problems is that we sometimes do want to accept that we are not doing well,” Coleman said. “±őłÙ’s not beating yourself up; it’s talking about the harsh reality that our children are not being served well. 
 We have to be innovative in how we do that work, but we can’t accept failure in any capacity.”

But, Coleman noted, that “harsh reality” is also that it’s not necessarily about politics or school structure. Neither of the major political parties, nor traditional public schools or charter schools, are serving black students well, he said, adding that it’s up to the parents and the existing community organizations to put aside the 10 percent they disagree on so that they can work for the 90 percent that they do agree on.

That also means motivating more parents to be active — by taking on leadership roles in education or running for school board positions despite the fact that the jobs don’t pay or that they think they may not have time, Hendrix, of Parents Challenge, said.

“A lot of times, we’re not at the table; therefore, when they’re looking for many of us to serve in those roles, there are one, two,” she said. “We have got to be willing to be in the schools designing the curriculum and running the programs.”

That all comes back to putting aside differences so that the black community is not internally fighting each other, Coleman said, and to support education leaders like Amouzou — whether or not they see eye to eye on the politics of choice — because schools like his are educating black students the way their parents want them to be educated.

At Amouzou’s Empower Community High School, a charter school in Aurora, Colorado, 14 of the 16 staff members identify as black or Latino. The executive director, principal and board chair are all black. (Extensive research has shown that students perform better when they are educated by those who look like them.) It is also at Empower that ninth-graders are reading about quantum physics and studying college-level research on social justice.

Dia recognizes that a culture shift that involves widespread black leadership and equitable education is not going to happen overnight.

“What is left to parents to do in the meantime?” he asked. “We all know that we cannot fail our kids and we need to figure out a way where parents get the power back to them. And the only power that they have is to be able to pick. ±őłÙ’s obvious. This country that we live in, everything happened at the top and came down to the bottom. ±őłÙ’s time for us to start it at the bottom and build it to the top.”

Over the past 15 years, the city has become a model for urban school reform. Parents are given wide latitude to choose where to enroll their children. Charter schools have spread swiftly, authorized by a school board largely friendly to the sector. And all schools, whether traditional or charter, are subject to an aggressive rating system that measures quality.

But persistent disquiet over Denver’s reform regime, and questions about whom it has served, have grown louder in recent months. Momentum from a successful teachers’ strike earlier this year has spread to a wider movement for change across the district, and next month’s local elections will prove a crucial test of the community’s attitudes.

Two reform-minded incumbents on the elected school board are term-limited, and another is not running for re-election. That means there will be three open seats on the seven-member body — enough to swing the membership away from its long-running consensus and potentially bring an end to one of the nation’s bolder experiments in charter expansion and test-driven accountability. The situation is reminiscent of the 2017 board cycle, when candidates opposed to further reforms were able to two board seats.

Collinus Newsome is the director of education at the Denver Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies in the state. Noting the changing winds around education in the greater Denver area — nearby Aurora is to its board, which oversees a district of roughly 40,000 students — she remarked that the outcome this election season “will be either very predictable or it’s going to be a mess.”

“If the election in Denver is a full-on [reconsideration] of the reform community, it’s going to significantly change the way the district moves forward,” she said.

What’s a portfolio?

By most accounts, Denver’s era of reform has been ongoing for about a decade and a half, beginning with the tenure of Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet. Prior to to the post by then-Mayor John Hickenlooper, the rookie superintendent had worked in finance and law, with no experience in education leadership. Both men rode their success in the city to high-level political careers: Hickenlooper, who was later elected governor, is now running for Senate after a failed presidential bid; Bennet is still pursuing the presidency while holding the state’s other Senate seat.

Under the administration of its rookie leader (and, when Bennet was tapped to become senator in 2009, his replacement, Tom Boasberg), Denver became one of America’s most prominent laboratories for educational change. The district rolled out ProComp, a merit-pay scheme that replaced the existing compensation schedule, and acted aggressively to close underperforming schools. And charter schools, authorized by the district itself, began a swift expansion.

In total, the district shifted to what is loosely termed the “portfolio model”; the idea is something of a buzzword, taking on different forms in the various cities where it is practiced. But it essentially describes a system through which families can choose among a bevy of options including both traditional and charter schools. District schools in portfolio districts are also typically granted some of the same autonomy over budgeting and personnel that charters have long enjoyed.

The changes didn’t go unnoticed. A few years after debuting an innovative common K-12 application system to help parents navigate between district, charter and magnet schools, Denver the top district in the country for school choice by the Brookings Institution. And promising results followed: High school graduation rates rose across the city, and by Stanford University’s well-respected Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that, in the wake of the reforms, students in the city made gains in math and English that outpaced the state average.

Something rotten in Denver

But local sentiment didn’t always match the glowing reviews. Controversial school closures from students, educators and families, some of whom found Bennet an imperious leader. Boasberg, his successor, resigned last year that he hadn’t done enough to curb substantial academic gaps between white and minority students.

Betheny Gross, the associate director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, said that Denver’s transformation was typical of how the portfolio approach has played out in other cities, with more choice for families and authority flowing down from the district to school leaders. At times, however, it has also alienated parents who felt their neighborhood schools were under attack.

“One of the things that people have been concerned about is whether this portfolio has really generated the kinds of schools this community wants or needs — in particular some communities that have historically had comprehensive high schools with bands and football teams and all the hallmarks of the great American high school,” she said. “The reforms sort of shifted the focus to smaller schools, multiple schools within one building, and it seemed to some community members that they were shutting down historical institutions.”

The Denver Foundation’s Newsome went further, saying that while minority and low-income communities welcomed the introduction of greater choice, they were just as often angered by what they perceived as a revolution from above — one that sometimes smacked of racism.

“I hardly ever hear people complaining about choice,” she said. “You definitely have a better sense of what a high-quality school should look like. … But when it comes to [leaders] plugging into communities, it’s almost as if it’s been an afterthought. I wouldn’t say everything was bad, but there are definitely certain communities in the city that feel like things have been done to them.”

Tiffany Choi was a French teacher at Montbello High School in northeast Denver when the school board voted to shutter the school for poor academic performance in 2010, breaking it into five smaller programs run in the same building. In an interview with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, she said the decision reflected a lack of community input in policy that affected thousands of families.

“There was really a lot of pride around that school,” she said. “[The closure] was fought hard by the students and teachers in that community, who said, ‘This is a central meeting point in our community for sports and for arts and music.’ And it was very heartbreaking to be in that school while it was closing.”

Gradually, the anguish engendered a backlash. The 2017 races for school board, in which candidates backed by teachers unions defeated two pro-reform members, were seen as “,” with dark money sponsoring mailers that tied incumbents to Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos. And this February, 2,600 teachers walked out of their classrooms — of a merit-pay system that many felt subjected their earnings to uncertainty.

The strike was settled within days when the district approved a pay raise. But in the months that followed, a movement spread with the aim of “” — voting out another two or more reform-oriented members to break their long-held majority.

Choi, who served as a strike captain in her high school, of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, the local union, in September after vowing to “fight against corporate reform policies” and end school closures. The 10-year incumbent she defeated was viewed by some as responsible for the spread of the ProComp system.

“We have two teacher-friendly members on the board, out of seven,” she said. “Now we have an opportunity to take back the schools that are rightfully ours, and if we get two or three positions on the board, we’ll be able to make some changes.”

The shape of the race

The question is whether opponents of the status quo can make good on their momentum.

In all three races, candidates exist who might attempt to chip away at the portfolio model. But this summer, a broad range of community groups pushing for change a unified slate of contenders after disagreeing on whether to back two union-backed men or a pair of minority women.

The best-funded of the insurgent candidates is , a 20-year-old recent Denver schools graduate who also ran in 2017. Though he campaigned on a district-wide charter school moratorium last cycle, he is now organizing primarily around racial equity.

That’s a live issue at the moment, as Denver’s civil rights activists loudly complain of what they describe as the district’s unwillingness to confront school segregation. A blue-ribbon commission last year on how to address the issue, but Newsome, who served as a co-author, says that it has spent months “sitting in someone’s office, and I’m not sure anyone’s even looked at it.”

±őłÙ’s difficult to tell, however, whether outrage and impatience will translate to electoral wins. David Flaherty, a local Republican pollster, pointed to showing that most Coloradans were satisfied with the quality of their schools, while a significant minority said that more should be done to expand school choice. Although all the candidates for school board in Denver could be described as progressive, he suggested that a reform-friendly message could win the support of potential swing voters.

“If you’re a Democrat and want to pick up soft Republican or independent voters, talk about school reform in any manner,” he advised in an interview. “I’m not talking about full-blown vouchers or defunding public school districts. But any education reform is appealing to Republicans and some independents, who believe that changes can be made to public education in Colorado.”

And even if outsider candidates manage to flip the board, the changes made over the past 15 years will be challenging to undo, noted CRPE’s Gross. Even in cities like New York and Newark, where anti-reform challengers won power promising to turn back the clock, charter schools and principal autonomy haven’t disappeared, she said.

“Do they think that telling families, ‘No, those choices aren’t available to you anymore’ is the direction forward? It seems implausible to me that they’re going to suggest or even move on an effort to shut down the charters that exist — there’s a lot of students in them already, and many families are really happy with their schools. There would still be very strong elements of the principles of portfolio that seem pretty institutionalized at this point.”

While many in the education reform community see the strike as a clear sign that education reform as we have known it is over (I mostly agree), I believe it may set the stage for a deeper set of improvements to public education that have eluded us.

The strikes in Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, West Virginia, and now Oakland have had as much to do with teacher frustrations over how they have been treated by the reform movement as with how much they have been paid. It appears many teachers feel as if reform was pushed upon them, whether new teacher evaluation systems or increased testing without incorporating solutions to the problems they face in their schools.

According to a released last summer, , along with the profession’s appeal among members of the public.

I have been at this work as a teacher, administrator, and advocate for 30 years. I entered the profession wanting to change schools from the inside with my fellow teachers. Some of those efforts worked, laying the groundwork for the development for many of our nation’s highest-performing public schools, while other aspects of that reform movement failed to take off because of structural, leadership, or culture challenges in the system that were too difficult to overcome.

Overall, schools have gotten far better. We made a great leap with American public education in the 20th century. But we have not kept up with the needs of a mid-21st century society. So what are we going to do to accelerate improvement?

Combining an with a deep understanding of what can be done today, we have the chance to build a public education system that works for most everyone — students, parents, teachers, and the community. This will not be accomplished in a few years, but it can be built over the next decade or two, like a great cathedral, if we stick to a focus on getting all students prepared for life, democracy, and work, with regular reflection on progress and challenges.

Here are seven lessons from Denver’s teacher strike that might get us the public schools we need:

1. Include teachers: Reform efforts must include educators if they are to have a lasting impact. Teachers and their unions can push for reforms, as they have for greater funding, or undermine reforms if they are not seen to benefit a teacher’s impact on learning or job satisfaction. Interestingly, Denver’s ProComp system of bonus pay started out as an example of what can be done when a teachers union and reformers work together. It seemed to come off the rails when the district forced changes to ProComp without investing in bringing teachers along. The district overplayed its hand with few tangible benefits for most teachers.

2. Start with what works: Unproven technocratic fixes rarely work and can carry a heavy political cost. Colorado Senate Bill 191, which changed teacher evaluation practices in 2010, and similar legislation in other states were well-intentioned fixes to a broken teacher evaluation and tenure system. TNTP’s report is a reminder of why these policies were generated: The vast majority of teachers get glowing evaluations and little helpful feedback, are awarded tenure almost universally, and then are nearly impossible to terminate regardless of what they do. While the intent of the reforms was right, solutions that included using value-added standardized test scores and rigid statewide standards on teacher evaluations led to a new bureaucracy that only enraged teachers and administrators, doing little to address the primary problems. It was a classic Pyrrhic victory that only set back long-term efforts to improve schools.

3. Begin with schools, not classrooms: Although the teacher is one of the most important factors in a student’s development, schools are the places that support (or don’t) teachers in their work. A positive school culture and leader matter far more than teacher compensation, evaluation procedures, or the latest smartboard (as helpful as each can be). Teachers work within a school community, and that community can have a powerful impact on what happens in that teacher’s classroom. Reform efforts that have focused more on schools and school leaders — whether the charter school movement, community schools, new school instructional designs, or innovation schools — seem to have had greater impacts on student achievement and last longer.

4. Include community from the start: Reform, no matter how well-intentioned, must be driven by community, not done to community. Many reforms have been top-down and often made a great deal of sense from a policy perspective. The problem was that there was little or no support in the neighborhoods or schools where the reforms were being implemented. Who wants a school closed, even if it is shown to be failing, unless those most being affected can see how they will benefit (and not just in some fuzzy future, but next year)? Reformers must invest in building community understanding for what is going on and is possible in that community. People fear loss, not change, and any improvements must be met with a real commitment to deliver with and alongside the community’s members. This is a long-term proposition, not done in short cycles.

5. Community-based advocacy works: Positive transformation is possible even in a contentious negotiation. The teachers union and Denver Public Schools agreed to significant for the most disadvantaged schools even when the union wanted to return to a pay scale that treats all teachers the same. Advocacy from grassroots community groups and civil rights organizations played a role in pushing both sides to not only keep the incentives but also raise the amounts while negotiations transpired.

6. No quick fixes; tinkering wins the day: Education reform history is marked mostly by , with a great deal of noise over simple, quick fixes that come and go. Television, then the internet, and now personalized learning are meant to revolutionize public education. The big reform fixes never materialize, but steady, slow efforts focused on schools and their improvement through a variety of less sexy efforts often result in positive change over time. Because people want change now, leaders must help them understand what is possible, what needs to be reformed, and how to get there.

7. Use a split screen: Admittedly somewhat counter to the previous lesson, reformers collectively must work on designed to educate most of the population at the levels needed today. We need to put equal effort into improving the current system while creating new systems and schools. I am not sure what the ideal new system would look like, but I do have some notions of the designs needed to engage most kids in lifelong learning — and it is not a factory model that groups kids in rows of desks listening to a teacher, doing worksheets, or completing simple multiple-choice tests. At the current rate of improvement (flat to a few percent a year), the system we have will not get us the education required for our democracy or our economy. Yet we need to continue making progress, even if slow, because a few percent increase a year impacts thousands of students and makes the difference in whether they can contribute to society or are a burden.

So what do we need to stop, start, or continue doing? Reformers must work directly with community and grassroots organizations so the work is more grounded. They must support local leaders as they initiate action rather than always taking the lead. They must do far more to collaborate to build coalitions for change — especially with others that they may disagree with— to find places to work together for positive change.

I come out of the teacher strike optimistic, reflecting on our work and committed to doing even more to support the schools that all kids deserve.

Van Schoales is chief executive officer of the nonprofit “action tank” A+ Colorado. He has 30 years’ experience leading education reform efforts from the classroom to the statehouse. He has also helped found a number of other nonprofit groups, including the Odyssey School, Denver School of Science and Technology, Democrats for Education Reform Colorado, Bay Area Coalition of Equitable Schools, and Chalkbeat Colorado.

For all of ProComp’s faults — chiefly its inability to significantly reward genuinely great teachers, but also an overly complicated structure that doles out bonuses in dribs and drabs — it did move the ball down the field. Not a touchdown, but a few good first downs, and that pigskin is certainly in the opposing team’s territory.

Yet the Denver teachers union would prefer to sideline the significant advances ProComp did provide, most notably paying educators more money to work in the city’s toughest schools.

What most districts never seem to get, but Denver does, is that compensation is an employer’s most important tool for buying what it values. Strategic use of compensation helps employers attract and retain the knowledgeable, skilled people they most need and fill the jobs that are hardest to staff.

Unions, on the other hand, would have districts use compensation as the Great Equalizer. They want it to uphold the pretense that all teachers are equally valuable to a district, no matter what they can teach, how well they teach or where they are willing to teach.

Try telling teachers who work in the highest-poverty schools in Denver’s Montbello area that their job is no more challenging than that of those working in Cherry Creek. Even the teachers in Cherry Creek know it’s not true.

In the current negotiation over compensation, the district is proposing a modest $2,500 bonus each year to any teacher who works in a high-poverty school (currently some 70 schools) and an additional $2,500 if their school is also one of the 30 most challenging in the district. Compare that sum to the $20,000 annual bonus that the best teachers in Washington, D.C., receive for taking on such positions.

Still, the Denver union wants to reduce the district’s bonus to $1,500 — harking back to that same dribs-and-drabs bonus system that probably led to ProComp losing its luster. For a paltry $1,500, no teacher is going to trade a job at which kids come to school well fed, well rested, and with relatively stable lives for one where none of those things are true.

Two years ago, my organization named Denver a , one of only eight districts in the nation to earn this status. We also highlighted Denver as one of six places in the country that is with its teacher evaluation system and working to strategically deploy compensation dollars to recognize great teachers. Part of the reason for these accolades is the willingness of the district, along with its teachers union, to take bold steps toward ensuring high-quality teachers for all students.

ProComp was possible only because Denver voters approved a significant tax increase to fund it, persuaded that the district was serious about connecting teacher compensation to student success. This push by the union to revert to the discarded system not only puts the district back at its own 10-yard line but is no less than a broken promise to Denver’s citizenry.

Kate Walsh is president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.