Local and National News

North High proposal stirs controversy

Thu, 17 May 2012 14:45:00 GMT

Originally posted on EdNewsColorado, May 17th, 2012. Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org
Read here. Written by Rebecca Jones.

West Denver Prep’s request to open a high school in Northwest Denver drew hundreds of neighborhood residents to a community meeting Wednesday night, packing the auditorium at Smedley Elementary to overflowing.

On one side of the room were fans of the charter school, which currently has four middle school campuses, including two in Northwest Denver, all of which consistently rank among the most distinguished academically in the DPS system. They want to see that sort of option available to high school students as well.

On the other side were fans of North High School, the community’s beleaguered public high school that has endured years of failed reform efforts, but that supporters believe may at last be on the road to redemption. They want to see North’s new principal, the highly-regarded Nicole Veltze, given the time and resources needed to turn the school around the way she did Skinner Middle School.

Many said they fear charter schools – particularly those sharing a campus with a non-charter – absorb space and resources that the non-charters need to thrive.
And at the front of the room: DPS officials trying to manage a roomful of parents, students, staff and community members whose emotions were running high, and see to it that all felt that their concerns were being heard, and that all understood the options confronting the school board as it weighs the pros and cons of where to put a new school.

Some of the options involve putting West Denver Prep High School onto the same campus as North.

Lack of trust an obstacle

It was apparent that those three groups – Denver West Prep supporters, North High School supporters, and DPS officials – were unsure about one another’s motives.

“I hope we can have some trust as we go through the agenda,” Yana Smith, director of regional community engagement for DPS, told the packed house at the start of the meeting. “You can push back respectfully. That’s welcomed. It’s not our intention to stand here and talk AT you for the next two hours.” No yelling, no name-calling, respectful listening – those were the evening’s ground rules.

Some parents explained why they sent their children to West Denver Prep and would never send them to North. Others explained why they sent their children to North and why they felt every parent ought to consider doing so. North alumni extolled the education they got. Current North students extolled the education they are getting. Most agreed they hoped this dispute wouldn’t turn neighbor against neighbor, but feared it might.

Two-and-a-half hours later, after facilitators had roamed the room with microphones allowing many – but not all – of those who wanted the speak the chance to do so, Smith drew the meeting to a close. “I can’t say it didn’t go the way I had hoped,” she said. “Anytime there’s such a division between perspectives, emotions, options, priorities, having purposeful dialogue is challenging.”

School board to weigh options over the next month

Those who are interested will get another bite at the apple today when the Denver school board hosts a public comment session, starting at 3:30, as part of its regularly scheduled meeting. And another community meeting is planned for May 30 at Smedley.

On June 4, the school board will hear presentations from all those applying to open new schools in the fall of 2013– West Denver Prep is one of five new schools seeking to open in or near northwest Denver – and on June 7, district staff will present its recommendations to the board. There will be time for more public comment on June 14 and possibly on June 18. The board will vote on the applications on June 21.

Here’s the background, and the facts the school board will consider when deciding what to do.

Pros and cons to every scenario

Over the next four to five years, the district expects to see about 400 to 500 more students enrolling in North and its feeder schools. The existing elementary schools in the area are full. But there’s some space available at the middle and high school level.
Another consideration is the number of students who live in the area, but choose to go to school elsewhere. School officials calls this the “capture rate,” and North’s is quite low. There are 1,366 high-school-age students living in the North boundary area who attend school somewhere in DPS, but only 824 of them attend North or one of the small alternative high schools nearby.

That means that roughly 500 high school students who could be attending North have chosen to attend another DPS school, and officials estimate an additional 400-500 high school age students live in the area but don’t attend any DPS school. That’s a total of 900 to 1,000 students who live within North’s boundaries, but who choose not to enroll there.

Enter West Denver Prep SMART High School, which projects it would eventually enroll 500 students. Another proposal, for Four Winds Indigenous, an expeditionary learning school with an indigenous-based curriculum, projects it could serve 200 high school students in the northwest area.

DPS officials estimate that the North campus – including the 1913-era building that West Denver Prep Highlands Middle School currently occupies – could accommodate a maximum of 2,070 students. North’s projected enrollment for fall is 1,254, and WDP’s Highland campus middle school projected enrollment is 314. That leaves space for 816 more students.

Thus, one proposal before the school board is to co-locate North, WDP Highlands Middle School and WDP high school all on the North campus. That’s an attractive option financially because it wouldn’t require much in the way of new construction, North’s central location is highly desirable, and the campus is already well-equipped to meet the needs of high school students. On the downside, that doesn’t leave much room for North to grow. The school presently has 940 students. Under this proposal, it would be able to accommodate up to 1,110, but more than that would be tight.

West Denver Prep middle school might relocate

Option 2 involves moving WDP middle school to Remington, an elementary school at 4735 Pecos that was closed in 2008, and letting WDP high school take over the 1913 building at North, plus just three or four classrooms in the main building, and having the two high schools share the gyms, cafeteria and library. That option provides space for North to grow, but it’s more expensive, and Remington is so far away from other schools that students would most likely have to be bused there.

Option 3 involves putting the WDP high school at Remington. That has the advantage of giving the high school its own independent facility, and the Remington building is in good condition. But Remington was built to serve as an elementary school, so remodeling it to serve high school students would be costly.

Option 4 would bring Smedley, which closed as an elementary school several years ago, back into play. Smedley, 4250 Shoshone St., which has a capacity for 447 students, could house WDP high school, or it could house WDP middle school. Either option would be costly, however. Among several limiting factors: The school doesn’t have the space to create the parking required for a high school and it has no playing fields.

Or WDP high school or WDP middle school could open at Del Pueblo, another school that closed in recent years. But Del Pueblo’s location – at 7th Avenue and Galapago Street – puts it out of northwest Denver, and with a capacity of just 311 students, additional construction would be required.

Also on the table is a proposal to move either the WDP high school or middle school into Skinner Middle School. Skinner is a large building, and it would be especially well-suited for the middle school students, but adding a second middle school on the campus could constrain Skinner’s ability to grow.

So none of the options are without drawbacks. And community members on Wednesday had some suggestions of their own. Among them: Converting the now-empty St. Anthony’s Hospital into a high school. Or making whatever arrangements are selected only temporary, and building a new school. Or aligning North’s curriculum more closely with West Denver Prep’s, so the two schools could, in effect, become one.

Residents plead for more time

Or doing nothing, at least not yet. “We have the right to ask for more time,” one parent said. “June 21 is not time enough for anyone to present an answer that will succeed. And we’ll have to revisit this again and again if we don’t take the time now to make this work.”

Already, a new neighborhood organization calling itself Choose North Now has formed to lobby against any proposal to co-locate an additional school at North.
“For too long the district has subjected North to almost-yearly reforms, leaving the curriculum and staff in disarray,” said David Diaz, a former North teacher and coach, and neighborhood parent. “Now that proven leader Nicole Veltze is in place as principal, we need to give her the space and empowerment to build the high-quality school that our diverse neighborhood deserves.”

Choose North Now has launched a petition drive to encourage the school board not to mess with what supporters hope will be strong growth for the venerable high school.
“We could be aligning the curriculum at North and West Denver Prep. We could do that, and it’s free. And we could have the school we all want, and it’s North,” said Mike Kiley, a parent of two school-aged children and a leader of the group.

LEAP a big step for teachers in DPS

Thu, 17 May 2012 03:37:00 GMT

Originally posted on EdNewsColorado, May 16th, 2012. Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org
Read here. Written by Julie Poppen.

Nick Childers’ 10th-graders at Denver’s West High School are studying the causes of World War II. As the teens enter the classroom, he greets each by name, makes eye contact, and shakes their hands.

On this spring day, however, there is an unexpected – or at least partially unexpected – guest. Marianne Kenney is one of Denver Public Schools’ 45 paid “peer observers.” She’s a former Cherry Creek teacher and passionate school reformer. She also helped write the state’s content standards in social studies as Colorado’s former social studies specialist.

It’s her job to unobtrusively watch DPS teachers in action and grade them against a grid of expectations. She is in charge of observing 70 secondary and 25 upper elementary educators. Today, the subject of her scrutiny is Mr. Childers, U.S. history teacher and Teach for America alumnus.

Kenney sits at a desk in a rear corner of the room, and flips open her laptop. Childers begins the lesson.

Welcome to the fish bowl that is teacher effectiveness in Colorado. Right now, one of the biggest fish in the bowl is Denver Public Schools.

DPS stands apart from other Colorado districts for its combination of size and magnitude of challenges. Seventy-three percent of its 80,000 students qualify for free- and reduced-priced lunch based on family income. It also stands out because of the work and money it is pumping into LEAP, Leading Effective Academic Practice, the district’s pilot teacher evaluation program, which focuses as much – if not more – on professional development as it does on rating teachers. Other Colorado districts testing out new teacher evaluation models are Jeffco, Eagle, Harrison, Brighton, and Douglas County.

All Colorado districts will be required to implement some form of “educator effectiveness” measures after the passage of Senate Bill 10-191 two years ago. With the help of a three-year, $10 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DPS got a jump start and created its own system.

“What sets us apart is how thoughtful we’ve been,” said Tracy Dorland, deputy chief academic officer for teaching and learning in DPS. “It’s not just a system of evaluation. It’s a system that respects the teaching profession.”

DPS test-drives teacher effectiveness

Key to SB 10-191 are comprehensive teacher evaluations to “provide a basis for making decisions in the areas of hiring, compensation, promotion, assignment, professional development, earning and retaining non-probationary status, dismissal, and nonrenewal of contract.” Most teachers now work under collective bargaining rules that place a greater emphasis on years in the classroom than results. Under SB 10-191, at least half a teacher’s evaluation beginning in 2014-2015 will be based on his or her students’ academic growth as evidenced by test scores and other, yet-to-be-determined academic measures.

With LEAP, DPS is also experimenting with peer observations, principal observations and student feedback. In addition, the district is piloting meetings between teachers and school leaders to discuss a teacher’s “professionalism” – the things a teacher does that don’t always get captured during a classroom visit, such as relationships with colleagues and parents. Built into LEAP is support for teacher improvement: Books to read, videos to watch, online or in-person classes to take – all available to the teacher via Schoolnet.

“There is not a teacher out there in any classroom who doesn’t want to be the best they can be,” said former LEAP spokeswoman Amy Skinner, who is now working for the Colorado Department of Education as Race to the Top communications director. “It’s the hardest job in the world. You’re not doing it if you don’t want to get results for kids. (LEAP) is about giving them more of that support they’ve never had.”

LEAP began with a 16-school pilot in spring 2011, then expanded to 127 district schools this year — 94 percent of all district schools — resulting in 3,800 teachers going through the process.

A centerpiece of LEAP was the hiring of 45 peer observers – trained and experienced educators who have the knowledge and expertise in the same subject area as the teacher they’re evaluating. The $3.8 million price tag of the peer observers comes out of the DPS general fund.

Under the old teacher evaluation system, teachers were rated “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” More nuanced information was provided to teachers, but most ranked “satisfactory” nonetheless. Statistically speaking, the ratings didn’t add up. In 2007-08, DPS principals and assistant principals gave unsatisfactory ratings to 33 out of 2,185 teachers evaluated – or 1.5 percent. And that was actually one of the highest percentages of unsatisfactory ratings in any metro district, according to a report in Education News Colorado.

It remains to be seen whether a similar pattern will emerge with LEAP, which uses numerical ratings against four major areas: Positive classroom culture and climate; effective classroom management; masterful content delivery; and high-impact instructional moves, such as checking for understanding of content and language objectives or differentiating lessons based on ability.

A score of 1 or 2 means the teacher is not meeting expectations; a 3 or 4 means a teacher is approaching expectations; a 5 or 6 signals an effective teacher; and 7 is distinguished.

During the first of three evaluation windows this year, teachers were given numeric scores. In the second window, they weren’t. In the third, numeric scores were used again but the framework had changed. As a result, DPS officials declined to release any of the ratings at this time.

“Until we are able to show more data points, it is unfair to share the observation data,” said Skinner.

In the past, teachers also complained about inconsistency in how principals evaluated them. At one school, a principal might have said a teacher was “top-notch.” But at another school, a different principal gave the same teacher negative reviews. Politics could also become a factor. And observations by principals were not consistent and only happened once every three years.

“It was more about a relationship with an adult as opposed what you did with the kids,” said Pam Shamburg, a Denver Classroom Teachers Association (DCTA) representative on LEAP.

A look at peer observation

At first, many DPS teachers weren’t happy about unannounced visits to their classrooms by peer observers. But LEAP staffers say teachers are warming up to the idea now that they’re getting used to the observers. Of the teachers who participated in LEAP observations in spring 2011, 81 percent reported they would be able to improve their practice based on feedback, and 74 percent said they would speak positively about the observation and feedback experience to colleagues.

This year, trained peer observers visited teachers at least twice, evaluating them against the original 21-indicator rubric and later against a condensed, 12-point rubric. (Check out the revised rubric.)

Candis Hitchcock, 57, a veteran special education teacher at South High School, said she likes the idea of peer observations – even though she was skeptical at first.

“You’re going to be evaluated no matter what,” Hitchcock said. “It’s nice to have someone from outside come in. My observer was wonderful. She taught special ed, too. Just because I have all these years of experience doesn’t mean I know everything.”

But she worries about all the things an observer doesn’t see – like the time spent running a sensitive IEP meeting with parents, or carefully completing mounds of legal paperwork.

“I would love to be observed holding an IEP meeting,” Hitchcock said.

And she’s not sure other parts of her job are captured, either.

“It’s much more than academics,” she said. “I’m a counselor, a mother, a father, a feeder. I take time to be patient with kids if they’re upset. You can’t say, ‘You can’t do that – we’re doing math right now. You can’t cry.’ There are many things they don’t really see us do.”

Shamburg, though, said there are other teachers who have not been too happy about their peer observers – especially if the observers are young and brash and telling a veteran teacher how things should be done.

Building principals also play a key role as to whether teachers embrace the peer observations.

“You can feel it when you go into a building,” Shamburg said. “The (teachers’) attitude is mirrored by the principal. They’re not always comfortable having a second eye.”

Childers’ number comes up

As for Childers, he knew he had one more observation this school year by Kenney. He found out five minutes before her visit. For the next 45 minutes, he would be watched closely.

A timer on a cord dangles from Childers’ neck – his way of making sure he stays track with his lesson plan, which he carries out with military precision. The 20 students sit in clusters, working silently at their desks. They draw pictures and write a sentence to go along with each of four vocabulary words: totalitarianism, fascism, Nazism, and militarism.

Many of his students are English language learners, so images are a key part of building vocabulary.

Kenney occasionally gets up and wanders around the room with her laptop. She listens in on quiet, one-on-one conversations. Sometimes, she asks students questions about what they’re doing, and why.

Childers watches his timer, then moves on to the next segment of the day’s lesson. He instructs students to write down the day’s “content objective.” Today, the objective is to analyze Hitler’s goals for Germany and the reasons for Japanese militarism. He shares stories about his own family members being persecuted in the Holocaust.

A follow-up visit

Kenney is back the next day over Childers’ lunch hour. This time, her visit is no surprise. This is the most delicate part of the LEAP peer observation process. Kenney has to talk to Childers about his teaching in a way that is non-judgmental. She has to keep her opinions out of it, and avoid “should” statements.

They talk about her earlier visit this school year and what he has worked on over the past several months based on Kenney’s first round of feedback. He says he has worked on creating “thoughtful” class groupings, and differentiating assignments. Both agree his classroom management skills are top-notch.

Now, she has to deftly guide him to the conclusion she wants him to reach. She wants to see more passion about the subject matter, more creative ways to engage students in historical events.

“Not a moment is wasted in your class,” she tells him. “While working on things, you supported each kid, gave them feedback on their notes. I saw a difference from last class to this class.”

Kenney asks him to provide more context about the lesson she observed. She wants to know “the big idea.”

He talks about his students being able to write strong, 11-sentence paragraphs, support their opinions, and explain how facts or quotes support certain statements. His first answer is narrower than she wants it to be.

She tries a different tack: Say these kids are all married and have their own kids in high school. They’re now studying World War II. What would these former students – now parents - say about what they learned in Mr. Childers’ class?

Childers pauses, then says students should remember the goals these countries had leading into World War II, the political motivations that led to war and connect them to current or future situations, such as the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Kenney wants more. “In your heart of hearts, what’s really important; what sticks with them?”

“Half of my family is Jewish,” Childers says. “Half escaped; half didn’t. How can these things happen? How did totalitarian regimes come to be? …How can we make sure they don’t happen again in the future?”

In the end, Kenney encourages Childers to go deeper with his lessons. She offers him tangible ideas. She suggests he put students in the role of historian, have them pretend to be journalists on carrier planes when the atomic bomb was dropped. She suggests he have students think about whether they have ever felt repressed and without choices the way people living under totalitarian regimes may feel.

Then she asks Childers how she can do a better job as an observer.

He describes her feedback as “excellent.” He says he liked how she pushed him to think about the big idea, but he’s also a bit frustrated. Considering the amount of time in class and the fact that many students are well below grade level, is it more important to teach a student how to write a topic sentence or emphasize the big picture?

“I think they can do both,” Kenney says, before sending him a link to a book called Reading Like a Historian, along with some tip sheets.

For now, this observation is merely a way to help Childers improve. It has no bearing on his tenure status or movement up the pay scale. But, in 2014, it will – along his principal’s observations of him; a review of his professionalism, which includes how well he knows his students and their personal backgrounds; student test scores; and student feedback, which asks questions such as, ‘Are you always busy in this class?’ or ‘If you don’t understand something, does the teacher help explain it in a different way?’

What’s next for LEAP

The LEAP pilot will continue next year.

The district will use the revised rubric. Teachers complained the first one was too long, and sometimes redundant. The new one is more focused. The new framework also better integrates instructional technology and best practices for linguistically diverse students. Most importantly, Dorland said, the revised framework is now tied to the Common Core Standards.

The length of the observation was also increased based on teacher feedback in the early pilot, from 30 to 45 minutes. Ratings summary sheets are now provided to the teacher in advance of the final wrap-up meeting with the observer to make the meetings as efficient and useful as they can be.

The principal observations have also not been as strong as they should be, with very few teachers actually having been observed twice during the year by a principal, Shamburg said.

LEAP staffers are now starting to put more work into the student outcomes side of the equation (i.e. test scores), to be piloted next year. The tricky part is what measures to use in non-tested subject areas, such as music, art or library.

For Shamburg, a former lawyer turned educator, adding test scores into the mix demonstrates how “politics has overcome common sense.” To the public, it seems straightforward to link test scores to teacher evaluations. But in DPS, for instance, a majority – or about 70 percent of teachers – do not teach classes in which standardized tests are administered, which means the district must figure out what other reliable assessments to use.

Unlike many of his peers, Childers said he supports the idea of linking student achievement to teacher evaluations – the most controversial aspect of SB 10-191 – with conditions.

“If you didn’t have that it would be like having a sales job and none of performance tied to how many sales you made. If there’s not any learning going on, then there’s not any teaching going on.”

But Childers is adamant that the focus needs to be on where the student starts out the school year, and the growth he makes while in a class. It is not fair, Childers said, to apply the same benchmark goals to all students without taking into consideration where they started the school year. Some of his students start off at a third grade reading level.

Another huge piece that needs to be worked out is how each piece of the evaluation will be weighted for each teacher.

“The pieces that will be in the new evaluation system aren’t all there yet,” Shamburg acknowledged.

In 2014-2015 when LEAP becomes the law, things will be different. While no one category would result in a teacher losing non-probationary status or being placed on an improvement plan, an overall score will ultimately be used to determine these and other decisions. However, non-probationary teachers in the “approaching” category would maintain their status even though their overall rating is not in the “effective” range.

Then, there’s the continued cost of LEAP. The Gates grant runs through next summer. The main ongoing expense is the peer observers. There are sure to be debates about how to best spend the $3.8 million it took to hire them.
The LEAP office continues to seek out feedback from teachers through its website.

“We are being deliberately more responsive and more open,” DPS spokesman Mike Vaughn said. “ We want to think about this long and hard, and make sure we take the time to get it right…(People) complain about tenure. But there has not been enough attention paid to how broken the support system for teachers has been.”

Teacher views after first peer observation fall 2011

• 66.8 percent – The observer had the subject knowledge to rate the content of my lesson.

• 70 percent – During the feedback meeting, my observer provided feedback that was appropriate for the content of my lesson/grade-level.

• 70 percent – During the feedback meeting, my observer helped me understand which indicators I need to focus on for growth.

• 71.6 percent – During the feedback meeting, my observer facilitated a collaborative discussion of my teaching.

• 60.7 percent – The Framework is a useful tool for self-reflection about my teaching practice.

•68.7 percent – The feedback experience was positive.

This survey by DPS was based on 1,849 survey responses sent to 3,523 teachers.

Commentary: Colorado can take the learning lead

Fri, 11 May 2012 14:59:00 GMT

Originally posted on EdNewsColorado, May 10th, 2012. Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org
Read here. Written by Amy Slothower and Tony Lewis.

Two proponents of mixing online and in-person instruction say the time is ripe to ramp up such efforts in Colorado.

Public schools in Denver today look an awful lot like they did generations ago. Teachers lecture in front of classes, forcing students to work at the same pace, despite individual needs and interests.

But an emerging group of innovators is designing new school models that use technology to personalize learning, accelerate student achievement and free teachers from old instructional approaches.

These schools are dubbed “blended learning” models because they incorporate a blend of technology and teacher-driven instruction. At some schools, students rotate between online learning labs for basic skill work in math and English, and project-based classroom work with their teachers. At other schools, small groups of students cycle between mini-lessons at computers, tutoring with mentors and teacher-led instruction all within the same classroom.

Denver doesn’t yet have many of these blended models, but Next Generation Learning Challenges, a competition funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides us a chance to become one of the nation’s leading adopters of these high-impact schools.
The initiative, which is housed at EDUCAUSE, has launched a $12 million contest for education innovators who develop promising blended-learning school models for 6th to 12th grade students. Winners can access up to $450,000 to help launch new schools that increase college readiness, use technology to personalize learning experiences for students and can be easily replicated.

Denver has an excellent climate for these types of schools to grow. Local funders such as the Donnell-Kay Foundation have taken the lead and paved the way for blended learning over the past three years by hosting the Blended Learning Summit (concluding next week) bringing experts from around the country together to learn from and develop relationships with. Furthermore, we have a deep pool of top teaching and school leadership talent through programs like Teach For America. And Get Smart Schools is making our state one of the best places in the country to launch outstanding new, autonomous schools.

Some have raised questions about whether computer-based instruction provides students with a rich education, but well-crafted blended learning schools are proving that great teaching and sensible use of technology can lead to outstanding results for kids. For example, at Rocketship schools in California, students get 75 percent of their instruction in traditional, teacher-led classrooms but also have two-hour daily sessions to build reading and math skills with online programs. Because these learning labs reinforce basic skills, teachers can focus more time teaching higher-order thinking and providing personalized instruction. Eighty-seven percent of Rocketship students receive free or reduced-price lunch, and 94 percent are African American or Hispanic. The school’s results are outstanding: 93 percent of students are proficient in math and 75 percent are proficient in English language arts, beating the state averages by 25 percent and 14 percent, respectively.

Next Generation Learning Challenges recently announced the winners of the first of three rounds of the competition. And dozens more have applied for round two. If we want to leverage these national resources to benefit our students, we need to inspire local school leaders and education entrepreneurs to put in their applications for round three early this summer.

The school models that come through this competition will be some of the most innovative, high-potential schools in the country. Let’s work together to ensure that students in Denver benefit from this cutting-edge work.

For more information on the Donnell-Kay Blended Learning Summit and to join the webinar next week, please click here.

Four orphaned bills find homes

Wed, 09 May 2012 21:29:00 GMT

Originally posted on EdNewsColorado, May 9, 2012. Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org
Read here. Written by Todd Engdahl.

Four education bills in danger of dying because of Tuesday night’s House civil unions deadlock have been amended onto other education legislation by the Senate.

The radical changes in the three amended bills will require House approval later in the day.

Here are the bills that missed a key deadline and were effectively killed as standalone measures because of Tuesday night’s stalemate:

Senate Bill 12-172, which would require the State Board of Education to commit Colorado to one of two groups developing multi-state achievement tests in language arts and math.

Senate Bill 12-046, which would eliminate most zero-tolerance school discipline requirements, give school districts more flexibility in discipline and encourage schools to reduce use of expulsions, suspensions and referrals to police.

Senate Bill 12-047, which would provide state funding to districts that chose to administer basic skills testing such as the Accuplacer to high school students.

Senate Bill 12-164, which would modernize state regulation of for-profit colleges that offer bachelors and graduate degrees and add some consumer protections for students.

Here’s what the Senate did this afternoon to save them:

The texts of discipline and Accuplacer bills were added to House Bill 12-1345, the 2012-13 school funding bill, which then got 27-8 final approval.

The content of the multi-state testing bill was added to House Bill 12-1240, an omnibus cleanup bill of various education laws. The revised bill passed 35-0.

And the text of the higher education regulation bill was added to House Bill 12-1155, another higher ed measure that originally dealt with remediation procedures. It passed 35-0.

The amendments were offered by various members of the Senate Education Committee from both parties. There was no debate on any of the changes.

Colorado has relatively strict rules that restrict bill content to the subject listed in a bill’s title. But lawmakers and staff members determined that the titles of the three bills were broad enough to accommodate the orphan measures.

In a related development, an emotional Gov. John Hickenlooper announced this afternoon that he will call a special session of the legislature to reconsider civil unions and perhaps other orphan bills. If the three bills amended by the Senate are approved by the House, there would be no need for those issues, nor any other education issues, to be included in the special session.

The state constitution requires that bills receive preliminary and final floor consideration on different days. All of the orphan bills were scheduled for preliminary consideration Tuesday, meaning they had to pass by midnight in order to receive final votes today, the last day of the 2012 session. A total of 31 bills suffered the same fate, according to our partners at State Bill Colorado.

Senate Bill 12-068, the proposed ban on added trans fats in school foods, did get preliminary House approval Tuesday evening.

House Republican leaders didn’t want to bring the civil unions bill to the floor, where it was expected to pass. The game of political chicken with Democrats lead to a recess that kept representatives off the floor for much of Tuesday evening, running out the clock for civil unions and the other bills.

Key education bills sideswiped

Wed, 09 May 2012 15:26:00 GMT

Originally posted on EdNewsColorado, May 9th, 2012. Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org
Read here. Written by Todd Engdahl.

Four important 2012 education bills have died because of the Colorado House’s late-night impasse over Senate Bill 12-002, the civil unions bill.

They include:

Senate Bill 12-172, which would have required the State Board of Education to commit Colorado to one of two groups developing multi-state achievement tests in language arts and math.

Senate Bill 12-046, which would have eliminated most zero-tolerance school discipline requirements, given school districts more flexibility in discipline and encouraged schools to reduce use of expulsions, suspensions and referrals to police.

Senate Bill 12-047, which would have provided state funding to districts that chose to administer basic skills testing such as the Accuplacer to high school students.

Senate Bill 12-164, which would have modernized state regulation of for-profit colleges that offer bachelors and graduate degrees and added some consumer protections for students.

The discipline and higher education bills were the products of extensive negotiations and development by lawmakers, state officials and interest group, so months of work have been wasted. Failure to pass the bills isn’t necessarily disruptive for state schools or colleges, but it does delay reforms sought by a wide variety of policymakers and groups.

The state constitution requires that bills receive preliminary and final floor consideration on different days. All of these bills were scheduled for preliminary consideration Tuesday, meaning they had to pass by midnight in order to receive final votes today, the last day of the 2012 session. A total of 31 bills suffered the same fate, according to our partners at State Bill Colorado.

Senate Bil 12-068, the proposed ban on added trans fats in school foods, did get preliminary House approval Tuesday evening. The two biggest education bills of the session, the 2012-13 school finance act and the early childhood literacy bill, were not affected by the impasse.

House Republican leaders didn’t want to bring the civil unions bill to the floor, where it was expected to pass. The game of political chicken with Democrats kept representatives off the floor for much of Tuesday evening, running out the clock for civil unions and the other bills.

Some lawmakers are urging Gov. John Hickenlooper to call a special session for consideration of the civil unions bill. It’s unknown if he will do that, or if he will include other issues if he does. Historically special sessions are limited to consideration of one issue, or to very few. The governor’s formal written “call” for a special session limits the subjects to be covered, so crafting a call that includes multiple topics but excludes other issues could be tricky.

Literacy bill moves in Senate

Fri, 04 May 2012 03:53:00 GMT

Originally posted on EdNewsColorado, May 3rd, 2012. Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org
Read here. Written by Todd Engdahl.

The Colorado Senate this afternoon gave preliminary voice vote approval to House Bill 12-1238, the early childhood literacy measure that is the highest profile education bill of the 2012 session.

The measure passed without amendments, despite efforts by Democratic Sens. Evie Hudak of Westminster and Irene Aguilar of Denver to tweak the definition of retention in the bill. The motions prompted a long semantic debate over whether the bill improperly defines retention as an educational “intervention.”

Sen. Rollie Heath, D-Boulder, argued against the amendments. “What this bill is about is trying to get kids to read by the end of the third grade,” he said, “I hope that we don’t get caught up in the semantics of this because that’s not what this bill is about.”

The Senate started to debate the bill at mid-morning, but discussion was delayed until afternoon because copies of a lengthy committee amendment hadn’t been distributed to senators.

After passing the House, what’s now called the Colorado READ Act faced barriers in the Senate, given a skeptical Democratic leadership and lobbying from school district interests who saw the bill as too restrictive and underfunded.

But major amendments approved last week by the Senate State Affairs Committee seemed to meet most of the concerns about the bill. Heath was a major driver behind the amendments.

“We did the best we could to change the tone of this bill so that this is a literacy bill,” Heath said on the floor Thursday.

Here are the key elements of the amended literacy bill:

• A focus on students with a “significant reading deficiency” (to be defined by the State Board of Education). The House version of the bill also covered students with “reading deficiencies,” defined as those reading below grade level but above the level of significant deficiency. With the new focus, the bill is expected to apply to about 24,000 students statewide.

• Use of interest revenue from the state school lands permanent fund to provide about $16 million in per-pupil funding (about $700 per student) to districts working with students who have significant reading deficiencies. The House version of the bill included about $5 million in funding. That’s retained in the Senate version, to be used for professional development grants, putting the total price tag at about $21 million. If the bill passes it would be the first significant education reform bill in the last five years with significant funding. Proposed changes in the bill’s legislative declaration specifically note the need for financial resources.

• Easing of some of the more detailed requirements for parent consultation and notification contained in the House version.

• While the proposed amendments retain specific references to retention as an option for struggling readers, the language is somewhat softened compared to the House version. Superintendent review of retention decisions for third graders remains in the bill, but parents would have veto power over retention of students in kindergarten through second grade.

• Addition of specific interventions, such as enrollment in full-day kindergarten, summer school and tutoring, for K-3 students with reading problems. Districts would have to use those tactics to qualify for the per-pupil funding.
Tax holiday bill squeaks out of committee

After chewing on it for more than an hour, the Senate Finance Committee approved House Bill 12-1069 on a 4-3 vote. The measure is the proposed sales tax holiday for back-to-school purchases.

The bill goes next to the Senate Appropriations Committee, where there are likely to be questions about the estimated $4.5 million state revenue loss that measure would cause. And two Finance members who voted yes, chair Sen. Mike Johnston, D-Denver, and Sen. Keith King, R-Colorado Springs, indicated they still have concerns about the bill.

The finance panel did amend the bill so the holiday would occur during only two years, rather than the five years in the House version of the measure.

The tax holiday would kick off in the first calendar year after state personal income grows by 5.0 percent. That’s expected to happen in 2013, meaning the first holiday would be in 2014. The tax break would cover school supplies not exceeding $50, clothing not exceeding $75 and computers not exceeding $1,000 and would be available during a three-day period every August.

The break applies only to the 2.9 percent state sales tax. Cities and counties could choose whether or not to participate.

Testing bill passes Senate

Thu, 03 May 2012 15:44:00 GMT

Originally posted on EdNewsColorado, May 1st, 2012. Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org
Read here. Written by Todd Engdahl.

Updated 10:15 a.m. - The state Senate voted 31-4 this morning for final passage of Senate Bill 12-172, which would require the State Board of Education to take full membership in one of two national groups developing common tests in language arts and math.
Text of Tuesday story follows.

Sen. Mike Johnston trimmed down his already-short Senate Bill 12-172 Tuesday, and the Senate gave it preliminary approval on a voice vote Tuesday.

The bill would require the State Board of Education to become a governing member of a multistate testing group.

One amendment successfully proposed by the Denver Democrat would allow the board to withdraw after Jan. 1, 2014, from whichever group it joins if the board doesn’t like the tests the group develops.

English and math tests based on the Common Core Standards are being created by two national consortia, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. Colorado now is participating in both but it isn’t a governing member of either. States that join a group’s governing board have a greater say in test development – but they also commit to use that group’s tests, based on the rules of the groups. Most Colorado education leaders favor joining the second group, known as PARCC.

The state board – at least its Republican majority – has been skeptical of Johnston’s bill. At a face-to-face meeting with Johnston and cosponsor Sen. Nancy Spence, R-Centennial, last Friday, some members made it clear they’d be more comfortable, among other things, with an opt-out clause in the proposal.

But after Johnston and Spence left last week’s meeting, the board voted 4-3 to oppose the bill, even if amendments were added (see story).

Johnston’s original bill also contained language encouraging the board to work with other states, if possible, on development of tests such as science and social studies. At Johnston’s request, the Senate removed that language from the bill. He said the language wasn’t necessary because the Department of Education already is involved in such discussions.

Testing has been a nagging issue throughout the 2012 session.

The board last fall requested $26 million to develop a full battery of new state tests to replace the CSAPs, which are obsolete because of new state content standards. The Hickenlooper administration proposed no funding.

The Joint Budget Committee fussed over the issue for months, with members complaining about mixed signals from the board, the governor’s office and the House and Senate education committees.

The legislature finally decided to provide only some $6 million for development of new social studies and science tests, plus Spanish language and special education tests.

Johnston is now optimistic about the bill’s chances in the Republican-controlled House. He told Education News Colorado that he’s signed on Rep. Tom Massey, R-Poncha Springs, as a prime sponsor. Massey, chair of the House Education Committee, has been a central figure on most major education bills this session. Rep. Millie Hamner, D-Summit County, also will be a House sponsor.

Colorado currently is using the transitional TCAP tests but needs new permanent tests to both fully assess students on new state content standards and to implement the educator evaluation law.

Although Johnston described his bill as “Colorado’s long-term assessment plan,” only one thing is certain out of this year’s testing debate. Colorado students will be taking a third year of TCAPs in the spring of 2014, instead of just the two years originally planned.
House GOP wants to intervene in Lobato

A resolution introduced Tuesday in the House would require the legislature to hire its own lawyers and enter the Lobato v. State lawsuit as an amicus curiae (friend of the court).

The measure, House Joint Resolution 12-1023, argues that the Denver District Court’s decision against the state threatens the legislature’s constitutional powers to set the state budget.

The defendants in the case include Gov. John Hickenlooper, the State Board of Education and education Commissioner Robert Hammond but not the legislature. Attorney General John Suthers has appealed the ruling to the Colorado Supreme Court, with his appeal brief due in June.

A victory for the plaintiffs could have massive implications for the state budget. Although the trial court’s ruling was issued in December, the case has received scant mention during the legislative session. (See EdNews’ Lobato archive for background.)

The resolution is sponsored by House Speaker Frank McNulty, R-Highlands Ranch, and 16 other House Republicans. There are no Democrats or senators on the measure (read the resolution).
Key change made in literacy bill

The Senate Appropriations Committee Tuesday morning made a significant amendment to House Bill 12-1238, the proposed early literacy measure. In order to fund interventions for K-3 students with significant reading deficiencies, the bill proposed to use $16 million in interest revenue from the state school lands permanent fund.

Committee chair Sen. Pat Steadman, D-Denver, successfully proposed an amendment that would cap annual literacy revenue at that $16 million, allowing revenues above that to flow into the permanent fund, the body of which can’t be spent. The permanent fund has been flat at about $600 million for some years, a subject of concern for some education groups that would like to see it grow and be able to provide revenue for future education spending.

The committee passed the amended bill on an 8-1 vote.
Union dues bill passes House

The House Tuesday gave 33-32 party-line approval to House Bill 12-1333, a measure that would allow school district employees who are members of unions to have payroll deductions for dues stopped at any time.

Union contracts now typically allow members to withdraw only during a single short period once in the school year.

Teachers’ unions oppose the measure, which isn’t expected to survive in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Use the Education Bill Tracker for links to bill texts and status information.

Verdict still out on school turnarounds

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:49:00 GMT

Originally posted on EdNewsColorado, April 17, 2012. Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org
Read here. Written by Nancy Mitchell.

Editor’s note – Reporters around the country collaborated with the Education Writers Association, Education Week and The Hechinger Report for an analysis of the nation’s massive effort to improve its lowest-performing schools. Education News Colorado was one of the partners.

After two years, the federal program providing billions of dollars to help states and districts close or remake some of their worst-performing schools remains an ambitious work in progress, with roughly 1,200 turnaround efforts under way but still no verdict on its effectiveness.

The School Improvement Grant or SIG program, supercharged by a $3 billion windfall under the federal economic-stimulus program in 2009, has jump-started aggressive moves by states and districts.

To get their share of the money, they had to quickly identify some of their most academically troubled schools, craft new teacher-evaluation systems, and carve out more time for instruction, among other steps.

Some schools and districts spent millions of dollars on outside experts and consultants. Others went through the politically ticklish process of replacing teachers and principals, while combating community skepticism and meeting the demands of district and state overseers.

It’s not at all clear if the federal prescription can cure the most ailing schools and lead to long-term improvements, but preliminary student achievement data for the program offer some promise.

The U.S. Department of Education looked at about 700 of the schools in their second year of the program and found that a quarter of them posted double-digit gains in math during the 2010-11 school year. Another 20 percent showed similar progress in reading.

A collaborative reporting project drawing on the efforts of more than 20 news organizations and affiliated journalists paints a mixed picture of how the SIG program is playing out on the ground.

The major findings show:

States have pulled SIG money from at least a dozen schools that showed anemic progress on early indicators of success, such as teacher and student attendance, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Five schools in Pueblo, Colo., have seen student performance sink even lower after awarding a $7.4 million grant to an outside provider.
A plan for a new teacher-evaluation system in New York City led to a temporary loss in turnaround funding after city officials clashed with the local teachers union.
Schools nationwide, especially those in rural areas, are wrestling with personnel and leadership changes driven by the program’s requirements, along with a mandate to add extra time to the instructional day.

At the same time, the program’s supporters can point to encouraging — though early — developments.

In Louisville, Ky., a handful of long-troubled schools posted double-digit gains in its state math scores after just one year in the program. An elementary school in an isolated valley in Colorado saw a 9-point spike in its state math scores, and smaller gains in other subjects.

Other schools haven’t seen big jumps in achievement yet but are beginning to glimpse a new school culture, including improved discipline and attendance. Some of the best early reviews come from students, who say their schools are calmer and more academically rigorous.

“I feel more safe, and I feel like I’m learning more. They are starting to have challenges for us,” said Jasmine Dukes, a seventh-grader at Friendship Preparatory Academy at Calverton, formerly Calverton Middle School, in Baltimore.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan also sees signs of recovery in schools across the country, even as he cautions that it’s still too early to draw conclusions about the program’s effectiveness.

“Big picture, there’s really significant movement in a very short amount of time, which I think a lot of folks felt wasn’t possible,” Duncan said. But he doesn’t expect overnight success: “This is really, really hard work; there’s a reason the country took a pass on this for a couple of decades.”

All of which argues for caution in assessing the program’s effectiveness so far.

“There’s evidence on both sides of the coin,” said Robert Balfanz, the director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University and a leading researcher on school improvement. “This is not the Oldsmobile of comprehensive school reform. … [This is] a souped-up model coming hard and fast and getting big changes quick. … The big question is whether those changes are going to lead to improvement.”

Funding Gusher: With billions more dollars come tighter strings for schools

The current SIG program is a bolder version of a once-sleepy program created under the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002 to help states turn around their lowest-performing schools. In its original form, the program never topped $500 million in federal funding — less than one-half of 1 percent of current federal education spending overall.

But in 2009, federal lawmakers — in passing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and with little debate — poured an additional $3 billion into SIG.

That sent districts scrambling for a share of the three-year competitive grants, worth up to $2 million annually to perennially struggling schools.

With the flood of cash came new, tighter strings. Eligible schools — identified through a complex, multi-tiered process — are among what the Education Department often describes as a state’s bottom 5 percent academically. Schools taking the money have to adopt one of four controversial improvement models. In some cases, at least half of a school’s teaching staff must be replaced. A school might be converted into a charter school — or even shut down. And no matter which option is chosen, a school’s principal must be removed, unless that person has been on the job for under three years.

Federal officials defend that prescriptive approach. They say that, in the past, states had failed to pick rigorous turnaround options — such as taking over a school or turning it into a charter — when given a broader menu of choices.

“Schools literally got worse,” said Duncan. “The children that need the most help, the majority of them, got less help than before. That was absolutely crazy to me; that’s what
I was fighting against” in overhauling the SIG program.

So far, the department has examined results for roughly 700 of the 850 schools that joined the program in 2010-11, and it plans to release more information on student results later this year. During the first year of the program, the proportion of students who were proficient in math or reading went up in roughly 60 percent of SIG schools, Duncan said.

But some state and local leaders still chafe at what they see as a heavy-handed federal approach.

On required reform models

“It’s too restrictive. They mandated these models before they even researched them,” said Keith Rheault, who served more than a decade as Nevada’s superintendent of public instruction, before retiring on April 2nd. “We’re testing it out.”

From the get-go, the program has been reviled on Capitol Hill as Exhibit A for those arguing against federal overreach in K-12 education. Congressional critics—Democrats and Republicans alike—assail what they see as arbitrary staffing requirements, a lack of options for rural schools, and a wobbly research base. The program is almost certain to get an extreme makeover, and its funding remains in jeopardy.

Still, a majority of urban school district officials think the program has the potential to deliver lasting change to long-foundering schools, according to a survey by the Council of the Great City Schools, an organization in Washington, D.C., that represents the nation’s urban school districts.

Some state leaders are upbeat as well. “Overall, I’m optimistic and positive about the grants,” said Mark Coscarella, assistant director in the Office of Education Improvement and Innovation at the Michigan Department of Education. “I think we’ve seen schools really take on the challenge of making some really important improvements.”

Time Crunch: Some schools got money just weeks before school year began

Schools have made big changes against a tight clock, a consequence of the program’s genesis: the 2009 stimulus package, which sought to pump job-boosting federal money into the economy. Although the grants run for three years, some school districts got their money just weeks before the start of the 2010-11 school year.

That left many districts with little time to find principals or teachers and sell the reforms to the community. A report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, criticized the federal Education Department for taking too long to process applications, which did not give districts and schools enough time to figure out the program’s tricky framework.

Local school leaders say they are still recovering from the crunch.

“There’s a lot to do in a short period of time,” said Philip Yaccick, principal of the Weston Preparatory Academy, a charter school in Detroit, which received a $1.8 million SIG grant. “In an ordinary situation, there’s a little more time to create the change, but then also [to] implement and solidify the change.”

But federal officials defend the accelerated timeline from both a job-creation and school-turnaround standpoint.

“Our children had waited too long. We realized we should not — we could not — wait any longer,” said Jason Snyder, deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Personnel Hurdles: Schools scramble with requirement to replace staff

By far, districts and schools have had the toughest time with the SIG program’s human resources requirements, which demand big changes in how schools deal with staff under all four of the federal models.

Sheridan, Colo., fourth-grade teacher Julie Westing is in her tenth year of teaching but her first year at Fort Logan Elementary, a SIG school.

Even the most flexible of those models — “transformation,” the one chosen by nearly three-quarters of participating schools — requires districts to devise teacher-evaluation systems that take student performance into account.

The task has proven so difficult that last August, the federal Education Department gave states and districts until the start of the 2013-14 school year to have the systems fully implemented for use in teacher compensation and retention decisions. But the process has been rocky: Earlier this year, New York state for a time withheld SIG money from New York City when the city teachers union and the district struggled to reach agreement on an evaluation system.

Under a number of models, districts and schools have struggled to replace long-serving teachers and principals. More than half of participating large urban districts said they didn’t have enough time to hire qualified staff, according to the urban schools group survey.

Some schools using the second-most popular option — “turnaround,” which calls for getting rid of at least half a school’s staff — scrambled to fill slots, or hired scores of novice teachers. For example, an analysis byThe Courier-Journal, of Louisville, found that 60 new hires across seven SIG schools, or more than 40 percent, were new to the profession.

To lure qualified educators, some districts, including Nevada’s Clark County, spent SIG funding on signing bonuses to attract experienced teachers. Indiana and other states turned to alternative training programs such as Teach For America, a New York City-based nonprofit organization that places new college graduates in under-resourced schools. And in Chicago, some schools are partnering with the Academy for Urban School Leadership, where prospective educators spend a “residency” year working with a master teacher.

Some schools kept most of their teaching forces, but used their SIG funds for extensive professional development. Chicago’s Hancock High School spent part of its grant on three “interventionists” — master teachers in reading, math and writing who teach demonstration lessons and work with students and teachers individually.

“When you have a brand-new set of teachers, it’s difficult to know how it will play out,” said Pam Glynn, the Hancock principal. “They may be well-versed in content, but may come from a different socioeconomic group and may struggle to connect with the kids.”

Rural schools’ struggle

The nation’s rural schools, which account for about a fifth of SIG schools overall, have opted mainly for the flexible “transformation” model, which doesn’t call for a big staffing shake-up, but requires schools to replace the principal, create new teacher-evaluation systems and add learning time to the school day.

“We’re not Denver,” said George Welsh, superintendent of the 600-student Center Consolidated School District, which has a single elementary school. “We didn’t think that just firing half of our teachers and hiring whatever was available out there was necessarily going to be a higher-quality option than what we currently have.”

In some cases, schools have promised to hire instructional coaches and other support staff, only to find a dearth of qualified applicants, said Caitlin Scott, a consultant for the Center on Education Policy, a research organization in Washington that has closely studied SIG implementation in Idaho, Maryland and Michigan.

“The money doesn’t create new people,” she said. “The problem of staffing a hard-to-staff school is more complicated, and we haven’t really solved that problem yet.”
Management Demands: Some principals shuffled from one school to another

Finding principals with track records in turnarounds has also been tough. In some cases, districts shuffled principals from one SIG school to another — in New York City, the new leader for Grover Cleveland High School came from Queens Vocational High School, another school getting federal improvement funds.

And in other places, jobs sat vacant while districts searched for the right candidate. DePue High School, in the tiny town of DePue, Ill., didn’t find a new principal until its second year in the program. Baltimore, which brought in outside groups to manage five of its seven SIG schools under the little-used “restart” option, saw a big turnover in principals: Two of those schools went through three principals in the first year, while another had its principal replaced mid-year.

Some local leaders remain skeptical of the principal-removal requirement.

“I question the research behind that particular element,” said Barbara VanSweden, the superintendent of the Fitzgerald School District, in the metropolitan Detroit area. “I look at our situation and the fact that our principal has begun to make improvements in the area of student achievement.”

But others see the approach as promising. More than half of 46 state Title I directors—who oversee programs for disadvantaged students—said that replacing the principal was a key element to improving student achievement in “transformation” and “turnaround” schools, according to a survey by the Center on Education Policy.

Juggling the Schedule: Extended learning time difficult to implement

Even interventions with broader political support — such as adding more learning time to the school day — have bumped up against realities such as teacher contracts and bus schedules. Some schools have simply juggled instructional time already in their schedules.

Other schools funneled their dollars into before- or after-school programs. Memorial Middle School, in Orlando, Fla., now has a “zero” period at the start of the day, a time when students can come an hour early and work on reading and math skills using computer programs, or finish homework. The school also offers Saturday classes.

Still other schools have added time to the regular day — though sometimes not much. Weston Preparatory Academy, in Detroit, tacked 15 minutes onto its school day. West Seattle Elementary School in Washington state used its SIG grant to add four days to the school year and an extra 15 minutes every day.

“Some people might say, ‘Oh, 15 minutes, that’s nothing,’ ” said the Seattle school’s principal, Vicki Sacco. “But every moment counts.”

Paying Outsiders: Results in Pueblo, elsewhere raise questions about consultants

Faced with the technical and logistical challenges of putting $3 billion in SIG money to use on a tight deadline, states have enlisted an array of consultants, including for-profit companies, nonprofit turnaround specialists and postsecondary institutions.

But tracking that cash — and determining whether schools have gotten their money’s worth — remains daunting. The federal government does not tally how private educational consultants have benefited from the turnaround windfall, nor do most states, according to an analysis published by The Denver Post in February. In about 15 states that agreed to tally such spending, an average of roughly 25 percent of all SIG money went to private consultants.

In Colorado — one of the few states willing to do such a tally — consultants took home $9.4 million, or 35 percent of the state’s $26.6 million in SIG money in the past two years. That’s paid for instructional coaches for teachers, leadership coaches for principals, analysts to pore over student data, and pricey professional-development seminars on changing school culture.

Even some contractors who offer services to SIG schools have raised alarm bells about the lack of accountability for outside groups.

“These schools require truly comprehensive services, from instructional to operational support,” said Jennifer Shea, a senior program manager at the School Turnaround Group, part of the Boston-based Mass Insight Education, which is working with six states on turnarounds. “Very few organizations currently have the capacity do this work. … I don’t think these types of providers necessarily have the wrong intentions, but we need stricter standards for how partners are being selected and monitored.”

The program has seen some well-publicized stumbles along the way. Several news organizations, for example, have looked at the experience of one consultant working in SIG schools in Colorado, the New York City-based Global Partnership Schools.
GPS was founded by Rudy Crew, a former head of the New York City and Miami school systems, and by Manuel Rivera, a former superintendent of the Rochester, N.Y., schools. Mr. Crew left the company last fall. The company operates SIG schools in Baltimore; Bridgeport, Conn.; and Pueblo, Colo.

In Pueblo, for example, where GPS has a $7.4 million contract, student performance slipped further at five of the six schools the company operates, The Denver Post reported.

At the GPS-operated school in Baltimore, Garrison Middle School, nearly every indicator of quality has dropped since GPS took over in 2010, The Baltimore Sun found.

But GPS seems to have had much more success at Harding High School in Bridgeport, where early indicators, like attendance and school climate, have improved, according to staff and students, The Connecticut Mirror reported.

In an email to Education Week, Rivera said that turning around a school is a lengthy process, and that states shouldn’t expect big changes in student achievement overnight.

“Some of the most-respected researchers in America concur that transforming or turning around a chronically low-performing school is a multiyear process,” he stated.
States also have taken some steps to address provider quality. Fourteen states have offered districts an approved list of outside providers, according to the CEP survey of Title I directors.

And some states and districts are beginning to rework their relationships with consultants. Indiana is revisiting its approach after a number of school districts switched consultants or severed their relationships in favor of providing services in-house.

“We don’t want anything off the shelf from them,” said Jim Larson, the state’s director for school improvement and turnaround. “We want them to work for the schools. We’re asking, ‘How can you be an extra set of eyes in the classroom?’ Then we’re shaping the scope of their services around schools’ needs.”

Snyder, the Education Department’s SIG chief, said that districts have brought in outside providers to help with the “challenging work” of turning around schools.
The program “gives districts the flexibility, through a rigorous screening process, to seek outside help that will meet their local needs,” Snyder said. “And on the rare occasion that an external provider doesn’t work out, we have seen districts end that relationship and find another solution.”

Future in Doubt: Turnaround program on thin ice with Congress

Meanwhile, the turnaround program is on thin ice on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are sympathetic to those clamoring for greater local flexibility on turnarounds, including teachers unions, principals’ organizations, and advocates for district and state officials.
Looking ahead

“But the important question is: If this all goes away, can we keep up the momentum?”
– Baltimore principal

“We’re concerned that locking into a specific set of models might hinder innovation in the school-turnaround space,” said Peter Zamora, director of federal relations for the Council of Chief State School Officers, in Washington, D.C.

The Obama administration has made its vision of the School Improvement Grant program — with its four signature models — a top priority in proposals to rewrite the NCLB law. But the headwinds are strong.

A U.S. Senate committee, as part of its push to overhaul that law, has approved a change that would let states come up with their own improvement strategies and submit them to the U.S. Secretary of Education for approval. Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have sought to defund the program, and the House education committee recently approved a bill that would wipe it out entirely.

Even if the program survives, it seems likely that the nation’s lowest-performing schools will never see another turnaround bonanza like the stimulus law’s $3 billion in SIG money.

That has local officials already worrying about what may happen when the dollars disappear.

“The challenge for me is to create structures that will sustain over time, so when the money goes away, we can still do it,” said Lionel Jackson, Jr., principal of Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts High, in Baltimore. “But the important question is: If this all goes away, can we keep up the momentum?”

A national effort
This story was produced by Education Week, The Hechinger Report, and the Education Writers Association. Additional reporting was contributed by Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel, Sarah Karp of Catalyst Chicago, Brian Rosenthal of the Seattle Times, Nancy Mitchell of Ed News Colorado, Liz Bowie and Erica Green of the Baltimore Sun, Paul Takahashi of the Las Vegas Sun, Jennifer Jordan of the Providence Journal, Jennifer Brown of the Denver Post, Scott Elliott of the Indianapolis Star, Antoinette Konz of the (Louisville) Courier-Journal, Rachel Cromidas and Philissa Cramer of GothamSchools, and Lori Higgins of the Detroit Free Press.

Denver Public Schools can better improve through charter schools, study says

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:25:00 GMT

Originally posted on DenverPost.com, April 2, 2012. Copyright © DenverPost.com
Read here. Written by Yesenia Robles.

Read the full report on the Donnell-Kay website here.

Denver Public Schools may be able to more quickly improve performance through charter schools than by using federal turnaround strategies for the entire system, according to a report out today.

The study by the nonprofit Donnell-Kay Foundation compared data from 36 schools that have opened since 2007.

"One thing that's clear about what's working is high-performing charters," said Alexander Ooms, a Donnell-Kay Foundation senior fellow and the report's author.

"A lot of this is preliminary and early, but I am heartened to see some school improvements," Ooms said.

The "Great Expectations, Mixed Results" report suggests Denver Public Schools should set higher and more specific expectations for new schools so there is a way to measure success.

It also recommends ending turnaround strategies that don't seem to be working.

DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg defended the district's expectations, pointing out that the district's school performance framework — a sort of annual report card for schools — sets a performance bar for every school, new and existing.

"A lot is judged by SPF," Boasberg said. "The metrics there are very clear. We're looking at several dozen measures through the framework."

The data in the study showed variations within school types, but overall found that new charter schools — managed autonomously but held accountable by the district — had higher scores than the district averages.

About 68 percent of the charter school scores were better than the district average when compared by grade level.

Innovation schools — those that have waived some rules and regulations to earn greater autonomy — had more mixed results. About 61 percent of scores were better than the district average, while 39 percent were the same or worse.

But schools that were turned around or redesigned — usually under federal turnaround status for poor performance and where leadership and half of the staff must be replaced — scored the same or worse than the district average 68 percent of the time.

Boasberg said the data is the same nationwide and said that DPS has opted for introducing new schools and phasing out underperforming schools instead of doing turnarounds at West High School and Montbello High School recently.

The report also highlighted the ability to replicate a school as being key.

"There are examples of the highest performing charter schools that are able to replicate and do so well, but there are also many good district schools that the district should try to expand," Ooms said.

Boasberg said the district has done some of that in new schools and cited the Noel Community Arts School as a new version of Denver School of the Arts.

"The most important thing in school success is not the label or whether it's a core knowledge or arts school," Boasberg said. "It's do you have great teachers and a strong culture of collaboration and high expectations."

DPS’ SchoolChoice worked – for most

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:23:00 GMT

Nearly 70 percent of the 23,000 families who participated in Denver Public Schools’ new streamlined enrollment process got into their top choice schools, DPS leaders announced today.

Meanwhile, 80 percent got into their first or second choice school and 83 percent got a spot in their first, second or third choice.

It was unclear whether the participation in school choice increased this year over previous years, but several parents interviewed said the system seemed more fair and easier to navigate – with less gaming of the system by well-connected parents.

Christine Walvarens, 45, who lives in southeast Denver, succeeded in getting her son into popular East High School.

“For us, it actually was a very smooth process, but I did read everything pretty carefully,” Walvarens said. “It was easy and transparent. I feel it is actually much more fair this way.”

Still, the system didn’t work well for everyone. And many parents whose children didn’t get into schools their siblings attend said the system was anything but fair.

169 families fail to get into top five choices

Some 169 Denver families – 108 at the kindergarten level – didn’t get into any of the five choices they were asked to place on their applications. Several parents interviewed also reported siblings not getting into the same schools as their brothers and sisters.

Gabriella Cavallero has one little girl who will be going into kindergarten next year. She took mornings off from work to tour schools, attend open houses, talk to principals and observe students in class. She settled on five schools she believed would be good fits for her daughter, and set about ranking them. Then, she submitted her form.

“I know I was choosing schools that didn’t have a lot of slots … but isn’t that going to be the case if you’re researching good schools?” she said.

Her daughter didn’t get into any of them.

Miguel Oaxaca, parent of two DPS students and a member of the education committee of Metro Organizations for People (MOP), said he had one parent complain that her son had been enrolled in a school she didn’t choose. A few other parents griped about not getting into coveted East High School.

He also said not all schools did everything they could to get the word out to Latino families about the new choice process.

“In the beginning, there was a little confusion, but after a few weeks, it was getting better,” Oaxaca said.

Not everyone will be happy with the unforgiving nature of a lottery, and there are bound to be snafus in a new system serving an 80,000-student urban district. But district officials said they were pleased with participation in SchoolChoice.

“We are thrilled to see such a strong response from parents, which is a clear testament to the progress our schools are making,” Boasberg said in a Feb. 23 statement.

In Cavallero’s case, the district told her to consider listing a new batch of schools and go through the second round of SchoolChoice. But Cavallero doesn’t see the point.

“The process – I don’t know what it’s been like in the past – was incredibly stressful, and time-consuming and work-intensive,” Cavallero said. “I do freelance work, and get paid for the time I am working. I had to take off a lot of time because I wanted to be an informed parent.”

Non-sanctioned DPS choice Facebook page pops up
Stories like Cavallero’s are flooding neighborhood list-serves and mommy blogs. A mom in Highlands, Lauren Wolf, even set up a Facebook page as a place for DPS parents to vent about their choice experiences. By Monday afternoon, it had 118 “likes.”

Proponents are still trying to determine whether the new, one-stop-shop SchoolChoice system, which included several information sessions in English and Spanish citywide and was supported by a coalition of community partners led by Get Smart Schools, drew more families into the process.

But DPS spokeswoman Kristy Armstrong cautioned there is no way to compare participation to that of previous years.

“The main reason we did SchoolChoice is that it was such a complicated system,” Armstrong said. “There were literally 62 different forms and time-lines. This year, it was one process.”

Across the district, 82 percent of current students who will be entering “transition” grades next year – kindergarten, sixth and ninth grades – participated in SchoolChoice this year. And, in general, 40 percent of the district’s 81,500 students attend a school that is not their neighborhood school.

Armstrong said the district has received positive feedback on the new system, but she acknowledged frustration by parents of younger children.

“We’ve heard about families wanting to get into preschool programs and full-day kindergarten,” she said. “We have limited funding for preschool, and the state only pays for a half day of kindergarten. We are not near close to where we need to be to meet demand.”

A supply and demand problem
The fundamental problem is there just aren’t enough seats in the most sought-after schools. Yet there are openings at lower-performing schools.

The answer, according to Boasberg, is for parents to get involved now in their neighborhood schools – through high school – even if their kids are toddlers or preschoolers. The other answer is money: Money for teachers, new schools and expanded capacity at popular schools.

A committee is meeting now to determine whether Denver voters might be willing to open their wallets for this purpose again in November. Boasberg shared these options with Wolf and another mom Thursday in a meeting arranged by 9NEWS.

That’s all good, Wolf said, but she – and other parents – believe the choice process itself needs to be tweaked. For instance, siblings should get the same priority ranking in a choice as a neighborhood student, Wolf believes, since a child who enrolls in a choice school forfeits his or her neighborhood school slot.

“This is the first year there wasn’t room to capture the siblings,” Wolf said. “We have 10 families at Brown (Elementary) with siblings in (early childhood education) who got on a wait list.”

She also doesn’t believe the district is doing enough to handle the population boom in northwest Denver, largely made up of young families.

Wolf says the new choice system, which is now operated entirely through the district’s choice office, didn’t work as well for parents in her neighborhood. Previously, each school handled its own process and deadlines. And while it was still the same lottery system, it seemed parents were able to work with principals to come up with solutions.
Wolf said Brown’s principal, Suzanne Loughran, requested additional kindergarten seats and it looks like that will happen, so it seems her younger daughter will be able to stay at Brown with her big sister. Loughran could not be reached for comment. Even though her situation may be solved, Wolf said that was not the case for many other DPS parents.

“With the district taking control out of local schools, and putting it in a centralized office, it led to a lot more confusion and questions,” Wolf said.

Commentary: Quality is the next phase in reform

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:12:00 GMT

This commentary was submitted by the leaders of four education advocacy groups: Van Schoales, A+ Denver; Moira Cullen, Democrats for Education Reform, Paul Lhevine, Stand for Children Colorado and Chris Watney, Colorado Children’s Campaign.

The future of our state lies directly with this generation of Colorado students. Always a trailblazer in education reform, Colorado is now entering a new phase in which school quality is paramount over both school type and educational program. As we move forward in our quest to provide a quality public education for our students, it is imperative that Colorado keeps a laser focus on school quality, which will drive student achievement for all kids.

Initially, education reform efforts focused on confronting an industrial school model, unchanged over almost a century, in which students were assigned to a single local school and tracked into groups: simple technical skills, a basic high school diploma, and an elite few bound for college.

What happened? Change. Jobs changed, as more positions require independent thought and analysis – skills learned in higher education. Students changed, as demographic shifts brought increased diversity to our public schools. Personnel changed, as professional opportunities widened for ambitious and talented women who previously had few options other than teaching. Families changed, as both the composition and roles in the home shifted.

What did not change was the one-size-fits-all school model. So, the initial phase of education reform ushered in a variety of public school options (traditional, magnet, charter, and innovation) that now provided various instructional programs, such as core knowledge and language immersion, and a changing environment that would eventually cultivate a focus on quality.

Colorado has also led the nation in creating an academic accountability system that allows schools to track the academic progress of individual students over time. This ability to measure the academic growth of students in conjunction with an increasing variety of public school models provided a new and valuable understanding of school quality across our state.

What has surfaced is that no single school type or program guarantees success.

Student data shows that the top ranked schools in Colorado, the schools showing the most progress in driving student achievement, include schools of all shapes and sizes – urban, rural, and suburban, charter, magnet, and traditional, high poverty and affluent schools. We’ve learned that students can achieve in a multitude of school settings, and thus we must demand that all of our schools, regardless of structure, are providing a quality education.

So what does this all mean? It means that parents, school districts, boards of education, and community groups must base their actions regarding schools first, foremost, and fundamentally on quality.

A focus on school quality helps us to avoid the soft bigotry of low expectations by asking the best from all schools, regardless of their students’ circumstances. The proof of student success allows us to sidestep the inherent personal biases of teachers, parents and communities who find it difficult to admit their schools are failing kids. And, when any school is not providing the quality education that leads to student success, we must demand change.

If we have learned anything, it is that there is no magic bullet of program or policy that will suddenly cause public education to flourish. We need the very best of all types of schools and educational programs, so that we no longer have the worst of any.

Quality first.

Commentary: “Drive” improvements to Denver Plan

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:18:00 GMT

This commentary was submitted by Jason Callegari, policy director for A+ Denver, a citizens group that advocates for education reform in Denver Public Schools.

In 2010, Daniel Pink wrote a book “Drive” that explores motivation, where it comes from and how to maintain it. For the cliff notes version of the book, tune into the TED talk that he delivers on the topic here.

Pink spends a good amount of the book looking at motivation in the workplace, within businesses and at school. In the end, he questions our long-held belief in the value of extrinsic motivators, namely monetary reward. There is little question that money, praise and prestige act as strong motivators and drive better output(s) in certain left brain-oriented fields. But Pink suggests, and I would agree, these carrot and stick motivators and the desire for material gain are overly simplistic and, in fact, the wrong tools to use to cultivate the drive for success in the field of education.

In fact, Denver Public Schools, teachers (DCTA) and voters partnered to implement a pay-for-performance program in Denver, which has seen results that are at best inconclusive. I don’t think that this is surprising. Of course many teachers would enroll in a program enabling them to increase their salary, but this doesn’t mean that this increased salary motivates a large percentage to do more than they currently are in the classroom. Teachers are already working hard.

The more thought-provoking section of the book, and what seems to align more directly with education, is the section where Pink explores the relevance of three factors of motivation: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. In his TED talk, he defines these as:

Autonomy – the urge to direct our own lives (or our school and classroom)
Mastery – the desire to get better and better at something that matters
Purpose – yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

These intrinsic motivators have driven people for centuries and I would argue that they are the drivers of teachers and leaders in all of our districts, much more so than salary.

These motivators are congruent with the Theory of Action, Performance Empowerment, outlined in the Denver Plan. One would assume that this could be a moment of relief; the strategic plan and the motivations that we’d like to target have aligned.

But as the new Policy Director of A+ Denver, I have recently been involved in a critique of the Denver Plan the results of which were summed up quite nicely in A+’s letter to the board. In the letter, A+ asks the school board and district leadership to redraft the Denver Plan and lists five main critiques:

Redraft the Plan to match the theory of action;
Add a section that addresses math and literacy;
Improve goals and their corresponding accountability measures;
Redraft the Plan to match current priorities;
Add recruitment, training and support of school leaders.

If we are to believe Mr. Pink, then the Denver Plan should be a document that speaks to the collective purpose of teachers and the district while seeking to increase school and teacher autonomy in smart ways. The Denver Plan should also speak to the ability or inability of the district to augment teacher skills guiding them toward mastery.

I’m not sure that the Denver Plan, in its current iteration, is this plan. And while autonomies are being pursued at the school level through innovation schools, we don’t have enough data to show whether this has been a smart use of autonomy. It is my hope that, with a redraft of the Denver Plan, the district can move closer to a plan that aligns what drives teachers and schools with its plan.

We’ve heard positive feedback from a number of the district board members as well as superintendent Tom Boasberg, and they have agreed take a closer look at these critiques. I hope they do.

Duncan talks reform, "green" schools

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 20:50:00 GMT

Visiting Denver on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan hailed the education system in Colorado for its spirit of “tough-minded collaboration,” in which people are working together and “there is a real sense of trust.”

Duncan made his remarks this morning during a town hall discussion at the Denver School of Science and Technology-Green Valley Ranch campus, the first of several public appearances on his calendar for his visit to the metro area on day two of what has been declared Colorado Literacy Week.

Joining Duncan at DSST were Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia, state Commissioner of Education Robert Hammond and Denver Public Schools Superintendent Tom Boasberg.

After brief prepared remarks, Duncan answered questions for about 30 minutes from an audience of several hundred students, educators and education officials.

Brother Jeff Fard, who runs a cultural center based in the Five Points neighborhood, asked Duncan what is being done to address the ethnic achievement gaps in public education, or whether a discussion of racial issues was “a taboo subject.”

“We have to talk about race,” said Duncan. “We can’t have anything that is taboo or off the table. When you talk about achievement gap, by definition, we have to talk about race. I wish there was an easy answer. There isn’t one.”

Duncan said any solution has to be multi-faceted, starting with greater investment in early-childhood education, to improve kindergarten readiness, as well as a greater focus on “wrap-around” programs, enrichment opportunities that will keep children in school once they get there.

And, he said, “We have to get the most talented and effective teachers and principals into those communities. In many communities, there have been incentives for the most talented to go to the wealthier communities and no incentive to get them to go to the communities who need them the most.” That, he said, needs to be reversed.

One young male student asked for the secretary’s thoughts about paving the way to higher education for undocumented students – an issue Colorado is tackling with the legislature’s consideration of Senate Bill 12-015, the so-called ASSET bill.

“I think right now as a country we’re just crazy on this issue,” said Duncan, who said it was “insane” to create roadblocks to college after educating undocumented students at from kindergarten through high school.

“I have been desperately frustrated by the lack of progress we have had on this in Congress,” he added. “This is one where right now, quite honestly we don’t have the support in Congress to get the right thing done. We need their talents in this country. We are cutting off our nose to spite our face.”

Garcia used the occasion to announce a program dubbed One Book 4 Colorado, an initiative aimed at providing one new book to every four-year-old in Colorado, and simultaneously supporting parents as their child’s first teacher. The program was developed in partnership between Reach Out and Read, the Colorado State Library, public libraries, the private sector and numerous foundations.

Duncan celebrates environmental literacy

After the town hall, Duncan stopped by the Green Schools National Conference to promote the department’s Green Ribbon Schools program and to praise environmentally-conscious educators who he said have toiled in obscurity for too long.

“For too long, greening our schools, developing environmental literacy, have been afterthoughts in education,” he told the gathering of several hundred students, educators and others at the Colorado Convention Center. “This gathering today is a powerful testament that the green movement is no longer a sidelight in schools.”

In 2001, fewer than 19,000 American high school students took the Environmental Science Advanced Placement exam. Last year, nearly 100,000 did.

Duncan said the evidence shows that investing in eco-friendly school buildings and programs doesn’t have to mean de-funding other programs.

“You’re helping to debunk the zero-sum myth,” he said.

In fact, green schools use roughly a third less energy than conventionally-designed schools, and on average save $100,000 per year on operating costs.

“That’s enough to hire two new teachers or purchase 5,000 new textbooks,” he said.

He noted that it isn’t just new school buildings that are racking up big savings on energy bills. Even old buildings can take simple steps to promote environmental stewardship and save money in the process.

Indeed, Boasberg, who introduced Duncan, noted that by replacing less-efficient water fixtures, DPS has managed to reduce water consumption by 40 percent, saving more than 50 million gallons of water annually.

Duncan said that environmentalists have changed the culture of American schools, just as they’ve changed the culture of America.

He noted that in 2001, fewer than 19,000 American high school students took the Environmental Science Advanced Placement exam. Last year, nearly 100,000 did.

“That’s an amazing movement in the right direction,” he said.

Duncan said the Green Ribbon Schools program, recently launched to recognize schools that excel in promoting healthy and environmentally-friendly learning environment, came about because schools requested it. He said it marks a sleeker, more partnership-driven model of initiative.

“This represents a departure from the usual way of doing things,” he said. “We didn’t have to wait for a dysfunctional Congress to act, and we didn’t have to hire a lot of new staff to administer this program. You didn’t ask us to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we brought together some underused resources into one coherent program.”

Q and A with Duncan on current events

With the news that three children are now dead in the wake of the shooting at Chardon High School in Ohio, Duncan commented on the tragedy in a brief morning press conference:

“Obviously, your worst nightmare. My wife and I have two children in public schools and you never, ever, ever want to see something like this happen. So there will obviously be a thorough investigation. Our team has been in touch with local school
officials there, to provide whatever assistance we can. But it’s a devastating tragedy.”

One reporter asked Duncan why such incidents are happening “more and more.”
“We actually just had a recent report that came out that said school violence is down so big picture, trends are going the right way; but obviously any incident is unacceptable, and when these kinds of things happen, it’s absolutely devastating.

“It’s something we have to learn from, we have to be more vigilant, we have to push hard to reduce bullying and to understand what’s going on there. Folks will be looking very, very carefully at what can be learned here, so that these kinds of things never happen again.”

On a day when Republicans in Michigan and Arizona were going to the polls in those states’ presidential primaries, Duncan was asked to respond to candidate Rick Santorum’s recent remarks on the campaign trail that President Obama was a “snob” because he “wants everybody in America to go to college.”

Duncan didn’t even let the question finish, cutting it short with, “I’m not political, so I’m not going to comment.”

Then he commented:
“Everyone here knows that the unemployment rate for college-educated folks is less than half that of those who don’t have a college degree,” he said. “Lifetime earnings are dramatically higher.”

His non-comment comment continued:
“There are no good jobs – none – in the legal economy today for a high school drop-out, nothing out there. And there are almost none if you just have a high school diploma,” Duncan said.

“Some form of higher education – four-year universities, two year community colleges, trade, technical, vocational training, whatever your dream, whatever your passion is, whatever your interests, some form of higher education has to be the goal for … every single young person around the country.”

Denver Plan needs overhaul: A+

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:44:00 GMT

Denver Public Schools’ strategic blueprint, the Denver Plan, is in urgent need of substantial revision, the A+ citizens committee told the school board Thursday night.

“We are asking you to revise and update the (Denver Plan) with a clear set of goals and a well-defined set of strategies that will drive academic improvement,” the A+ board said in a letter to the Board of Education.

“We are concerned that the Denver Plan does not address the need for ongoing systems to measure the impact of the plan’s strategies, programs or initiatives throughout the district,” the letter said.

Jesus Salazar, chair of the A+ Denver subcommittee on the Denver Plan presented the A+ Denver letter to the board.

“Although the plan listed out a set of district initiatives and focus areas they did not clearly articulate the road map of how you get to success…It makes it hard for us to build public will, and advocate for the necessary reforms,” Salazar said during brief remarks.

A+ Denver has laid out a five-part plan for redrafting the Denver Plan:

Improve goals and their corresponding accountability measures.
Redraft the plan to reflect current priorities.
Redraft the plan to match the theory of action.
Add a section that addresses subjects other than math and literacy.
Add recruiting, training and support of school leaders.

“The goals (of the plan) themselves are a disjointed list of deliverables,” the letter said.

“The fact that so few of them are within reach, even though many are quite modest in aspiration, must suggest that the strategies employed to achieve them are inadequate in design or in practice.”

DPS spokeswoman Kristy Armstrong said Superintendent Tom Boasberg had not yet read the report from A+ Denver, and would therefore not comment on it.
Peña: “It needs to be significantly changed & improved”

Former Denver Mayor Federico Peña, also a member of the A+ Denver board of directors, was not able to attend Thursday night’s meeting. But earlier in the day, he said he firmly supported and endorsed “every sentence” of the strongly worded letter.

“The school system, and that is the school board, and the administration, needs to have a strategic plan and a strategic vision for how it wants to improve the academic performance of the children in DPS,” Peña said.

“If the Denver Plan is intended to be that strategic plan (then) it needs to be significantly changed and improved. There are some things that are good, but it is not the kind of strategic plan that any major organization would use to move itself forward and to challenge some very difficult issues.”

DPS board President Mary Seawell said the district will take the A+ recommendations seriously.

Seawell: “We still have work to do”
“In the coming weeks and months, the eight of us (Boasberg and the board) will be working to make sure the Denver Plan is best informing the decisions and direction of all of our work in creating and supporting high quality schools for every student in Denver,” Seawell said in a written statement. “As a governing team we still have work to do in coming together around a shared vision if those discussions are to be as meaningful and productive as possible.”

Board member Jeannie Kaplan, often a voice of dissent in DPS affairs, discussed the A+ Denver letter prior to Thursday’s board session.

“I think my overarching sense is of sadness, because it doesn’t give me any pleasure to have what I have suspected and talked about for many years confirmed,” Kaplan said.

“But, on the other hand I think that also it gives some of us some vindication that it’s an outside group looking at basically the same data and looking with an eye to truth and honesty…I think that people who are really being open and honest about what’s happening are concerned that we really haven’t made strides in the last six years.”

Kaplan: Defensiveness not an appropriate response
Kaplan said she hoped the DPS administration would not be “defensive” in its response, adding, “I would hope that the people in the superintendent’s office, and on down, would see this as an opportunity to work with all of us, for the betterment of all of our kids.”

Anne Rowe, one of two new board members elected this past November, was a founding co-chair of A+ Denver. Rowe, who now represents southeast Denver, said the letter “addresses some points that, as a board, we absolutely should be looking at.”

Rowe pointed out that the board “talked about some of these exact topics” in its recent board retreat.

“I think the good news is that it will continue a really important and healthy conversation, going forward, and really get us to continue asking the important questions around our goal of high student achievement and increasing student achievement in DPS,” Rowe said.

The 68-page Denver Plan, originally adopted in 2005 and revised in 2009, lays out in its appendix specific measurable goals, such as that the number of DPS students taking Advanced Placement classes each year will grow by 3.5 percent.

Another is that 3.5 percent of third grade students will become proficient on CSAP in reading each year for the next five years, with a five-year target of overall district proficiency rate of 68.4 percent in 2013.

In 2011, the district’s third-graders saw a 5 percent jump in reading from the previous year – but that still left DPS third-graders at just 56 percent proficiency.

Board members had received copies of the A+ Denver letter on Wednesday, and it wasn’t long before Chief Executive Officer Van Schoales started hearing that some critics of the DPS administration were interpreting it as “a call for Tom Boasberg’s head.” Schoales flatly denied that was the case.

“It’s unfortunate that some in the community are politicizing this, when we are asking for a revision of the Denver Plan for all the reasons that we stated in the letter, and we’re completely open and transparent about that.”

DPS board told master plan needs a rewrite

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:25:00 GMT

The Denver Plan, which has been guiding Denver Public Schools since 2005, needs to be rewritten, according to a new A-Plus Denver report and memo delivered to the board Thursday night.

Jesus Salazar, who is a board member of the organization A-Plus Denver — a nonprofit organization that provides oversight for the district — told the DPS board a detailed report will be out later this year, but said the main point is that the current plan doesn't work.

"The bottom line is we do feel the plan needs to be redrawn," Salazar said. "We want a tool where we can hold management and the board accountable."

The review of the plan was started more than two years ago, after the current version of the plan was introduced in late 2009.

"While it provides a fairly comprehensive list of the district initiatives, it does not clearly describe how the district will be managed for success," the memo states.
As Salazar put it, the plan does not articulate a roadmap that parents and the community can understand and use to hold the district accountable.

A-Plus Denver calls for the report to be shorter, to have a contingency plan in case goals aren't met. It asks goals to be re-written in a way that prioritizes them and incorporates a way to reach them, including milestones along the way.

Specifically, the letter also asks DPS to include goals that focus on more than just math and literacy.

Salazar said when the board last approved the plan, it only discussed for about 10 minutes before passing it unanimously.

Van Schoales, executive director for A-Plus Denver, said that the criticism may reflect more on the board than the staff, since the board creates district policy and directs the staff.

Schoales said the report is meant as constructive criticism, providing suggestions on how to improve accountability and the vision for the district.

DPS board member Jeannie Kaplan referenced the report in her criticism of the district's graduation and remediation rates earlier in Thursday's meeting.

Andrea Merida, another DPS board member, wrote a blog post about the report in which she said she agrees with the concerns about the plan. Merida added that she would also include in a call for a revised plan a request for a "redrafted strategy for supporting English learners at the school level, a system to rank schools based on whole child measures, and a complete overhaul of the School Performance Framework."

Yesenia Robles: 303-954-1372 or yrobles@denverpost.com