I’ve followed Denver Public Schools long enough to know that I shouldn’t get my hopes up.
I’ve watched superintendents for whom I had high regard — leaders such as Irv Moskowitz and Jerry Wartgow — do their best and yet fail to significantly boost the district’s overall achievement, let alone shrink the chasm between Anglos and Asians on the one hand and Hispanics and blacks on the other.
I realize, meanwhile, that poverty and broken homes stack the odds against the district. And I also understand, even if it’s unpopular to say so, that cultural attitudes contribute to low achievement — and that they’re extremely difficult for teachers to overcome.
So why am I cautiously hopeful at the moment for Denver’s schools? Let me count the reasons:
First, because over the past four years, beginning with Superintendent Michael Bennet and now under his successor, Tom Boasberg, the district has been willing to rock the boat. It has closed schools and started new ones, overcome its hang-up about charter schools and even taken on the teachers union (on occasion). It has supported faculty eager to dump stifling rules — including those restricting the freedom to hire and fire — and been a leader in devising systems to track the growth of individual students and compare the effectiveness of teachers with peers.
Second, because district leaders have projected a sense of urgency, refusing to resort to the sort of self-satisfied “happy talk” that a recent column in this section falsely attributed to them. To the contrary: They’ve been starkly honest about the magnitude of the challenge.
Third, because achievement — as we saw this month with the latest CSAP results — does appear to be inching up (with an emphasis on “inching”). The district’s growth in scores has slightly exceeded the state’s for each of the past several years, although the gap remains huge.
Boasberg doesn’t downplay the remaining distance. “We still lag behind state [averages] by 15 to 20 points,” he told me, “and the state standard is below what you’ll find in many countries that our students are going to be competing with.”
Still, he is convinced that an effective teacher “can eliminate the achievement gap for a particular student or class” in three years, given proper support for this “extraordinarily difficult job.” That’s why the district intends to devote more effort to the recruitment, retention and development of teachers — rewarding those who deserve it and replacing, if possible, those who do not.
Not that it will be easy. “Much of our state laws, policies, and collective bargaining agreements are misaligned with this goal of effective teaching,” he says, calling for a “community conversation” on these issues.
Boasberg wonders, for example, why it is that “for a teacher with three years’ experience at age 25, you must either give them a lifetime job or fire them and they can never work in the district again.” This all-or-nothing choice is mandated by state law.
For that matter, he asks, why is there no provision under the law for recognizing outstanding teachers? Instead, Boasberg explains, teacher evaluations are limited to ratings of satisfactory and unsatisfactory. “You’ve got a system in which 99 percent of the participants are rated the same,” he complains.
I can’t remember a Denver superintendent who so openly questioned the status quo — unless perhaps it was his predecessor. And while I still know better than to get my hopes up, I can’t help but be encouraged to hear a superintendent who believes, “with effective teaching, that we can make up a lot of the ground for the students who are now in school before they graduate.”
“Morally,” he said, “I don’t believe we have any choice.”
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
