Was that giant sucking sound you heard last week Denver voters flushing half a billion dollars down the toilet?
By handing control of Denver’s school board to candidates backed by the teachers union, voters may have unwittingly ended Colorado’s bid for Race to the Top money.
But more importantly, did they also upend the district’s promising reform efforts?
The easy answer is yes. But the easy answer isn’t always the correct one. No one knows for sure what direction the new Denver Public Schools board will take.
Race to the Top is President Obama’s $4.3 billion idea to help seed reform efforts in a select handful of states. DPS has been an incubator for some of those reform ideas since Michael Bennet, now a U.S. senator, took the helm in 2005.
If the new board, where union- friendly members soon will hold a 4-3 edge, begins to slow reform efforts, or even reverse them, the race is over. Why should the Obama administration, even as loose as it is with our dough, kick a few hundred million to Colorado if DPS turns its back on even some of those reform efforts?
But, as always, it’s never quite so simple. A few education insiders suggest Colorado’s stock in the race dipped even before the election.
Backers of the three so-called reform candidates in last Tuesday’s election led us to believe that nothing short of Armageddon would erupt if their slate wasn’t elected. Only one of their candidates, Mary Seawell, won.
Even though the threats likely were overblown political tactics, questions remain: Will the new board try to upend the Denver Plan, the meticulous blueprint for reform developed under Bennet? Will the new board put the screws to Superintendent Tom Boasberg, who has upped the ante in the reform game?
Will it close troubled schools, and hold teachers and principals accountable for lousy test scores and shameful graduation rates?
When I talked with board member Jeanne Kaplan, who is poised to be board president under the new configuration, she said Boasberg’s job was safe. (She also wanted me to use the word “emphatic” when describing her sentiment. So noted.)
“That is absolutely not on the table or agenda,” she said.
Kaplan said the new board may not differ much from the old board on policy. “Quite frankly, I don’t see a lot of difference on many of the issues,” she said.
Really? Some of the campaign literature suggest otherwise. And while I know that union-backed candidates also want to see kids and schools succeed, they generally have a different approach to solving education problems than the so-called reformers.
Yet as soon as I say that, Kaplan says it’s time to de-polarize the board and shed labels like “reformers” and “union-friendly.” It’s true — too often, we in the media insist on putting politicians in those neatly configured boxes when often the reality is much more complex.
Reform, she said, needs to march on under the new board, but this time with more community input.
Is that what this election was all about, a lack of community input? Who could be against that?
Kaplan says in the past, the board made decisions without appropriately engaging the community. The board should listen to the community, teachers and parents, but at some point, board members also need to lead.
If listening to the community becomes doing what a roomful of angry parents and teachers say, then the board’s most important constituent — the child — will lose.
Everyone, you see, is for “reform” until it’s time to pull the plug on a failing neighborhood school.
At some point, and soon, this board will need to decide if their job is to represent the community or lead the community.
I think it’s to lead.
Editorial Page editor Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com.
