Over the past year, A+ Denver has worked with an array of community groups to assess the pace and effectiveness of the district’s efforts to turn around low-performing schools and close the achievement gap that persists within Denver Public Schools.
Our conclusions are clear: DPS needs to significantly increase the pace of turnarounds, implement them with strong school principals, and support them with resources and resolve. We can no longer accept the excuses, the factionalism and the tactics that prevent implementation of reforms affecting our lowest-performing schools.
Our recommendations:
Increase the pace of change: We recommend the district adopt a policy goal of implementing turnarounds of 30 low-performing schools over the next three years. At the current pace, it would take five to 10 years for the turnaround process to reach the communities in need. This is unacceptable. The “30 in three” goal will focus the district and community on a set of tangible and achievable objectives and provide a baseline against which to measure DPS performance.
Intervene aggressively. The board and district management need to insist on deeper levels of interventions, embrace acceptable levels of risk, and stick with the turnaround process regardless of the political opposition. Whether the replacement school is a charter, an innovation school or a district school is immaterial. The goal is better schools, and the common thread is that new school leadership be provided with autonomy in personnel, workforce rules and operations sufficient to break the cycle of failure and create a culture of accountability and success.
Outstanding leadership is the key. DPS must develop an internal leadership-development pipeline, recruit star school principal candidates from outside the district, and make DPS an accommodating and attractive target for the most successful charter management organizations.
We recognize that these goals present major challenges to DPS, yet we see no other competing use of funds that rivals turnaround leadership development in importance. It is no longer acceptable to delay or reduce the pace of turnarounds due to lack of resources or qualified personnel. The district needs to restructure its turnaround efforts and confront immediately the hard choices required to fund and execute a much more comprehensive and replicable turnaround program.
Engage the community. For the past eight months, A+ has convened the most extensive, deliberative and inclusive regional community engagement process ever attempted in a Denver school reform effort. Community engagement is critical to legitimizing and building support for needed changes and to informing the process of designing a suitable replacement school.
This process should be refined and replicated. Effective communication and outreach will result in transparency and better community understanding, thus allowing the district to minimize the excruciating conflict that has plagued previous turnaround efforts.
We recommend that the DPS board proceed with the far northeast Denver turnaround package generated through this process.
While we have concerns around execution risk, this plan represents an important step toward remedying an unacceptable situation in far northeast Denver and is far better than the alternative of accepting the continued failure of a set of chronically underperforming schools.
Utilize facilities to optimize the results for students. DPS needs to be more efficient and accommodating in developing a pipeline of new school options and in making its facilities accessible to new quality schools.
As long as it can demonstrate a proven track record of academic achievement in a low-income environment, charter schools, performance schools, innovation schools and magnet schools should all be considered equally when allocating facilities.
DPS needs to make this process more user-friendly, which will require improving change-management practices throughout the organization, from the superintendent down to the managers of food and janitorial services.
This list represents priority areas A+ Denver will be monitoring in the coming year as we track the changes we expect in district practices and policies.
John Hereford is chair of the Turnaround Committee for A+ Denver, a non-profit, independent civic group.
