If the latest CSAP scores don’t recast the debate over Denver school reforms, nothing probably will. If they don’t deter critics from mounting campaigns this fall to fill two open seats on the school board so they canlet’s be honest — fire the superintendent, no amount of progress will.
It’s not that test scores overall were great. It’s not even that improvement was spectacular, although growth has been fairly consistent now for six years — and especially in math.
Across the district, scores in three of four categories rose slightly (but in science, only from a miserable 27 percent proficient or above to a still miserable 28 percent), while declining by 1 percent in reading.
But of course reform opponents haven’t been railing these past few years about most of the schools producing lackluster results. They’ve focused their ire primarily on turnaround efforts in northwest and far northeast Denver — the special projects of Superintendent Tom Boasberg and a narrow board majority.
Two years ago, reform opponents thought they’d succeeded in locking in the status quo when three union-backed candidates swept to victory, prompting this newspaper to proclaim, “Power shift on DPS board.” But union officials (and journalists) had misjudged Nate Easley Jr. Despite emotional pleas at a hearing one month later, he cast the deciding vote in favor of a plan creating several new northwest middle schools.
“Why this important decision had to be rushed, I will never understand,” one opponent complained. Here’s why it had to be rushed: because every lost year is irreplaceable.
Last year at this time, sixth-graders in northwest Denver posted CSAP scores of 39 percent proficient or better in reading, 34 percent in math and 26 percent in writing. For sixth-graders in the new schools, we learned this week, those scores rose to 45 percent in reading, 45 percent in math and 43 percent in writing.
Now that improvement is spectacular.
Meanwhile, the number of sixth- graders in the northwest boundaries ballooned from 312 to 467, as parents who had enrolled their kids in other districts or in private schools brought them back. (Did an influx of possibly better-motivated students bias results? I don’t know, although Superintendent Tom Boasberg tells me “it’s very much an apples to apples comparison in terms of poverty rates.”)
Meanwhile, Boasberg is “very confident that these schools will continue to improve. . . . We knew the schools could be better.” And he predicted that “a year from now, we’re going to see similar results in far northeast Denver, and the community is going to be grateful that we pressed ahead in the face of an opposition that defended the indefensible status quo.”
That opposition, sad to say, included three of seven board members in a critical vote on the far northeast plan late last year — although all three eventually did support a few of the new schools while opposing others.
Under Boasberg, Denver is the only district to exploit repeatedly a 2008 state law allowing schools to dump union and bureaucratic rules and thus add more class time and even school days. Just this week, the State Board of Education unanimously approved six more “innovation” schools that Denver requested, for a total of 19.
Denver is never going to boast test scores equal to those, say, in Douglas County. The obstacles are too great. But the results in northwest Denver prove that the “indefensible” is not inevitable.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
