My favorite indicator of progress in Denver Public Schools over the last decade isn’t the academic growth our kids of every race and income level are making every year on the state’s annual assessments — though that now surpasses every other major district in Colorado — or even the steep decline we’ve seen in dropout rates.
It’s one amazing number: 1,158, as in more than 1,000 more young men and women walking across graduation stages throughout our city to receive a high school diploma.
Consider that DPS graduated 2,655 students in spring 2006 and 3,813 students in spring 2015. Strikingly, the number of Latino students in DPS graduating each year has nearly doubled in that time, from 1,085 to 1,930, as has their on-time graduation rate. Hundreds more of our students are going on to college each year, and our graduates’ remediation rate in college is on pace to drop by half with today’s high school seniors.
Each of these 1,158 diplomas represents a brighter future for our students and our state. Each represents a step closer to a parent’s hope and a child’s dream. That’s why it is so troubling that some critics would have DPS return to the failed policies that left our kids behind in the first place.
Before 2005, our kids’ academic progress each year lagged every large district in the state, from Colorado Springs to Grand Junction to Fort Collins. Between 2000 and 2005, DPS students could barely keep up with their statewide peers in reading, and fell behind them in writing and math.
That began to change in 2005. In the past decade, our kids have outpaced state averages with double-digit gains, leapfrogging past their Colorado classmates to first place in academic progress in reading, writing and math. At the same time, they’re taking tougher classes: The number of students taking and succeeding in Advanced Placement exams for college credit has more than tripled over this decade. And they’re staying in school to the finish line, with our dropout rate falling by 60 percent between 2006 and 2014; 2,400 fewer students are dropping out.
All of this growth hasn’t gone unnoticed by our families. DPS is now the fastest-growing urban district in the country, with enrollment growing by more than a quarter — from 73,018 students in fall 2005 to more than 92,000 in fall 2015. Thousands of families are staying in or returning to DPS because they see the improvements and the quality of our schools, and the thoughtful and committed work of teachers and leaders across Denver.
DPS has made more progress with kids in poverty than any other district in Colorado, but that progress is not enough. In fact, the main argument of the critics is that middle-class students are making too much progress so that gaps between poor and middle-class students are not closing fast enough.
The concern about achievement gaps is important, but it should not obscure the fact that, a decade ago, fewer than a third of our students who qualified for free and reduced-price lunches were reading at grade level. Today, more than half do. And as results in the rest of the state have been flat, we have seen the percentage of middle-class students at grade level in reading grow from 58 percent to 80 percent.
The path forward for DPS is not to return to old policies that left our kids so far behind in the first place, but to accelerate its reforms and its progress, particularly for low-income, Latino and African-American students for whom education is the best hope of opportunity.
Theresa Peña served on the Denver Public Schools Board of Education from 2003 to 2011.
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