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The overall Denver Public Schools system is failing students, according to an independent report released yesterday.

The sobering, at times frightening report, compiled by the Colorado Children’s Campaign, along with support from Metro Organizations for People and A+ Denver, states that current achievement levels are “unacceptable.”

Alex Medler, vice president for research and analysis with the Colorado Children’s Campaign, said that while current reform efforts appear to be headed in the right direction, progress is still exceptionally slow, with little hope for remarkable progress if efforts continue at the same pace.

“The current results, frankly, are unacceptable,” said Medler at the Oxford Hotel in Denver yesterday where the report was released. “The overall conclusion is that we’ve got improvements going on, but if we wait for the kind of improvements we’ve got going on now to solve this problem, it will be our kids, kids who will be the ones to benefit from it. It’s taking too long. We need to accelerate it.”

The report looked at the three areas in which DPS has focused its reform efforts: former school Superintendent Michael Bennet’s Denver Plan, the ProComp performance-based pay incentives program for teachers, and zones of innovation — in which schools are able to seek autonomy from the district to focus on customized reform efforts. 

While enrollment is increasing, performance is not getting better, states the report. The district is still struggling to find a functioning strategy to improve performance for its four-fifths majority of minority students, as well as two-thirds majority low-income students, continued the report.

Denver schools lagging

Denver trails much of the rest of the state and nation in achievement levels, falling behind Oakland, San Francisco and New York, to name a few, said Medler.

With a 53-percent graduation rate, Denver Public Schools has little hope for the immediate future, and therefore must immediately find and enact an aggressive reform effort that strikes hard, he said.

“It’s a coin toss as to whether or not a child that enters ninth grade will complete their high school education in Denver within four years,” said Medler.

Federico Peña, former Denver mayor and chair of the A+ Denver board, a group of citizens working on reform efforts for DPS, led an impassioned call to educators, lawmakers and community leaders to take up the cause and work for a solution.

Likening the reform effort to a war, Peña said the need to act is immediate.

“This is a new war,” he said. “We talk a lot about Al-Qaeda and terrorism, but what we don’t talk a lot about is another war occurring on the planet, and that is the war to produce the finest minds in the world, and we’re not winning that war, we’re losing that war.”

Boasberg sees some encouraging signs

Acknowledging the realities of the report and calling it “profoundly sobering” and “unacceptable,” Superintendent Tom Boasberg agreed that the school system is in trouble, but added that current reform efforts are headed in the right direction.

Before pointing to challenges, Boasberg took pride in the fact that DPS has shown more growth in proficiency than any other district; has cut its dropout rate by a third; and increased its enrollment to its highest levels in 30 years.

But he said there are several areas in which the district can accelerate reform, including post-secondary education, empowering teachers, strengthening relationships with parents and the community, and increasing economic transparency.

Teachers

Above all, however, Boasberg said the district needs to do a better job attracting and retaining quality teachers.

“The central nut of this is that the reforms really don’t amount to much of anything unless they affect the practices we see in our classrooms,” he said. “The overall emphasis has to be on the people … there’s nothing of more importance in terms of student achievement than the quality and effectiveness of the teacher that that student has in his or her classroom … everything needs to be centered around how do we attract the best quality teachers and school leaders to come to Denver, how do we retain them?”

Jessica Buckley, a teacher at Harrington Elementary School, and a member of Metro Organizations for People, said increasing teacher compensation is one way to go about attracting and retaining the best teachers.

“We want to be adequately compensated financially for the work we do,” she said.

Student pleads for help

Karla Carranza, a sophomore at Bruce Randolph School in northeast Denver, pleaded with the room full of stakeholders yesterday, asking them to quickly find a solution so that her future can be secured.

“Parents, teachers and political people have been calling us students, ‘The future.’ But what are we students without an education?” asked Carranza. “Definitely not the future.”

“We want a solution,” she continued. “We want a future — please don’t wait until my senior year in high school to find a solution. Start now.”

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