For the past seven years, Denver Public Schools’ controversial policy of closing low-performing schools was a thing of the past.
District leaders in 2022 reunified Montbello High School, which was closed and split into three schools more than a decade earlier. The following year, Superintendent Alex Marrero apologized to students affected by Manual High School’s 2006 closure. And when the DPS Board of Education needed to shutter schools this year, the decision was made based on falling enrollment numbers, not students’ academic performance.
But now, DPS schools will once again face closure if they don’t earn good enough marks under a new plan that Marrero will implement in August.
“It’s deja vu all over again,” said Van Schoales, senior policy director at Keystone Policy Center, a nonprofit that conducts education research. “It’s just bizarre given that the agenda, at least described by the school board and the superintendent, was to not do those things.”
DPS is reviving a reform-era policy that once helped transform the district into the largest K-12 system in the state and boosted academic performance, but has been shunned by most current school board members and criticized by educators and families for disrupting communities across the city.
The superintendent’s new policy — called the School Transformation Process — will use similar tactics employed by his predecessors to improve academic outcomes by taking low-performing schools and restructuring their operations, creating new schools or shuttering buildings completely.
But Marrero and school board members said they don’t see the School Transformation Process as a policy reversal. Unlike the strategies used by former superintendents Michael Bennet and Tom Boasberg to turn around schools, they said, Marrero’s plan will give educators more support and a longer timeframe before buildings are closed.
There’s also a key piece to Marrero’s policy that he said has never been done before in Denver, a city where battle lines between traditional, district-run schools and public charter schools were drawn decades ago.
If the superintendent has his way, all DPS schools — district-run, innovation and charter schools — will operate under the new policy, and for that to happen, charter schools will have to give up a right that allows them to appeal closures to the Colorado State Board of Education.
The goal, Marrero said in an interview, is to create more accountability for all of Denver’s schools — no matter their governance model.
“I don’t foresee this resulting in closures because that would be an absolute failure on our part,” Marrero said in an interview. “…This is also a call for all types of schools to be engaged in a policy/expectation, which I’m sure never happened (before) because there have always been divides here.”
The superintendent’s plan
Marrero pitched his policy during a May 15 school board meeting, saying it would be the district’s way of preventing state intervention.
In Colorado, schools receive performance ratings, based mostly on standardized test scores. The state’s Accountability Clock only allows schools to have low ratings for five years in a row before the state Board of Education steps in.
DPS currently has 25 schools on the Accountability Clock.
Not only does Marrero say the state board has a “low bar” when it comes to school performance, he also believes it should be DPS’s responsibility — not the state’s — to intervene when a school isn’t doing well.
“What can they offer that we can’t do locally?” Marrero told the DPS school board. “I believe it’s our duty to serve our own.”
So with that in mind, Marrero’s policy will have DPS administrators step in before schools reach their fifth year on the clock so the matter doesn’t go before the state board.
To do this, DPS will consider whether to “renew” or “reconfigure” schools that are in their first three years on the clock, according to Marrero’s presentation.
A renewal means the district might change a low-performing school’s programs or employees. A reconfiguration would change the grades a school teaches, such as turning a K-12 school into a secondary school with only sixth-to-12th-graders.
DPS will consider closing a low-performing school when it’s spent four years on the Accountability Clock. The closure could be permanent, but the school could also be replaced by a new provider, according to Marrero’s presentation.
District-run schools already on the Accountability Clock will not face closure when the policy goes into effect in August, but they could see changes to their operations or staffing, Marrero said.
All of the schools on the clock will be eligible for closure starting in the fall of 2026 — if charter schools agree to Marrero’s plan.
Abraham Lincoln High, which is in its seventh year on the Accountability Clock, will be exempted because the state is already involved, Marrero said.
But two charter schools — Academy 360 and Rocky Mountain Prep Noel — could be the first to face closure, if nothing changes, as they are already in Year 3 on the clock.
“This only works when every school is subscribed to it,” Marrero said in an interview. “I trust what me and the team are putting together, so I don’t envision any school going to Year 4 or 5″ on the clock.
But, he said, if that does happen, then a school will close.
DPS used to frequently close low-performing schools
Denver has a long history of school closures, which, despite the school board flipping in 2019, continues to cast a shadow over DPS, including the district’s recent closures due to declining K-12 enrollment.
The district became a poster child for education reform in the mid-2000s by implementing policies such as closing low-performing schools and replacing or creating new schools.
DPS has opened about 65 new schools since 2007, and more than 30 schools have been closed, then restarted or replaced.
Boasberg, who oversaw those policies as superintendent, said that, like Marrero, he believed DPS had a responsibility to step in when a school wasn’t performing well and needed to move faster than the state Board of Education could to change the school’s trajectory.
Also like Marrero, Boasberg — who led DPS from 2009 to 2018 — thought the state’s expectations for schools were too low.
“We felt it was really important that we not abdicate our responsibility,” he said. “…Our accountability was not to the state, it was to our kids.”
During Boasberg’s superintendency, the district gave struggling schools additional resources and sought ways to attract more staff, he said. Schools were also grouped into networks made up of four or six schools that were led by a former principal with experience of turning around a struggling school, Boasberg said.
“We knew those schools that were struggling needed a significantly higher level of support,” he said.
But if the interventions didn’t work, then DPS would close schools and build new ones, with new leaders and teachers.
Schools also changed operators, which meant that in some cases, district-run schools became charter or innovation schools that had more autonomy and flexibility when it came to things such as the length of the school day. Or larger schools were replaced with two or more smaller schools, such as what happened with Montbello High.
“These are very challenging conversations because when you do change the educators, it is painful,” Boasberg said. “But then again, at the end of the day, the responsibility is for the kids and to make sure kids are growing.”
Proponents of DPS’s reform policies point to a study by the University of Colorado Denver’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, which found the tactics used by past administrations increased the chances of Denver students graduating and improved overall academic performance.
But DPS’s reform strategies also drew criticism for displacing hundreds of pupils, many of whom were students of color.
Former Manual High students have been among the most outspoken about DPS’s tactic of closing low-performing schools, which they said disenfranchised Black and Latino students.
Almost a third of the Manual High students affected by the closure withdrew from the district by 2009, and their dropout rate rose, according to a CU study.
‘Guarded support’ for Marrero’s plan
Educators “felt extremely devalued” during the reform era, Denver Classroom Teachers Association President Rob Gould said.
He said he’s hopeful about some parts of Marrero’s policy, but that other aspects echo DPS’s reform era.
“There’s still the concern about when a school gets to this point, they are going to close it instead of putting real supports in place,” Gould said. “Just closing it and restarting it — that’s a very devastating thing for the community, to the students and the teachers.”
Marrero and other district leaders said that this time, low-performing schools will receive more help and have more time to improve their outcomes before they’re closed.
“In previous times, there was a really high bar, really short” time frame, said Joe Amundsen, executive director of school transformation at DPS. “There was never an opportunity for the district to support a school when they were on the clock.”
He will also help oversee the district’s new Elevate Schools Network, which consists of eight low-performing schools that DPS will work with to improve in order to get them off the Accountability Clock.
Previously, when DPS closed schools because of low performance, the action felt more “punitive” than what Marrero is now proposing, school board member Scott Esserman said.
“Those weren’t set up in a way that provided supports to schools,” he said. “They were merely set up to say, ‘You’re not doing well and here’s the consequence of not doing well.’ ”
Several board members, including Esserman and President Carrie Olson, have historically opposed closing schools because of low test scores.
Marrero does not need the school board’s approval to implement most of his policy, but directors will have to vote if he decides to close schools.
“I don’t know that we’re OK with that,” director Xóchitl “Sochi” Gaytán told Chalkbeat Colorado. She did not respond to an interview request from The Denver Post.
Olson said she is in “guarded support” of the new school improvement policy.
“We just don’t want them to feel like there’s a target on their back,” Olson said of schools. “…I’m hopeful that we’ve learned from our past mistakes as we do these things.”
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