Alan Gottlieb, Author at Education Next https://www.educationnext.org/author/agottlieb/ A Journal of Opinion and Research About Education Policy Fri, 15 Mar 2024 15:01:54 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.5 https://i0.wp.com/www.educationnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/e-logo.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 Alan Gottlieb, Author at Education Next https://www.educationnext.org/author/agottlieb/ 32 32 181792879 The Rise of Learning Societies https://www.educationnext.org/rise-of-learning-societies-small-experiment-rural-idaho-promise-student-success/ Thu, 14 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49717429 A small experiment in rural Idaho holds big promise for student success

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Fourth graders participate in an online lesson at the Gem Prep Learning Society in Emmett, Idaho, one of the two experimental programs that opened in the state in 2022.
Fourth graders participate in an online lesson at the Gem Prep Learning Society in Emmett, Idaho, one of the two experimental programs that opened in the state in 2022.

In the ever-shifting world of school choice, what began as a homegrown charter-school network’s small experiment in microschooling stands out as unique—and as a uniquely promising model for replication.

Gem Prep, a network of seven brick-and-mortar K–12 charter schools in Idaho, anchored by a longstanding and high-performing online school, launched an experiment called Learning Societies at the start of the 2022–23 school year. Two publicly funded Learning Societies opened in August 2022, one in the hamlet of Emmett, 30 miles northwest of Boise, with 22 students in grades 1–5, and the other in Lewiston in northern Idaho, with seven students in grades 1–5.

The basic idea is this: Some parents who, for a variety of reasons, hesitate to send their children to a traditional brick-and-mortar school have neither the time, inclination, or temperament to homeschool or to monitor a full-time online program. Learning Societies provide an intimate environment where kids, supervised by professional educators, learn online and in small, in-person groups for six hours a day. Gem Prep leaders describe it as a sweet spot between traditional schooling and at-home online learning. It is particularly well suited to rural areas.

While the inaugural year in both Learning Society locations was filled with challenges, those challenges produced valuable lessons that Gem Prep leaders are confident will strengthen the program going forward, as it expands to new locations and more grade levels.

I spent the Learning Societies’ inaugural year tracking their progress for Bluum, a Boise-based nonprofit that acts as a funding intermediary and local champion of entrepreneurial education ventures. I visited each center twice, once early in the school year and once toward the end, and checked in frequently with teachers, parents, and Gem Prep administrators.

It’s a testament to the underlying strength of the academic program that, even as the Learning Societies struggled with operational and procedural snafus, especially in the first few months, parents stuck with the initiative, with very little attrition.

Though online schools in general have been justifiably criticized for poor academic results, Gem Prep Online stands out as an exception. Thirty-five percent of its students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, more than in the state as a whole (27 percent). Yet Gem Prep Online, with a homegrown curriculum refined over more than a decade, regularly outperforms state averages in student achievement. In fact, in 2021–22, the online school boasted the state’s highest performance on the Idaho Reading Indicator, which is administered to students in grades K–3.

Most Learning Society students came either from schools in a low-performing rural district (Emmett) or had been homeschooling. In both Emmett and Lewiston, most students entering the program had been working significantly below grade level, with only 18 percent of incoming students scoring at the proficient level on the fall state-mandated reading assessments.

Learning Societies have the potential to achieve a happy medium that combines the strengths of both homeschooling (or online learning from home) and a traditional brick-and-mortar school. The idea for the program developed among Gem Prep staff and leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic, when everyone was forced for a time into remote learning.

For some families, where parents had no choice but to leave home for work, this posed an almost insurmountable problem. Their children were home, learning remotely, but the younger ones needed adult supervision to navigate online systems.

In some places across the country, including Idaho, families formed informal “pandemic pods”—essentially parent-run learning cooperatives. But, Gem Prep leaders wondered, what if a school staffed by professional educators could provide a similar service across the state, even after the pandemic ended?

Thus were Learning Societies born.

“By several measures, Gem Prep Online is a top school in the state,” said Jason Bransford, Gem Prep’s CEO. “The ability to access that for families who don’t have a full-time adult in the home I think is really a powerful and compelling part of the Learning Societies story.”

A typical school day at a Gem Prep Learning Society sees some students engaged in online lessons on laptops while others receive instruction from a teacher in a small group, all within the same classroom.
A typical school day at a Gem Prep Learning Society sees some students engaged in online lessons on laptops while others receive instruction from a teacher in a small group, all within the same classroom. Both modalities use Gem Prep Online’s well-regarded curriculum.

The Origins

What would later become Gem Prep Online launched as a statewide virtual charter school in 2004 as the Idaho Distance Education Academy. Gem Innovation Schools, as the organization is officially known, opened its first brick-and-mortar school in 2014 in the city of Pocatello.

Today, Gem Prep operates Gem Prep Online as well as six physical schools in Pocatello, Meridian, Meridian North, Meridian South, Twin Falls, and Nampa. All of them currently or will soon serve students in grades K–12. A campus is scheduled to open in Ammon in 2025. The early success of both Gem Prep Online and the first brick-and-mortar school attracted major investments from Bluum, the J. A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Charter School Programs. At full enrollment, the Gem Prep Network of Schools will serve 4,600 students statewide.

Gem Prep schools are known for their academic rigor, their high performance, and their philosophy of earned student autonomy. As students progress through the grade levels, they are encouraged to take increased ownership of their learning.

By the time they are in the final two years of high school, many Gem Prep brick-and-mortar students rarely appear on campus. Often, they work independently online, and some attend in-person college classes. Many students take advantage of their scheduling flexibility to participate in internships, jobs, or other activities.

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, Gem Prep Online’s enrollment swelled by 40 percent, as parents sought options that would keep their students learning at grade level, or at least from not falling too far behind. The pandemic-era shift to online learning gave public-school parents across Idaho an opportunity to see inside their children’s classrooms for the first time. A significant number did not like what they saw. Either they felt the pace of learning was too slow, or that the values being espoused by educators did not align with those of their families, or some combination of the two.

In some communities, groups of parents began forming their own learning co-ops, and some reached out to Gem Prep to see if the charter network, with its long track record of rigorous online learning, might help.

This led Bransford and his team to hatch the idea of Learning Societies. “We realized that we had large Gem Prep schools in some of the biggest cities in Idaho, and then we had Gem Prep Online that you could do from your home. But we didn’t have anything in the middle, and we decided Learning Societies filled a need in society,” he said.

Gem Prep Online only works for families who have a supervising adult at home. Learning Societies, as originally conceived, would provide that supervision for families where parents had to work outside the home.

For the concept to succeed, Gem Prep would have to ensure that these microschools, offering a mix of online and in-person instruction, hewed to the same rigorous education provided at both Gem Prep Online and the network’s brick-and-mortar schools.

Homeschoolers were a group that was likely to be attracted to Learning Societies, especially because many such families might value the assistance of education professionals who could help their children learn without pushing values that are antithetical to the family’s own.

While this proved true from the outset, there was also some potential misalignment, which Bransford and his team moved early to correct.

“Former homeschoolers saw this early on as halfway between traditional schooling and homeschooling, and I don’t see it that way,” Bransford said. “They wanted maximum flexibility, but many of their students had severe academic gaps. And that’s not how we operate. We believe in excellence, then flexibility.”

Gem Prep adheres to the same philosophy of earned autonomy as its brick-and-mortar counterparts. As students move through the grades and demonstrate their ability to take ownership of their learning, they are granted more freedom to direct it themselves, using the Gem Prep Online curriculum.

While Learning Societies welcome all students whose families chose to enroll them, the program particularly suits students motivated to become self-directed learners, said Adam Bruno, a Gem Prep administrator who manages the program.

“Our scholars need to have the innate drive to complete their assignments in a high-quality manner or at least the desire to develop this skill,” Bruno said. “One of our early lessons is that those ‘running from something’—they only chose Gem because they didn’t like the local district—struggled more than those ‘running to’ our model of rigorous self-directed learning. The model can work for any scholar, but there has to be total family buy-in to become a self-directed learner and achieve college readiness.”

Beginning with the 2023–24 academic year, Learning Societies have expanded into the upper grades, where the earned-autonomy concept should increasingly come into play. This should relieve some of the pressure on Learning Society leaders and staff, who have found simultaneously supporting and overseeing the daily work of students in multiple grade levels to be one of the program’s biggest challenges.

Teacher Bailey Schissler assists fourth-grade student Cora Andean at the Gem Prep Learning Society in Emmett. In its experimental first year, Gem Prep leadership discovered that a successful Learning Society depended on the presence of a consistent, experienced teacher.
Teacher Bailey Schissler assists 4th-grade student Cora Andean at the Gem Prep Learning Society in Emmett. In its experimental first year, Gem Prep leadership discovered that a successful Learning Society depended on the presence of a consistent, experienced teacher.

Learning Societies in the Microschooling Ecosystem

What makes Gem Prep’s Learning Societies unique is that the microschooling movement largely consists of private enterprises with varying levels of formal structure, which means, among other things, that parents must pay tuition. “The public sector is rarely involved in microschooling, so it is fascinating to see the government sector respond,” said Don Soifer, co-founder and CEO of the Las Vegas–based National Microschooling Center.

Soifer described the Learning Society model as “a novelty in this space.” As microschools have evolved, they have generally fallen into three categories, none of which fits what Gem Prep is attempting. The first category comprises independent schools that Soifer described as similar to pandemic pods. Parents intend to keep them small—the average size is about a dozen students—and have no desire to scale them up.

The second category, which is rarer, consists of “partnership” microschools, generally organized by an employer. Soifer cited a series of microschools he helped run for the city of North Las Vegas during the pandemic. The initiative was funded entirely by city dollars, and the schools were set up in recreation centers, libraries, and other city-owned facilities. To qualify, families had to withdraw from the local school district and become homeschoolers.

The third category is what Soifer calls provider networks. These are companies established to open microschools in school-choice-friendly states that have authorized Education Savings Accounts or other voucher-like programs. He cited Acton Academy, Prenda, and KaiPod as leading examples of microschooling provider networks.

“The provider will do everything you need to get up and running using their model,” Soifer explained. “It becomes easier for somebody who doesn’t want to wrestle with the regulatory stuff, and the business stuff, and the licensing, and designing the teaching and learning.”

Soifer said Great Hearts Academies, a charter network that operates classical academies in Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, has moved into the online space and could soon consider a model similar to Learning Societies. For the moment though, Gem Prep’s Learning Societies stand alone.

The Learning Societies had a combined enrollment of nearly 30 students in grades 1–5 at Emmett and Lewiston in the 2022–23 school year. This year saw an expansion of grades at those sites plus the launch of a third Learning Society in Payette, with close to 40 students.
The Learning Societies had a combined enrollment of nearly 30 students in grades 1–5 at Emmett and Lewiston in the 2022–23 school year. This year saw an expansion of grades at those sites plus the launch of a third Learning Society in Payette, with close to 40 students.

Lessons Learned in Year One

Gem Prep’s experiment therefore merits close scrutiny. Several key lessons have emerged from the Learning Societies’ first year in Emmett and Lewiston. These ideas should prove useful going forward, particularly with two initiatives launched in 2023–24, a new Learning Society in Payette and the expansion of grades in Lewiston and Emmett through high school.

Communicate clearly to families from the outset exactly what a Learning Society is and how it operates. Families interviewed for this article in Emmett and Lewiston throughout the 2022–23 school year were universally happy with the academic progress their students made. “They were just so far behind, and they have made so much progress. It’s amazing,” said one Emmett mother, who moved her children to the Learning Society from a local public school. “I want to cry when I see how far they’ve come.”

Not all families, however, started with a clear understanding of how the program was intended to function. For example, some parents didn’t realize that the Learning Societies were primarily an extension of Gem Prep Online, rather than a small school with mostly in-person instruction.

Others initially thought of the Learning Society as a kind of drop-in center to be used at their convenience rather than a structured day that required regular attendance. Bransford said Gem Prep will be clearer about the network’s philosophy going forward.

“If a student is performing really well, we want to provide maximum flexibility and freedom. But if the student is struggling, we double down and provide more interventions and support,” he said.

Hire experienced educators who feel comfortable with significant autonomy. Initially, Gem Prep leadership envisaged staffing Learning Societies with a leader who had at least the equivalent experience working with children as a public-school paraprofessional, along with a second adult, most likely a parent, to help out as needed. For the program to work financially, there couldn’t be more than one paid adult for every 20 children. Parent volunteers would have to supplement the paid staff where needed.

Experience proved, though, that a successful Learning Society requires an experienced teacher, not just a paraprofessional. In Lewiston, with an enrollment of seven students in grades 1–5, leader Lois Bly was a veteran Gem Prep teacher. One parent volunteer also had a teaching license and helped out at least one day each week. Bly proved to be the model of a Learning Society leader. Not only did she have both a teaching background and Gem Prep experience, but she also had the temperament to navigate the rocky road of a start-up.

Such was not the case in Emmett, where the leader for the first few months was a parent who, before taking on the role shortly before school started for the year, had been a stay-at-home mom for 15 years. Because Emmett had more students than Lewiston, she had a full-time assistant, a young man with very limited teaching experience. By October the leader had stepped into a part-time role, and by the holiday break she had resigned and withdrawn her children from the Learning Society.

Her replacement, a young woman with a modest amount of teaching experience in public schools in another state, lasted through the school year, but she became disenchanted after just a few weeks and notified Gem Prep she would not be returning for the following school year. She felt that the systems and structures in place were insufficient for the task at hand and that students were being short-changed as a result.

In many ways, the program in Emmett was held together by the close-knit parent community, who, despite the Society’s leadership issues, saw their children making strong academic progress.

While some of the challenges in Emmett were caused by insufficient preparation on Gem Prep’s part, the bigger issue was expecting too much from the people initially hired to do the job, educators who lacked the experience and attributes required to succeed as a Learning Society leader.

Gem Prep’s Adam Bruno described what he has learned about the kind of person who can flourish as a leader. In addition to classroom experience, he said, the individual needs “adaptability, flexibility, and chillness; that ability to go with the flow, step in where they’re needed, take coaching, and generally be able to roll with things, because there’s just so many things that come at you out there that you maybe can’t anticipate.”

Equally important, he said, “if it’s somebody who knows Gem Prep, that is really helpful.”

In 2023–24, all three Learning Societies are being led by experienced Gem Prep teachers who also, Bruno believes, have the attributes needed for success.

Ensure that there are enough supervising adults that students don’t fall through the cracks. If parents had one consistent concern throughout the first year, especially in Lewiston, it was that the adult workload in the Learning Societies was overwhelming, bordering on impossible, for the number of paid staffers. A particular challenge for staff was having to fill multiple roles simultaneously: instructor, facilitator, tech trouble-shooter, and coordinator between online teachers and students.

Equally if not more vexing was having to help students across many different grade levels. The youngest students needed constant handholding to use the technology properly and stay focused, which parents believed sometimes left the older students without adequate support.

The need for sufficient staff will undoubtedly pose one of the biggest challenges in creating successful Learning Societies going forward. Because Gem Prep now recognizes that the program requires experienced professional teachers, personnel expenses will be higher than originally anticipated. Those increased costs will make it tough to decrease the student-to-adult ratio below the current 20 to 1. But, Bransford said, an experienced, confident Gem Prep teacher can handle high ratios—assuming the program is dialed in and that leaders are well trained for the role.

Be quick to adapt as circumstances warrant (for example, by extending the school day). When the two Learning Societies launched, they operated with a five-hour day, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Parents felt that this was insufficient and left students with a burdensome amount of work to complete at home. Gem Prep listened to the feedback and offered a “highly encouraged but optional” sixth hour, from 1 to 2 p.m., at the start of the second semester. Virtually everyone took advantage of that opportunity.

This kind of flexibility was a hallmark of Gem Prep’s approach during the inaugural year of Learning Societies, and that trait will serve the program well as it moves forward. Expansion and growth will bring new, unanticipated challenges, and the program’s ability to pivot and adapt will be critical to its continued success.

Find the right mix of online learning, live work with the leader, and independent study. As the year progressed Gem Prep made several changes to how Learning Societies used their time. Initially, the bulk of a student’s day was spent either in live remote lessons with a Gem Prep Online teacher, or working independently on their computers. Little time was spent in small groups working with an adult in the room.

“A parent called it an Internet café, and that was a fair description,” Bruno said.

Parents, educators, and students all found this frustrating at the outset. “Our kids need that in-person time, and that’s something our teachers just don’t have time to do,” one mother said in October. But by November, she said she was seeing more of an effort by staff to pull out small groups and work with them on lessons.

Bruno said that as currently conceived, elementary students will spend about 45 minutes of the day in a live, online lesson with a teacher. Up to 90 minutes will be spent working in the classroom with the leader or an aide. The rest of the day will be spent working independently or in small groups on lessons or projects, with time also built in for meals and recess.

“What I probably didn’t frame as well as I could at the outset, even for myself, was how do we keep the best parts of Gem Prep Online and bring it into a hybrid concept?” Bruno said. “And then, on the other hand, how do we bring the best parts of our brick-and-mortar schools into that mix? When we get that locked in, we will be really strong.”

Student Progress

Parents I interviewed were satisfied with the progress their children made in 2022–23. Students entered the Learning Societies with significant deficiencies in reading ability. By spring, 58 percent of students were reading at a proficient level, up from 18 percent the previous fall. In just the first year, these students had shown strong academic growth across all demographics.

Across the two campuses, on the normed ISIP reading assessment, part of the Istation online reading program, nearly half (48 percent) of all Learning Society students scored at least 20 percentage points higher in May than they did on their initial test in September. And 43 percent of students exhibited similar growth on the math assessment over the same time span.

By the end of the school year, 84 percent of 3rd through 5th graders were proficient in English language arts as measured by the state’s standardized test, and 66 percent were proficient in math. Those levels are significantly above statewide averages.

It’s not surprising, then, that two of the three Learning Societies operating in 2023–24—Emmett and Payette—began the year with close to full enrollment of 40 students at each site, while Lewiston has doubled its enrollment from the first year and is just under its capacity of 20 students.

Looking to the Future

Gem Prep administrators have entered the second year of Learning Societies confident that they have hit on a potentially transformative concept. They are eager to expand the program to other parts of the state at a deliberate, cautious pace. Ideally, they would like to add one to two new Learning Societies each year in areas of the state that lack access to a brick-and-mortar Gem Prep School or to other choices.

A few factors will determine whether this growth is feasible. First, there needs to be a critical mass of parents committed to placing their children in a Learning Society, which is a new and unfamiliar structure for most people.

Second, Gem Prep has to locate affordable space to rent or buy that fits the needs of a small school and meets the required building and safety codes. Inadequacies in the Emmett space in 2022–23 caused some challenges that continued throughout the year.

Third, every Learning Society needs a leader who has the attributes described earlier in this article. Ideally, a leader should be an experienced educator who either has worked in the Gem Prep ecosystem or is familiar with the network and its operating principles and philosophies.

“We’re really excited about the future of Learning Societies and what they can provide for Idaho families,” CEO Jason Bransford said. “We’ve learned a lot, and we still have a lot to learn, but the potential is clear.”

Alan Gottlieb is a Denver-based education writer and co-founder of Chalkbeat. 

This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Gottlieb, A. (2024). The Rise of Learning Societies: A small experiment in rural Idaho holds big promise for student success. Education Next, 24(2), 14-21.

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After Denver School Board Election, Union-Backed Candidates Emerge With 7-0 Control https://www.educationnext.org/after-denver-school-board-election-union-backed-candidates-emerge-with-7-0-control/ Fri, 05 Nov 2021 17:46:20 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49714123 Charters, unified enrollment system, innovation zones all will face threats

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The union-funded expenditure committees sent out the only negative campaign mailers in this cycle, stoking fears about candidates who backed reform.

Even as voters elsewhere, most notably Virginia, lashed back at candidates promoting highly progressive public education agendas, Denver’s electorate Tuesday voted in a school board that marches in lock-step with local, state, and national teachers unions. Four union-backed candidates won election, joining three union incumbents, making the board a 7-0 juggernaut.

What this means for Denver Public Schools will become clearer in the coming weeks and months. But it surely spells trouble for the city’s robust charter sector, as well as for semi-autonomous innovation zones and innovation schools.

The winners were incumbent board President Carrie Olson, Xochitl “Sochi” Gaytan, Scott Esserman, and Michelle Quattlebaum. Gaytan in particular is hostile to charters and choice. Esserman is tightly tied to incumbent Tay Anderson, who calls the new board a “union super majority.”

It is difficult to draw sweeping conclusions about the meaning of Tuesday’s vote, in part because turnout was abysmally low—precisely how low should be known later this week. But anyone claiming a mandate is blowing smoke. And even among the small number of Denverites who cast ballots, many chose not to bother voting in the school board races. Other ballot issues—questions on homelessness and land use, most notably—garnered far more attention.

Nearly complete results show that 17 percent of those who cast ballots in the Tuesday November 2 election didn’t bother voting for a candidate in the race for the citywide at-large school board seat. In the three geographic district races, the number of under-votes was even larger. In the diverse northeastern district, almost one-quarter of people casting ballots ignored the race for a school board member to represent them.

So, why did the forces opposing school reform gain strength? This will be a subject for debate and retrospection for some months to come. But it’s not too soon to draw a few conclusions.

First, in an environment where school board races draw little attention, and where the number of credible reporters covering education has dwindled, the vast majority of voters know little to nothing about candidates and issues.

This is why union endorsements carry far more power than the money pumped into these elections. Unions can marshal members to walk door-to-door promoting their anointed candidates. Never underestimate the power of a teacher knocking on someone’s door and saying “these are the candidates who support kids, teachers, and public schools. Please vote for them.”

Second, pro-reform coalitions seem slow to learn the lesson that money can’t buy election victory. Independent expenditure committees that supported candidates who tilted toward reform spent well over $1 million on mailers, canvassing, and social media advertising. It made no discernable difference to the outcome. Why? See number one above.

Third, and we hate to say this, but as we outlined in our recent “Dismantling Denver” article, negative campaigning and fear tactics seem to work. The union-funded expenditure committees sent out the only negative campaign mailers in this cycle, stoking fears about candidates who, the mailers contended inaccurately, support having unqualified teachers in classrooms and favor endless high-stakes testing.

So, what’s next? Denver Public Schools are facing several years of declining enrollment. Look for the new school board to do everything in its power to stop the growth of the charter sector and to deny renewal applications for existing charters.

In a similar vein, thriving innovation zones made up of district schools, and some of which are run by autonomous nonprofit boards, face an existential threat. The Denver Classroom Teachers Association dislikes the zones, and therefore the board is likely to take them on aggressively.

Denver’s unified enrollment system, which makes it easier for parents to enroll their children in charters, is under threat, as is the district’s student-based budgeting system. To the extent that the district can curtail state tests, it will do so. Dismissing ineffective teachers will become more difficult.

Alex Marrero, Denver’s new schools superintendent, is likely to face stiff challenges, as an assertive board attempts to set the agenda. While the current board has given a great deal of lip service to the concept of policy governance, in which the board sets policy while giving the superintendent the power to implement it, it is hard to imagine this new board allowing Marrero the freedom to lead the district effectively. If the previous board had a tendency to micromanage, look for that problem to grow worse with the new board.

As we wrote in “Dismantling Denver,” Denver Public Schools made steady if inadequate progress over the past decade-plus. While we’d like to believe that progress will continue, these election results give no cause for optimism.

Alan Gottlieb is a Denver-based education writer and co-founder of Chalkbeat. Parker Baxter is scholar in residence and director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs.

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Dismantling Denver https://www.educationnext.org/dismantling-denver-nationwide-mode-education-reform-union-backed-candidates-took-over-school-board/ Mon, 01 Nov 2021 09:00:46 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49714091 The city was a national model for education reform. Then union-backed candidates took over the school board.

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A seven-member elected board governs the Denver Public Schools. Now that the pandemic’s disruption is receding, the board appears poised to renew its efforts to roll back reform.
A seven-member elected board governs the Denver Public Schools. Now that the pandemic’s disruption is receding, the board appears poised to renew its efforts to roll back reform.

Denver Public Schools’ plunge over three years from one of the nation’s most carefully planned and promising examples of public-education transformation into a district led by a school board in disarray has multiple causes, and there’s plenty of blame to spread around.

Ultimately, however, it is the result of a concerted effort over more than a decade by organized and committed activists, local and national, who have opposed changing the governance and operation of school districts in any significant way. The politics of public education in Denver have grown increasingly contentious over this time, as is true in many large school systems across the country. What distinguishes the conflict over reform in Denver is how unrelated it is to student outcomes.

While Denver’s reforms have been far from perfect, they merit the national attention they’ve drawn. A growing body of evidence makes clear that outcomes for students in the city slowly yet significantly improved, including for students the district has historically failed to serve well (see “Redesigning Denver’s Schools,” features, Spring 2019).

When the district launched its reforms in 2005, students in Denver were more than 20 points behind their peers throughout the state in math and reading. Fewer than 60 percent of Latino and Black students were graduating from the district’s high schools.

By 2018, Denver students were performing only a few points below state averages, and graduation rates for Black and Latino students exceeded 65 percent, even as postsecondary enrollment grew and remediation rates fell. Significant achievement gaps persist by race and income, in part because student performance improved among white students as well as students of color.

Yet as soon as Denver Public Schools took its first, tentative steps toward reform more than two decades ago, an active opposition campaign arose, aimed not at moderating or improving the reforms, but at destroying them.

In 2019, the election of three new anti-reform members to the Denver Board of Education flipped the board majority to that camp. Another school-board election, to select four of the board’s seven members, is set for November 2, 2021. In Denver, families have embraced choice: almost half of all students choose a school other than the one assigned to them, and half of the public schools are either independent charter schools or semi-autonomous innovation schools, in which staff have the power to waive certain state and local requirements as well as some union contract provisions. Yet the new majority board members, backed by a reenergized teachers union, campaigned on a platform of opposition to choice, school autonomy, and performance-based accountability.

The broad popularity of choice in Denver makes dismantling reform politically fraught for the board and its allies. In fact, the board has faced strong pushback from some parents and educators and has had to confront the complex reality of governing a district where choice, autonomy, and a focus on outcomes are now woven into the fabric of public education.

But the union-supported board majority was determined to push ahead, and that meant cleaning house at the top. In fall 2020, Superintendent Susana Cordova resigned after less than two years on the job. Cordova is a Denver native and Denver Public Schools graduate who spent most of her professional career working for the district.

Cordova has not said publicly that she was pushed out by the board, though at a news conference on the day of her resignation she “acknowledged she didn’t always have the smoothest relationship with staff and the board,” the Denver Post reported. And board member Tay Anderson said, “A lot of constituents had the criticism when we appointed Susana Cordova that there was a lingering of past administrators. They were right.”

Cordova never got a chance to enact her own agenda. First, a teacher strike weakened her just weeks into her tenure. Next, the new board gave her no room to enact changes. Finally, softening the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic became the district’s sole focus.

Now that the pandemic’s disruption is receding, the board appears poised to renew its efforts to roll back reform.

But does the board majority have an alternative agenda? So far, it has offered only vague platitudes about prioritizing traditional district-managed schools and focusing on equity. Yet there’s no evidence that traditional neighborhood schools in this city have ever provided anything close to an equitable education for all of Denver’s kids.

The city’s anti-reform activists depict their movement as a homegrown, grassroots effort. Evidence suggests, however, that it is a well-funded and concerted campaign backed by state and national interests to destroy Denver’s reforms. Those reforms, because of their marked (if incomplete) success, threatened the old status quo.

Three interrelated factors have driven the attack on Denver’s reforms:

  • a well-organized, longstanding campaign to undermine the reforms
  • a complacent and intellectually exhausted reform coalition in Denver
  • a disengaged public, susceptible to social-media persuasion

Fourteen Years of Reform and Opposition

The deterioration of education reform in Denver over the past three years mirrors the national collapse of a bipartisan consensus that made possible the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and that fueled the reform strategies nationwide during the past two decades.

By embracing a focus on teacher quality, accountability for student performance, and public-school choice through open enrollment, charters, and innovation schools, Denver became an exemplar of bipartisan education reform. As the city implemented its reforms, the district attracted national praise as well as scorn.

When Tom Boasberg became superintendent in 2008, he picked up where his predecessor Michael Bennet left off and continued the reform effort until his departure in 2018. Four school-board elections maintained pro-reform majority control during the nearly 14-year Bennet-Boasberg era. That’s Methuselah-like longevity relative to most large-city districts. (One of authors of this article, Parker Baxter, worked for Denver Public Schools under both Bennet and Boasberg, from 2008 to 2011.)

Now, as opponents attempt to undo the changes, they’re finding that some elements, notably school choice and autonomy and a unified enrollment system that includes charter schools, have vocal supporters and constituencies.

Most school districts in the United States operate as centralized, vertically integrated bureaucracies, in which resources are controlled by the district office, teachers are paid on a standardized scale irrespective of where or what they teach, and students are assigned to schools based on where they live.

Yet though centralized school systems have endured for 150 years, they are not the only way to provide public education. The wide variety of delivery options that have arisen in the past three decades have earned growing acceptance.

What set Denver apart was the district’s explicit attempt to redefine every element of the traditional model of unified delivery, which both Bennet and Boasberg said was poorly serving the majority of urban public-school students. Their wide-ranging assault on the old model roused fierce antagonism, both locally and nationally. Cordova spent her short tenure reminding people that she was not a clone of her predecessor.

Cordova’s departure and the disarray that has followed are the consequences of a years-long campaign to undermine the district’s reforms. That campaign is almost wholly negative.

School-board terms in Denver are four years; elections are held off-cycle every two years. In 2009, when the reforms were still in their infancy, a Denver Post headline read: “Denver school-board election seen as neighborhood schools vs. charters.” That story could have run every two years since. There were then 20 charter schools in the city and no innovation schools. Today, there are more than 50 of each, serving almost half of the district’s 90,000 students. Over four elections, the opponents of the district’s strategy failed to take control of the board, but each loss intensified their resolve and their rhetoric.

To many observers and participants, Denver’s reform era seemed like a model of compromise and collaboration. But for those with an interest in preserving the traditional district model, the reforms presented a mortal threat.

Initially, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, the National Education Association’s local affiliate, was ineffectual in publicly countering the intellectual energy and enthusiasm of reform’s supporters.

Early on, perhaps because of perceived support for bipartisan reform and a reluctance to challenge a Democrat in the White House, the Colorado Education Association and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association chose to stage their fight in the courts. They spent the next decade unsuccessfully but persistently suing the district to block the creation of new innovation schools.

They also sued to block the implementation of a state law that ended forced teacher assignments by requiring hiring decisions at the school level to be made through the mutual consent of the teacher and principal.

Outside of court, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association was much less confrontational and even partnered with the district on several early reforms. Still, as Denver’s reforms grew in scale and in prominence, so too did the opposition to them.

In 2015, as the presidential primary season heated up, education journalist Richard Whitmire warned supporters of reform that the schism that should concern them was not between Republicans and Democrats but among Democrats. He warned that unions were rolling out a comprehensive strategy of “class warfare” aimed at making reform toxic among middle-class whites by telling them that testing and charter schools didn’t benefit them, while at the same time portraying opposition to charter schools and testing as an abstract matter of racial and social justice.

That turned out to be prescient in describing what would happen in Denver.

When Tom Boasberg became superintendent in 2008, he picked up where his predecessor Michael Bennet left off and continued the reform effort until his departure in 2018.

Beginning with the testing opt-out movement in spring 2015, opponents of reform took advantage of bipartisan frustration with standardized testing to undermine support for test-based accountability as a tool for school improvement and public transparency. They also conducted a relentless media campaign against charter schools, which, they maintained, were part of a conspiracy to destroy public education.

The election of Donald Trump, and his selection of Betsy DeVos as education secretary in 2016, gave opponents of Denver’s reforms a broad brush with which to tar all of Bennet and Boasberg’s efforts. DeVos was painted as the Cruella de Vil of public education, and school choice and charter schools in Denver were falsely painted as part of “Trump’s ideas” for schools—as a series of union-funded campaign ads did in 2017 and again in 2019.

Almost immediately following Trump’s election, a more progressive and assertive group of Denver Classroom Teachers Association members formed the Caucus of Today’s Teachers, which quickly gained strength and ultimately assumed control of the union. Leaders were more aggressive, better organized, and more effective at rallying support to fight reforms than previous Denver Classroom Teachers Association leadership had been.

In March 2017, while DeVos was faulting Denver’s reforms as insufficient for not including private-school vouchers, the teacher caucus organized around a platform to support “public education” and to fight for “community schools” and against “privatization.”

Unknown to Denverites at the time, and largely ignored by the press, the takeover of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association by the caucus was just one part of a well-funded, multipronged campaign by the National Education Association and Colorado Education Association to “shape the narrative” and undermine support for reform.

Just as Whitmire had predicted, the unions started their narrative-shaping with an easy target: middle- and upper-income white residents, many of whom have no children or who live in one of the city’s upper-income enclaves where schools remain relatively untouched by the reforms.

In the spring of 2016, Scott Gilpin, a real-estate developer, and Jeanne Kaplan, a former school-board member turned disciple of Diane Ravitch, formed Our Denver, Our Schools. The two organizers characterized Our Denver, Our Schools as a grassroots, community-led advocacy group. It didn’t officially register as a political-advocacy organization until six months before the 2017 board election. Then, for the next two years, Our Denver, Our Schools did not file annual reports with the Colorado Secretary of State. Local media covered the Our Denver, Our Schools launch event alongside the union’s launch of its own campaign committee and quoted a local parent who said she joined Our Denver, Our Schools because she and her neighbors wanted “traditional, comprehensive, district-run schools-down-the-block.”

Our Denver, Our Schools spent more than two years “educating voters” by spreading disinformation. One example, from the group’s website:

Like “No Child Left Behind,” Portfolio Management and Reform are strong words that imply good things, but the reality is that Reform Districts monetize our education making the rich richer, forgo research-based best educational practices for profitable testing, and leave behind the poorest and most vulnerable in our communities.

Our Denver, Our Schools said on their website that “the corporations that put the Denver School Board . . . in office are trying to make money off a public good. They profit and the most vulnerable parts of our community are left behind.” The site also said that “the Reform Approach . . . disproportionately neglects and even targets schools in communities of color and low-income communities, robbing them of the center of their communities, their political power, and a fair chance at a good education.”

In spring 2017, the National Education Association and Colorado Education Association, perhaps realizing that they needed to appeal to low-income families of color who comprise the majority of Denver Public Schools constituents, funded the creation of another “community” organization, Our Voice, Our Schools, led by a Black man, Hasira “H-Soul” Ashemu, and a Latina, Xochitl “Sochi” Gaytan.

Like Our Denver, Our Schools, the new organization called itself an authentic grassroots coalition. But that claim rang hollow, because Our Voice, Our Schools was receiving annual grants from the National Education Association’s Community Advocacy Promoting Education fund “to partner with the Colorado Education Association (CEA) to host . . . meetings in targeted Denver neighborhoods near the schools being impacted the hardest by pro-charter-school privatizing reformers.”

One of the two co-founders, Gaytan, also ran for the school board in 2017 but lost, even with the help of more than $100,000 from the unions’ independent expenditure committee. She is running again in November with the unions’ support.

Our Voice, Our Schools asserted on social media that the district’s reforms were a purposeful effort by “implicitly racist district leaders and their corporate backers” to “lynch Denver’s Black and Brown families.” In a Facebook post, the organization said: “Family, let’s continue to educate ourselves about these choice charlatans as they abound. These corporate charter sharks smell Black/Brown blood-money in the water.”

The strategy paid off in fall 2017 when two of the union-endorsed candidates won their races, breaking reformers’ unanimous control for the first time in eight years. Then, in 2019, three more anti-reform candidates won election, securing a five-to-two majority. Now the anti-reformers are making a bid to win total control of the board.

In a 2020 report detailing efforts to promote “racial justice in education,” the 3-million-member National Education Association highlighted its funding of anti-reform efforts in Denver. With the headline “Denver Coalition Organizes to Decolonize Schools, Empower Students and Families of Color,” the union claimed that, in just four years, Our Voice, Our Schools “has flipped a corrupt, for-profit, education reform-minded school board to one that is focused on equity and racial justice.”

The opponents have taken control, but whether they can hold it—and use it to benefit Denver’s children—remains to be seen. Neither the opponents of reform nor its defenders can rely on voter enthusiasm. Turnout for school-board elections over the past decade has rarely broken 30 percent. The only occasions when more than a third of voters turned out were 2005, when the union first lost control, and 2019, when it regained it.

The new board set out to dismantle some of the reforms they had campaigned against: charter- and innovation-school expansion, test-based accountability, and standardized testing.

In fall 2020, Superintendent Susana Cordova resigned after less than two years on the job.
In fall 2020, Superintendent Susana Cordova resigned after less than two years on the job. Cordova spent her short tenure reminding people that she was not a clone of her predecessor.

Dismantling Reforms Piece by Piece

Here is where the board’s efforts to roll back reform now stand.

Merit pay for teachers. Once hailed by reformers in both parties as a promising example of “new unionism” and even touted by President Obama, Denver’s groundbreaking ProComp performance-pay plan for teachers, funded by a special tax approved by Denver voters in 2005, was all but completely dismantled following a teachers strike in 2019, during the early weeks of Cordova’s leadership.

Although the compensation plan was designed in partnership with the union, the union’s leadership abandoned its support within a few years. The weakened program endured for nearly another decade.

The collapse of bipartisan consensus on reform coupled with the rise of teacher activism in states across the country provided an opening for local union leaders to cripple the program. By the time of the 2019 strike, the compensation plan had become deeply unpopular among teachers active in the union, partly because ProComp was overly complex, and its implementation was confusing and inconsistent.

Yet the Denver Classroom Teachers Association made it clear that it wanted not to reform or improve ProComp, but to abandon it and replace it with the traditional step-and-lane pay model.

“We’re not proposing something that’s out of step with what the rest of educators expect from their salary schedule…. We want to make sure our salary schedule is like what nearly every other district in the United States has,” said strike captain Rob Gould, who earlier this year was elected Denver Classroom Teachers Association president.

Dismantling ProComp ultimately means more than eliminating performance pay. It could also signal the demise of progressive education-reform priorities such as incentives for teachers who work in schools serving the most at-risk students. While Denver Public Schools strike negotiators succeeded in keeping this element of ProComp intact, this last vestige of the pay experiment may ultimately be rolled back too.

Performance-based school closures. The Denver school board adopted the School Performance Compact in 2015, aiming to define “a clear process” for how the district “identifies and supports the most persistently low-performing schools.” Based on data from the district’s robust school-level dashboard, the board could decide to close or “restart” chronically failing schools. In the case of charters, persistent low performance would lead to non-renewal.

The closure in 2016 of an abysmally performing but popular district-run Montessori school in central Denver created an enormous backlash, much of it emanating from the same forces that had opposed all of Denver’s reforms over the past decade-plus.

In 2018, with two new members, both of whom ran in part on their near-total opposition to closing schools, the board amended the compact to allow low-performing schools to “present to the board regarding their ongoing or planned improvement strategies and their planned or needed supports, along with a presentation of their improvement goals over time.”

The compact would in any event be crippled by the board’s 2020 decision to dismantle the foundation on which it is built, the School Performance Framework.

The advocacy organization A+ Colorado lambasted the board’s retreat from accountability. “This is a major shift in policy and the lack of engagement with community members prior to the decision raises major questions on school improvement efforts,” A+ wrote on its website. “Opponents of dramatic action believed that schools should remain open no matter how many kids, disproportionately students of color, languished in their halls and that someday, an improvement strategy would emerge to turn schools around. . . .

“With this pause, we worry that informed judgments by the district leadership and school board about school quality will now be postponed; what’s another year to a student not learning to read?”

Now, with a solid board majority opposing school closures on the grounds that they are punitive and damaging to communities, the compact is unlikely to resurface. However, steady enrollment declines are forcing the board to consider school consolidations, which they insist are not the same as closures. Before the pandemic, district officials were estimating a decline of more than 3 percent by 2025, but they are now predicting losses nearly double that.

School Performance Framework. The weakening of the district’s process for intervening in low-performing schools was a significant win for the opponents of reform, but it is the changes to the district’s tool for evaluating schools that have the most potential to change the landscape. Launched in 2008, the School Performance Framework became a lightning rod in the community. Denver’s framework was so robust that the state used it as a model for its own accountability system. Although largely based on standardized-test scores, the framework heavily weighted student growth, and it included additional measures like postsecondary readiness and results of student and family surveys. Yet opponents of Denver’s reforms aimed to dismantle the framework.

The opportunity to do so came in 2020 when, after a yearlong process, a committee of community members, educators, and district administrators issued recommendations, presented as a compromise between those who wanted to maintain the district’s framework and those who would prefer no evaluation at all. The board voted to scrap the district School Performance Framework in favor of the state’s less comprehensive and rigorous version but also called for the development of a new multidimensional dashboard. As a result, parents now have significantly less information about schools as they seek the best option for their children.

Unified enrollment system. Launched by the Boasberg administration in 2011, Denver’s first-of-its-kind unified enrollment system, SchoolChoice, was intended to make it easier for families to navigate the bureaucracy.

Under the system, families can, via a single application, rank-order their preferred schools, district-run and charter alike. Students are assigned to schools via a complex algorithm designed to give families their highest possible choice.

Before the SchoolChoice system, parents had to navigate multiple enrollment deadlines and applications. The system has simplified the process, and though it remains imperfect at best, it survives to this day. Now, though, the board majority’s hostility toward charter schools may pose a threat to SchoolChoice.

Charter schools and school choice. Last fall, the board voted to delay by a year the opening of a new high school by DSST Public Schools, a local STEM charter network. The new high school would have enrolled students from its nearby middle school—the highest-performing middle school in Denver, where 80 percent of students qualify for subsidized lunches and 94 percent are of color. While board members said their move to delay was prompted by concerns about achievement at other DSST schools, they were holding DSST to a much higher standard than that which they applied to middle schools they directly control.

Ultimately, the State Board of Education reversed the Denver Public Schools board decision. The local board cannot end charter schools in Denver and in fact could lose exclusive chartering authority under state law if the district denies charters to worthy applicants. Denver’s charter schools are much more integrated into the district than they are elsewhere in the country, sharing not only an enrollment system but also various facilities and some services for students with severe special needs.

But with Denver Public Schools enrollment projected to shrink for the foreseeable future, cooperation is under pressure. Some board members buy into the narrative that Denver’s charters—all nonprofits—have some sort of profit motive, and they describe charters as part of a corporate- and privatization-backed conspiracy to weaken traditional public schools. To many who oppose choice, charter schools present a threat to their vision of what public education ought to be: funded, employed, and controlled by a central authority.

Innovation schools and zones. The state legislature passed the Innovation Schools Act in 2008, offering district-run schools a measure of autonomy by allowing school employees to waive certain district and state policies and collective-bargaining terms and create school-customized policies in their place. Proposed waivers must be approved by at least 60 percent of a school’s staff.

Union leaders dislike the law because of the autonomy it affords school staff—the ability, for example, to develop their own hiring process and define their own school day and calendar. The Denver Classroom Teachers Association opposed the original law but, once it passed, tried to show the law was unnecessary by creating an innovation school itself through the district’s new-school development process.

By the time the Caucus of Today’s Teachers took over the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, one third of district-operated schools had innovation status. The ascendance of such schools posed a threat to the union, as did the fact that more than half of teachers in the city were not then union members.

Originally, Denver Public Schools granted innovation status to almost any school that requested it. Many of those schools struggled and continue to struggle. Over the past four years, however, the district has put in place a rigorous innovation-authorizing process that paralleled its tough charter-school authorizing process. In recent years, autonomy wasn’t granted willy-nilly but rather only to those schools that demonstrated a compelling rationale, a strong plan, and community support.

Innovation in Denver first came under threat in spring 2020, when board member Brad Laurvick (who won election in 2019 with support from the Denver Classroom Teachers Association) pushed a proposal that would have gutted the autonomy of innovation schools.

After fierce blowback from innovation-school principals and others caused some board members to wobble on supporting the resolution, Laurvick stepped back and proposed a “pause and reflect” period. But this move represents a reprieve, not a compromise. Nearly all innovation schools and the district’s three innovation zones will be up for renewal during the 2022–23 school year. ­Recent statements from several school-board members show that, to the extent allowable under state law, they will try to limit the expansion of innovation schools and zones going forward.

Alex Marrero, front, superintendent of Denver Public Schools, greets students for the first day of in-class learning since the start of the pandemic at Garden Place Elementary School Monday, Aug. 23, 2021
Earlier this year, the board selected Alex Marerro as Denver’s next superintendent. Marrero, a former principal and teacher, and briefly the interim leader of the 10,000-student district in New Rochelle, New York, is a charismatic leader and a child of immigrants who seems committed to deep community involvement in district decisions.

An Uncertain Future

When the innovation law passed in 2008, it was meant to spur “collective school community engagement in these plans, not just the teachers, or just the principal, but also the families,” said Jennifer Bacon, a charter- and innovation-skeptic board member, at a June 2021 board retreat. “Are we finding that that’s really happening? And can people articulate what it means that their school is an innovation school, or what that has meant for their kids? Because the suspicion that I have is, who doesn’t want to be an innovation school? Because that sounds fantastic.”

Bacon suggested that the process of becoming an innovation school has been driven by principals, not teachers or parents, and therefore is of questionable legitimacy.

Board member Barbara O’Brien, a former lieutenant governor, put the matter in perspective. “I just want to remind us that when innovation schools were created, it was an attempt to reimagine public education for our most vulnerable children,” O’Brien said. “I do not think we ought to have our feet set in cement. . . . And if we’re still leaving kids behind, let’s keep trying to find solutions. But I want us to remember that the roots of this state and district policy are in trying to help our most vulnerable kids.”

O’Brien cannot run for reelection this fall because of term limits. The other board member at least partially supportive of reform, Angela Cobian, has decided not to run for another term. Several virulently anti-reform candidates are running, raising the scenario of a unanimously anti-reform board. Some strong, young candidates of color who favor the portfolio model have emerged as well. The election promises to be a nail biter.

Earlier this year, the board selected Alex Marerro as Denver’s next superintendent. Marrero, a former principal and teacher, and briefly the interim leader of the 10,000-student district in New Rochelle, New York, is a charismatic leader and a child of immigrants who seems committed to deep community involvement in district decisions. But he lacks seasoning and experience, and how closely he aligns with the board’s agenda remains a mystery.

The old reform coalition in Denver seems demoralized and intellectually exhausted. Some say they hope that, if the school board succeeds in rolling back reform, the pendulum will swing back in the other direction sooner rather than later. Some newer advocacy organizations are seeking a viable alternate path that incorporates the successes of Denver’s reform efforts and learns from its shortcomings. Until then, school reform in Denver is stalled, and the roughly 90,000 students in Denver Public Schools can expect an educational environment characterized by backsliding rather than systemwide improvement.

Parker Baxter is scholar in residence and director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs. Alan Gottlieb is a Denver-based education writer and co-founder of Chalkbeat.

This article appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Baxter, P., and Gottlieb, A. (2022). Dismantling Denver: The city was a national model for education reform. Then union-backed candidates took over the school board. Education Next, 22(2), 26-35.

The post Dismantling Denver appeared first on Education Next.

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