Denver was one of the lowest-performing districts in the state in 2007, reports Jenny Brundin for Colorado Public Radio. Superintendent Michael Bennet (now a U.S. senator) launched a "radical restructuring" relying "on school choice and competition, closing low-performing schools, creating new schools, empowering educators, and holding everyone accountable for test results."
The reforms "dramatically improved student learning in math and English," according to a study by Colorado University Denver's Center for Education Policy Analysis. “These effects are among the largest ever observed in educational research," said Parker Baxter, the center's director. The study tracked individual students' achievement over time to show the district's gains were not due to changing demographics.
"Students who were in DPS for five years of reforms received the equivalent of between two and three years of additional schooling," writes Brundin. Achievement gaps didn't close because students at all levels improved.
Students who left a low-performing school that closed for a new school made significant gains in math, the study found. Students performed worse if they stayed in a low-performing school that received funding for "turnaround" efforts, such as replacing the teaching staff.
The reforms were controversial, she reports. "The district was divided and teachers complained the intense focus on test scores and accountability stripped classrooms of freedom and creativity."
The teachers' union and its anti-reform allies flipped the school board in 2019 and controlled all the seats by 2021, reported Chalkbeat's Melanie Asmar. The board became more hostile to charter schools and "more lenient toward low-performing district-run schools." (Last year, two incumbents lost seats due to school safety concerns.)
Despite the anti-reformers, Denver's portfolio model hasn't vanished, writes Kevin Mahnken on The 74. "The pace of school closures has slowed almost to a halt, but schools of choice still enroll a substantial portion of Denver students, and charter and innovation schools maintain wide autonomy in terms of hiring, curriculum, and scheduling."
Closing schools is painful, even though many underenrolled schools are also underachieving, writes
Sofoklis Goulas, a Brookings Institution scholar. There's no guarantee students will get to switch to a better school.
However, "keeping underenrolled schools on life support is expensive in both dollar and educational terms," write Michael Petrilli and Amber M. Northern in a foreward to the report. "For example, Chicago Public Schools now spends nearly $70,000 on each student who attends Douglass High School, which is currently operating at an astonishing 4 percent of its intended capacity."
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