Last week, Boardhawk published a detailed analysis of Denver Public Schools’ 2026 state test score (CMAS) data, as well as an evaluation of the state school performance framework rating of DPS. We invited the author of the piece, Cody Ostenson, on the podcast to discuss the findings.
Ostenson is a former DPS teacher, community engagement specialist, and lifelong public education advocate. As the Chief of External Affairs for Denver Families, Cody connects grassroots organizing and leadership development work to advocacy for district and board policies that ensure every Denver student has access to a quality public school of their choice. This includes leading partnerships with elected officials, community leaders, and community organizations.
The data analysis that underlies this broadcast and the published piece was conducted by Maya Lagana, a highly respected data analyst.
Disclosure: Denver Families for Public Schools is a funder of Boardhawk.
Podcast season 2, episode 21: full transcript
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Boardhawk podcast. It’s been a busy couple of weeks in the Denver Public Schools Board of Education meetings, so we’ll have a couple of items to discuss over the coming weeks. But today we’re really excited to have a guest on to talk about what data we now have coming out of both the district and CDE, aligned to the SPF, and,
Alan Gottlieb: Colorado Department of Education School Performance Framework.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Thank you, Alan, for those who hate the acronyms. I appreciate that. So I’m just going to introduce Cody and then we’ll dive right in. Hey, Cody, thanks for joining us. Cody’s a former DPS teacher and community engagement specialist, a lifelong public education advocate. I recently found out he was also a middle school teacher, so I care so much more about you because of that, since that’s a really hard job. [00:01:00] As chief external affairs officer at Denver Families for Public Schools, Cody connects grassroots organizing and leadership development to advocacy for district and board policies, to ensure every Denver student has access to a quality public school of their choice. This includes leading partnerships with elected officials, community leaders, and community organizations like Boardhawk. So good to have you on, Cody. Welcome to the podcast.
Alan Gottlieb: Awesome, thanks so much for having me. Cody’s last name is Austinson.
Cody Ostenson: Thank you, Alan.
Alan Gottlieb: And I do want to add this disclaimer, which is that Denver Families is one of Boardhawk’s funders. That doesn’t mean we’ll be easy on Cody, or that he’ll be easy on us, or anything. Never. But it’s just right to point it out. Go ahead with your first question, Alexis.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Sure. So I’m going to share my screen here, Cody, and as I do, I’d love to ask you: state testing results from earlier this spring came out, so we now have both district- and school-level data that came out a couple weeks ago. Denver Families hired someone we’ve had on the podcast before, and I think many of us have a deep respect for, Maya Lagana, to dig into this data. [00:02:00] So first, can you give us the high-level, cliff notes version of what we have here? And I’m going to share the article you recently posted on the Boardhawk website. If you’re listening in, take a look at that article, because we’ll be digging into some of the stuff that’s in there.
Cody Ostenson: Well, awesome, yeah, happy to jump in. Thanks so much for having me again, Alan and Alexis. I’m excited to be back on the podcast, diving into some really important data. Before I get into the analysis, a lot of this data can feel really wonky, so I want to start with why we, as Denver Families, care about it. Why do we do this annual partnership with researchers like Maya Lagana, to make sure we have additional access and information to really answer the question: how are our kids doing? We care deeply about ensuring every child has access to a quality public school of their choice, and this is really about understanding the state of quality, [00:03:00] how we’re providing a quality public education for all kids, particularly the students who’ve been historically underserved here in our community and in Denver Public Schools. We’re going to talk a lot about student-level data today, but I want to be really clear: as a former educator, students have unlimited potential, full stop.
So when we look at this data, we’re really looking at how our systems, whether in our individual schools or across the district, are helping students realize that unlimited potential. These are not judgments about children, not about students’ ability. This is about having a critical conversation where our school board and district leaders need to be talking about how we improve this data, and how we hold ourselves accountable for ensuring all students have access to a great public school. And while our schools do a lot more than teaching and learning, [00:04:00] as Alexis mentioned, I was a middle school teacher myself, our public schools are still the single institution responsible for educating all children. So these results should be a primary way we, as a community, understand whether our students are getting the promise we’ve given them in public education.
Today we’re going to talk about CMAS data, the Colorado Measures of Academic Success, a literacy and math exam given to grades three through eight in Denver Public Schools. We’ll also talk about the PSAT and SAT, an assessment on literacy and math for ninth through eleventh graders. And then we’ll talk about the School Performance Framework, the ratings schools and the district receive based largely on academic growth and proficiency results. A lot of how we’ll break down this data, particularly around race, will focus on white, Black, and Latino [00:05:00] students. In requesting this data, we sometimes don’t have the same depth the district has, because some student groups have a really small sample size, so that data isn’t always reported.
You’ll see we have a particular focus based on what Maya was able to get and crunch, and I just want to name that as we head into this conversation. So, back to your original question, Alexis: I think we’re in a place right now where, even with incremental growth for some student groups, equity gaps have widened in Denver Public Schools. We do see some of our schools, particularly those with autonomies, like our public charter schools and innovation zone schools, seeing stronger outcomes for kids. So we’re excited to look at some of these data points with you all. Let me know where you’d like to start, we could begin with academic proficiency.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: [00:06:00] Why don’t we start with DPS being green again, which is what we have on our screen. You and I were both at the board meeting, Cody, there was a very loud applause when it was announced that the district is green again. Can we explain what that means, and should we be celebrating? Because clearly the district is celebrating.
Cody Ostenson: So what does that mean? We’ll get to the State Performance Framework data in a minute, but what you’re referring to as the district going green is that we have a state report card that evaluates both our schools and districts. The district received a green rating this year. A green rating means that, out of a total of 100 points on this framework, which includes things like student proficiency, student growth data, and other outcomes at the elementary and high school levels related to things like early literacy or post-secondary readiness, [00:07:00] we get points on a rating system. Reaching green is just barely over 50% of points. It’s a little different for districts and schools, but it’s in the mid-50s for those point totals.
Alan Gottlieb: So when we say DPS went green, could you just clarify what that actually means?
Cody Ostenson: What that means is that we’ve just entered a performance band with about a fifty-point gap, so we really have to look deeper to understand what green actually means. Is this the second year in a row DPS has gone green on the State Performance Framework? Yes. But does that mean all kids in Denver are getting a great public education? No, and that’s where we have to start looking at the disaggregated data.
Sorry, Alan, you were going to ask an additional question.
Alan Gottlieb: That’s okay. Just a really quick point of clarification for our listeners and viewers: [00:08:00] talk briefly about the scale. Where is green on the scale, and what are the other colors, very generally?
Cody Ostenson: Great. Green is called the performance band. Again, the cut point is a little different between district and school ratings, but we’re talking mid-50 points up to 100. Higher-performing districts and schools tend to land in the 70s and 80s. It’s not that schools are often getting to 100% on the State Performance Framework. DPS made it into green by just one or two percentage points, so we’re just now making it into that rating. Underneath that are additional ratings: yellow, which can mean on watch, or improvement. Then orange, priority improvement, and underneath that, red. [00:09:00] Depending on whether a school or district falls into orange or red, the state may intervene, either at the district level or the individual school level, if a school is on the clock too long, often four or five years, before turnaround requirements kick in. Districts do get the opportunity to present what they’re going to do to try to turn programs around, and the state board has taken action, at the school or district level, to mandate certain types of intervention.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: And before we move to the next question: given that we were both at the board meeting earlier this week, they celebrated green, but they also celebrated Lincoln High School now being yellow. There was a little video of the superintendent and staff at Lincoln in Abraham Lincoln costumes, [00:10:00] so that was interesting, folks can go watch that in the board meeting. But basically, they were celebrating the school no longer being on the accountability clock, meaning they’re no longer at risk of closure or state intervention, because they’re yellow now instead of red. I’d argue it’s great that they’ve made progress, but it’s not necessarily a point to celebrate, because we’re still not academically where we’d want to be, especially with the Latino students who make up the majority of students at Lincoln. With that in mind, I have questions we can jump into, but Alan, I feel like I’ve been monopolizing the first few minutes.
Alan Gottlieb: I’ll say one thing about Lincoln, then I do want to get into this, because we have [00:11:00] quite a bit of data to go through. I really understand the impulse to boost morale in a district by celebrating victories, however small. Where I get cynical is that I think it’s more about self-aggrandizement, boosting the image of the district on kind of bogus grounds, as opposed to actually celebrating gains. So I get cynical about these celebrations, because they seem a little like Soviet-style fake demonstrations. But anyway, that’s just an editorial comment.
Cody Ostenson: Well, as we get into it, I think you’re both pointing at something important: there’s the difference between looking at the data and understanding what it tells us, and then there’s the question of what we’re going to do in response to it. I think once we go through some of the top lines that stood out to us at Denver Families from Maya’s analysis, we can get into that conversation of, so what, what does this actually mean for kids, and what are the next steps for the district, particularly the board and the superintendent.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Mm-hmm.
Cody Ostenson: [00:12:00] So, Alexis, I’ll jump right in. First, it’s important in this set of data to talk about proficiency: how many students are reading, writing, or doing math at grade level? This is one of those areas where we see incremental growth in proficiency for some student groups, but when we do the important work of disaggregating and understanding the data for students who’ve been historically underserved, along the lines of race, ethnicity, income, and for our English language learners, we still see incredible equity gaps between different student groups. Right now, some of those gaps continue to be over 40 to 50 percentage points. For example, some of our FRL students, students on free or reduced-price lunch, an indicator of income status, are being supported to [00:13:00] proficiency at far lower rates than our wealthier students who don’t qualify for that program. And there’s a significant number of students in Denver Public Schools who do qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. We also see significant achievement gaps for our earliest learners, grades three through eight, along the lines of race.
For multilingual, or English language, learners, we see less than 1% of students being supported to proficiency. If you scroll down a little, those are our literacy scores, but we see similar trends for our earliest learners in math. Then in high school, we hear a lot about the district’s graduation rates. If you keep scrolling, these two yellow charts show the PSAT for ninth through eleventh graders, where we see similarly large equity gaps between student groups. While almost 82% of students are graduating on a four-year rate in Denver Public Schools, [00:14:00] we see that less than half of our Black and brown students are being supported to grade-level reading and writing on their way toward graduation, and there are similarly large gaps on the basis of income. So while we may see increasing graduation rates, it’s fair for community members to ask whether students are actually prepared for what happens after high school. Another way to think about this data is that not all students come to us at the same starting point, and I felt this deeply as a middle school literacy teacher.
So we also need to look at growth. To reach proficiency, we need to see growth, and that’s part of the conversation we were having earlier: how do we celebrate growth while also understanding what growth data tells us about whether we’re on a path toward proficiency, which is really the goal we should be focused on. Here we see growth measured by something called [00:15:00] MGP, or Median Growth Percentile. It’s a number between zero and 100, and it compares how much growth a student group is making compared to peers who performed similarly the previous year. If you’re growing at 50, that means you ended this year in roughly the same relative position as last year, the same amount of average growth as your peers. If you’re above 50, starting to get to 60 or higher, that’s where a student group is accelerating, growing faster than the year before. Anything below 50 is where students start falling behind, and the lower the number, the farther behind that rate is falling.
Alan Gottlieb: I think it’s important to point out, and I’m sure you were going to get to this, but I want to make sure it gets said: [00:16:00] if kids are significantly behind grade level, they need to be growing well beyond 50, even into the low 60s, if they’re going to be on a trajectory to reach grade level. And we’re not seeing that among any student subgroups except white, non-FRL kids.
Cody Ostenson: Yes, and that’s exactly what these charts show. This top chart is growth by race and ethnicity across both CMAS and PSAT, and we see that white students are not only being supported to higher levels of proficiency, but also to MGPs of growth over 60. When we compare that to how MGPs stack up for Black and Latino students, [00:17:00] we’re seeing average growth. So while that’s not falling behind, and it’s not no growth, what we’re seeing is that this creates the conditions for gaps in proficiency to not just persist, but to widen, because students who are already at higher levels of proficiency are being supported with faster, more accelerated growth than Black and Latino students. We see that on the basis of income as well.
Alan Gottlieb: Just one other point I want to make: when we talk about wanting to close gaps, obviously the way to do that isn’t to say, “we’ve got to slow these white kids down, they’re going too fast.” It’s that we’ve got to figure out how to boost up the kids who are at 50 or below, [00:18:00] so they have a chance to get closer to grade-level proficiency.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: I also just want to point out, reflecting on the board meeting again, and Cody, remind me if the superintendent used the Monopoly analogy or not.
Cody Ostenson: He did.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Okay. So, Director De La Rosa asked a question about how some members of the community she serves are really concerned about Black and Latino students’ performance, and asked generally how he would respond to that. He pushed back a little, saying something like, “well, it depends on the source.” I’m assuming the source he means is me, Alan, Denver Families, and organizations that care deeply about Black and Latino students doing well and closing equity gaps. So it felt a little dismissive. But I will give the superintendent credit here: I absolutely agree that we have systemic institutions of systemic racism that we’re battling against generation after generation. [00:19:00]
The analogy he gave is that students aren’t starting at the same point on the Monopoly board. If you’re an affluent white student in DPS, you’re likely entering school with a higher rate of literacy, a bigger vocabulary, more support at home. That’s true. But his other critique, which he keeps bringing up, is a lot like how Donald Trump always talks about Obama and Biden: “well, how come we weren’t criticizing these other people?”
I think the difference is that under Susana Cordova and Tom Boasberg, the previous superintendents, we had board members who were laser-focused on this, who spent their time digging into the data, and members of the public had access to dashboards where you could disaggregate the data and look at it. Board meetings were spent talking about this issue, not just asking questions of board members, most board meetings were actually spent on it. [00:20:00] None of the previous superintendents did such a phenomenal job that you could say with certainty that Black and Latino students were doing excellent, meeting distinguished status in Denver Public Schools. But it was a laser focus, as opposed to, and this is my editorializing, what we’ve seen the last several years within the school board: interpersonal conflict, not a focus on the data, not a focus on Black and Latino students, or Asian students either, I’ll say.
Kudos to Director Sia, who asked that question, she was looking at some of the MGP data and specifically called out the Asian student population. I think too often, myself included, we don’t think about the Asian student population, particularly the immigrant community here in Denver, who are also experiencing gaps in this space. So I wanted to share that. [00:21:00] This doesn’t mean the superintendent is bad, it doesn’t mean the board is bad, or that they’re not trying their best. I’m just saying I agree with him that there are systemic inequities we have to come up against, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out the discrepancies that exist and keep pushing on that.
Alan Gottlieb: And newsflash to the superintendent, who wasn’t here at the time: there was plenty of criticism of Michael Bennet, Tom Boasberg, and Susana Cordova for these very same issues, gaps not closing, even though they tended to close a little more under those regimes than they are at present. But he wasn’t here. He’s just being paranoid. There was plenty of criticism….
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: And I’ll say, as a staff member who worked with both Tom Boasberg and Susana Cordova, in the one-on-ones or two-on-ones with board members, this was always front and center in those meetings. So hopefully that’s happening in the two-on-ones the superintendent is having with board members, [00:22:00] assuming they show up. You guys know who I’m calling out, if you’re a board member listening, please show up to your two-on-one meetings and don’t cancel. But I don’t know, I’m not in those meetings, so I’m not sure what’s happening.
Cody Ostenson: I think what I’m hearing is also related to what we hear from families and educators: from families’ perspective, they see their educators as their closest partners in trying to understand how to help their student catch up and achieve grade-level performance. All families want their students to be academically successful, that’s a belief we hold at our organization, and it was true for me in my own experience working with families as a classroom educator. And in a lot of my experience talking with peers, there’s this difficult question: am I responsible for how students arrived in my classroom? No. But am I responsible for taking urgent action to help them move forward to [00:23:00] the best of my ability? Absolutely. So what I think we’re talking about is that we see this work happening in bright spots all across the district, where educators and schools are figuring out how to move student groups to the accelerated growth they deserve. How do we then, as a system, scale and grow those strategies and tactics so they’re coherent across the system, rather than happening in silos? I think that’s a conversation that can often get stuck at the board and governance level, which is critical, and it’s one of the reasons we should talk about what this means for the board and the superintendent. But to bring it down to the educator and family level: we need to act with the urgency that, on one of the best teams I was ever on, we used to talk about, that today is a day we’ll never get back, and we have to be ready for kids tomorrow. [00:24:00] I think a lot of our educators are showing up that way, and that’s what we’d hope to see from our board and superintendent when having conversations about this difficult data, rather than some of the dynamics you’ve both called out.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Before we move to the next step, I just want to point out one last thing: I think we should celebrate when there are wins to celebrate, absolutely, and overall as a district, yes, we can talk about the green status. But I want to make sure we’re honest about the fact that we have more white students, and more affluent white students, in Denver Public Schools than we’ve had in the past, and that may or may not contribute to part of this. The last thing I’ll add is that several years ago, Denver Public Schools had its own School Performance Framework, which had a blue status, meaning distinguished, for schools doing exceptionally well on different indicators, including equity, meaning serving low-income students, Black and Latino students, and students of color well. [00:25:00] We no longer have the blue SPF, so we can’t easily show, “here are the schools that are highly distinguished in this space.” You can pull the data and do that analysis yourself, but it’s not easy to find, and I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of why I think that’s the case. But I just wanted to make that point too.
Alan Gottlieb: And just for historical context, although most people listening probably already know it, it was a previous board that, in its infinite lack of wisdom, decided to do away with that district SPF, which was much richer in data than what the state provides.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Yep.
Cody Ostenson: So I think this is where we start answering that question differently: where are we seeing schools that are making a difference? It’s abundantly clear from the research that there are in-school and out-of-school factors that [00:26:00] influence a school or system’s ability to get all students to proficiency. So the way we want to look at this data is, are we seeing schools that, even in the face of those out-of-school factors, are getting results for kids? What can schools and systems actually control, and how are they using those conditions to move forward? Because of the way previous superintendents approached the question of school quality, we’ve introduced different types of public school options in the Denver model: public charter schools, innovation zone schools, single-site innovation schools, and district-managed schools. What we mean by district-managed on these charts is really the traditional schools, the district manages both single-site innovation schools and its own traditional schools, while charter schools and zone models have different flexibilities and autonomies that help them explore different ways [00:27:00] to address specific student needs within their communities. When we look at how schools of different governance types create bright spots for different historically underserved student groups, we see a couple of important things, which lets us start asking how we ensure that what’s happening for some students in some parts of the district can happen for all students everywhere. In early grades, three through eight, we see real bright spots where our public charter school partners are seeing higher proficiency scores for our Black students. Our public charter and innovation zone schools are also outperforming on proficiency for low-income students, and the Luminary Learning Network, the last innovation zone in the city, is seeing really strong results, particularly for Latino students. So we can ask: what are some of the ways schools with these flexibilities and autonomies are using them to get results for kids? [00:28:00] It’s not that governance itself creates outcomes, but the tools that come with different governance models can create different outcomes for kids.
Alan Gottlieb: I just wanted to add a little context on the Luminary Learning Network, and I’m not looking at data in front of me, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I think what you’re seeing with the innovation zone’s stronger results, particularly for Latino students but also for free and reduced-lunch students, is that integrated schools serve low-income kids of color better than highly segregated, high-poverty schools do. The Luminary Learning Network schools, for the most part, are very diverse compared to the average DPS neighborhood school.
Cody Ostenson: In our full report, alongside these slides, we do have some of that additional demographic data, and that’s right. [00:29:00] When looking at this data, we should consider that as families within Denver Public Schools exercise choice and determine the best fit for their child, we do see a higher percentage of students of color and low-income students enrolled in, for example, our public charter models. We see the zone to be a lot more diverse in terms of its school population. I’d also say, Alan, that might be one consideration in how they think about integrating their models. And the Luminary Learning Network, in particular, uses its autonomies to create communities of professional learning, so that as one school in the zone finds strategies and tactics that help support Latino students, and I know there’s active work in the zone around supporting English language learners too, other schools can learn from that and replicate it. So I don’t know that I could put on a tight researcher hat and say these results are [00:30:00] caused by their integrated model, but I’d say it’s likely connected to some of the ways they build an integrated zone approach, and how they use their autonomies to target specific professional development in these areas. If you had Bailey on the podcast again to talk about what the zone is doing, I think she’d be happy to.
Alan Gottlieb: Okay, thanks.
Cody Ostenson: Great. So then when we look at,
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Cody, for those who might not be on a computer, I don’t want to go graph by graph, or bar by bar, but I’ll just speak over this really briefly, and then I’ll let you continue. So we’re looking at the 2026 CMAS ELA proficiency, that’s literacy. For free and reduced-lunch students, the school model most likely to serve them best is the zone schools. [00:31:00] For Black students, that’s charter schools. For Latino students, that’s the Innovation Zone. For white students, that’s also an Innovation Zone school. For English language learners, that’s a charter school. For special education students, that’s a zone school, with a district-managed school not far behind. So I just wanted to say that for those who are listening in the car or on a run, you know who you are, somebody runs in North Denver and listens to our podcast….
Cody Ostenson: Yes, trying not to bury people too much in data, but we try to make this as accessible as possible with lots of visuals, so please check out the article. We also have a [00:32:00] 50-ish slide deck for the data nerds who want to dive even deeper with more graphs and charts. And I’d say we see a similar pattern in proficiency when it comes to our high schools, if you want to bring up the SAT charts. This is where we really start to look at things on the basis of income as well. The reason you won’t see innovation zones referenced in any PSAT or SAT data is that there are no high schools in the district right now that participate in any innovation zone. So when we look at this, we’re basically talking about our public charter schools, or our district and single-site innovation high schools, which are all managed and operated by the district. When we look at how all students are doing on these results, compared to how schools of different governance types are helping particularly low-income students reach higher levels of proficiency in high school, [00:33:00] we see significant outperformance by the public charter sector. Our charter high schools are really helping our low-income students see higher levels of proficiency on high school assessments. And if you go down to one last chart, some of the reasons we may be seeing those higher levels of proficiency in the charter sector is because we’re also seeing higher levels of above-average growth. Alan, this comes back to the question we were talking about earlier: how does growth actually start to chip away at these achievement gaps, and what type of growth is necessary to close them? That’s where we see a 65 or higher as achievement-gap-closing growth, 50 to 65 as average to above-average growth, and below 50 as falling behind. Our charter high schools on literacy for the PSAT are seeing above-average to accelerated growth in about two-thirds of our charter high schools, where it’s roughly 50/50 for our district-managed high schools, whether students are seeing average to above-average growth or falling behind. The more dramatic area, I think, is when we look at high school math, where we’ve actually started to see some achievement gaps in the district widen. [00:34:00] This graph is really dramatic, we have four out of five charter high schools,
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Oh, sorry, hold on.
Cody Ostenson: You’re good. Four out of five charter high schools here, that’s the blue part of the charter graph, are seeing achievement-gap-closing growth of 65 or higher on SAT math.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Wow.
Cody Ostenson: And average growth for one in five high schools, which means, if you’re a public charter high school student, you’re growing, or significantly growing, in your ability to do high school-level math. We see the opposite in our district-managed high schools: one in four is seeing average growth on high school math, [00:35:00] where three out of four are seeing MGPs less than 50, which means just keeping up, or starting to fall behind. This isn’t to place blame, or to say that one model is altruistically better than the other, but when we look at data this way, we start to understand, at a deeper level, that if we want to see this type of growth for all kids in all schools in Denver, we should be asking our charter high school partners what they’re doing to accelerate math for high schoolers, so we can understand how to do that for all kids, because all of our kids deserve it.
Alan Gottlieb: And I think it’s important to point out that a significant amount, not all, of what we’re seeing here in terms of charter performance on math is attributable to the fact that there are so many DSST high schools. There are some others too, so I don’t want to shortchange them, but there are such a large number of DSST high schools that I think you’re largely seeing that reflected here. I really think, Alexis, we need to have Nella, the head of DSST, on the podcast to talk about what they’re doing, because it’s pretty remarkable.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: [00:36:00] Yep.
Cody Ostenson: Agree. Nella talks really passionately about this work, and I think that’s one of the reasons an organization like Denver Families sees, as part of our vision toward ensuring every child has access to a high-quality public school of their choice, the need for options like our public charter and innovation zone models, because we see the results when we invest in that work. So it’s not about picking and choosing winners within governance types, but asking, where are we seeing results for the kids who need it most? We see clear evidence here that there are places we can learn from our charter partners, particularly on high school math, to make sure all kids are able to do high school math at grade level.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: And I will give some credit to the superintendent and the school board, because they did acknowledge DSST and [00:37:00] how well they’re doing. I saw on social media that the superintendent actually visited one of the DSST schools and was there taking pictures with folks. So I do think there’s an acknowledgement that model is working particularly well, particularly for students who have historically not been as well served.
Cody Ostenson: Yes.
Alan Gottlieb: Okay. I’m looking at the time, and how long we’ve been going, and how much we still want to cover, so I think we should try to accelerate through the last sections a bit, so we’re not on for ninety minutes.
Cody Ostenson: Let’s do it. I think what folks can see is we’ve done a similar assessment of what this means for school ratings: if you look at the different compositions of school ratings, whether green performance plan, yellow improvement plan, orange priority plan, or red turnaround plan, if you’re a zoned student, you’re most likely to be in a rated school, compared to our public charter schools, then district-managed traditional schools, then district-managed innovation schools. Again, this isn’t about the work of any one school or teacher, these are all [00:38:00] different options we’re offering families for their public school experience. So as we look at where we’re seeing different results, what are we actually learning? I think that’s where we have a unique opportunity, Alan: we’re now at the end of a strategic planning period, from Alex Marrero’s introduction of the first version of the strategic roadmap back around 2021, so the first data would be from 2022. We have about five years now of the strategic plan to look at how students are doing relative to the goals the district set. There are two ways we can look at that. One is the goals the district set for itself within that strategic plan, that all student groups would grow by 10 percentage points in proficiency across the board, and none of those targets were met. It’s not really about whether the targets were met, I want to get into how these targets were set, and whether we should continue setting targets this way. But if we look just at the goals the district set for itself, [00:39:00] that’s another way of analyzing the question: what does it mean for DPS to be green on the State Performance Framework? It means we’ve still grown less than one percentage point year over year for most student groups, if at all. So growth has been happening in proficiency, we’ve seen higher proficiency rates over time. But I think you hear folks talk about this from a justice-oriented approach: is this ambitious enough? Is this what students deserve? This is how the district is measuring its own success.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Since we’re rushing through, I just want to make one other point. For those who really want to dig into the graphs, the district also had its own presentation, which you can download from the Diligent link on the board’s website. But I will say, I was really impressed that the data showed, for students who are significantly below grade level, the students who are furthest behind, [00:40:00] that district-run schools had the largest decrease in the percentage of students significantly behind grade level. I think what we miss there is, going back to the point about where students are starting, are they starting far behind or not when they enter public charter schools or innovation zones? So that’s something else I want to give the district credit for. Historically it’s been really hard to bring students who are the most significantly behind to a point where we’re decreasing those gaps. So I wanted to give credit where credit is due….
Cody Ostenson: Mm-hmm, and that’s where we can go into a more disaggregated conversation about what this means for the central question we view as critical at Denver Families: what does this mean for kids, given our history of having some of the largest achievement gaps in the country? Alexis, if you don’t mind pulling up the gaps chart, [00:41:00] just scroll up a little. Over the course of this time period, in grades three through eight, our youngest learners, we’ve seen equity gaps widen anywhere from one and a half to upwards of five percentage points. This goes back to those graphs where white and non-FRL students are growing faster than Black, Latino, or low-income students, and that’s where, in our earliest grades, gaps have actually widened over the last five years.
We see more mixed results, where gaps have either widened or narrowed, at the high school level. In some places where gaps have narrowed, by five percentage points, or by a smaller but still meaningful two percentage points, we can go back to that growth data we just looked at, even for this last year, where our charter high schools are really making a difference for some of our most historically underserved groups in narrowing some of these gaps. [00:42:00] So this gets us to the “so what.” Alexis, I think we can pull down some of these charts. Where do we go from here? I think it’s really three things. I
‘ll just share one: I’m an educator who has taught in both district-managed models and a public charter environment. I don’t really buy into this reform divide in Denver, but I understand it exists, and I think one of the things these results really demonstrate is that we’re having the wrong conversation about our public charter and innovation school partners. The adult political conversation is about whether they should exist, about their legitimacy, when what we should be looking at is that public charter and innovation zone models are getting results for kids who need it [00:43:00] most. It comes back to the fact that one size doesn’t fit all kids, so how do we make sure your zip code doesn’t determine the quality of education you receive? It’s going to take all of us, working across all of our public school models, to make sure kids have access to a great public school option.
That’s not the conversation we’re having, so I think this first and foremost affirms the role of our public charter and innovation zone partners in the core mission we should all be driving toward: better results for kids. Alexis, you also talked about another “so what,” which is that we need to start unpacking these results in relation to what’s happening with not just declining enrollment, but shifting demographics in the city. That chart, where we see equity gaps widening in earlier grades but more mixed results elsewhere, is where I started having some of those questions, because it was just this spring that the district presented the strategic regional analysis, the enrollment data “Bible,” to the board, showing that we’re not only seeing declines in enrollment, but our earlier cohorts of students are becoming whiter, and fewer are qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch. [00:44:00] So I want to thread the needle between a couple of data points.
One, we see those shifting demographics, earlier grades getting whiter and wealthier. Two, we know DPS has a history of serving whiter, wealthier students better. Three, we see incremental aggregate growth across the district. So our board members need to be asking: how much of what we’re seeing in terms of growth and proficiency is expected, because of those demographic shifts toward a whiter, wealthier district, versus how much reflects real work to isolate what policy and practice is actually driving results? Otherwise, we’re just going to assume that all growth is happening because of targeted strategy. I think we need to be talking about enrollment much more holistically within the conversation about quality too, and Alexis, [00:45:00] I think you named that in one of your comments earlier.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Yeah, and I’ll add quickly, for those interested in the enrollment conversation, that the district has just started community sessions for feedback on EL-19, the executive limitation that will have the school board redraw school enrollment zones or boundaries. The first meeting just happened on Tuesday, the next is in southeast Denver at Hamilton on the 8th, with more coming up. So please take a look, if you’re interested, please go, this is democracy in action. I was just plugging it at our PTO last night: attend, make your voice heard, and please don’t be racist, think about all students, not just your own. That’s my plug.
Cody Ostenson: I’m really glad you brought that up, Alexis, because I had the chance to attend that community meeting in the far northeast. [00:46:00] In my small group, the conversation turned less about boundaries and more about quality. I had parents in my group talking about how they were using choice to find the best opportunity for their child, wanting a school that would support their child not just to grow, but to be proficient at grade level. We hear that from families all the time, and it was interesting to hear it come up not just in my group, but across other small groups as they shared out. That was one of the common themes: families aren’t just thinking about balancing numbers on a spreadsheet or drawing lines differently, especially since nearly half of families in the district use choice to send their child to a school other than their boundary or enrollment zone school.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Mm-hmm.
Cody Ostenson: [00:47:00] So how do we understand why families are making those choices? We hear from families a lot that part of it is about quality. These conversations are intimately tied to one another, it’s not just about managing declining enrollment for financial reasons or class sizes, which are critical reasons we need to address it, but if we’re creating enrollment and boundary zones without considering how we ensure every child has access to a great public school, we’re missing the opportunity to actually deliver on that.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Well, Cody, I hate to say it, but we’re almost at time.
Cody Ostenson: Yep.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: I think the point you just made, about a great quality public school for every child, is a good point to end on, but before we wrap, are there any final words you’d like to share, any takeaways?…
Cody Ostenson: I think this is a really important time for community members and families to have not just short-term, but long-term, influence over this conversation with the district, because the district is currently going through a process where the superintendent is leading the board through a draft strategic plan. [00:48:00] We just ended our current strategic roadmap, which is the vernacular the district used for its strategic plan. A couple of things that came up in this conversation are really important to advocate for, as the board and district decide on their vision and how it’s articulated in the new plan. One is that, right now, the goals by which we evaluate the district and the goals by which we evaluate the superintendent’s performance are the same, and I think that’s where we run into a lot of the challenges around how to set goals that are ambitious for kids, while also usable as accountability for the district and the superintendent. How do we encourage leaders, whether Alex Marrero or any superintendent, to set really ambitious goals the district should be driving toward, while also being meaningfully evaluated on progress toward them? [00:49:00] Right now, the superintendent and the board are debating whether the board should weigh in on setting goals within the strategic plan, and I think it’s really important that the board says, “these are the three to five goals we’re working toward as a district,” because that sets the flagpost for what we’re driving toward.
Then the superintendent’s evaluation is about meaningful growth year over year toward those goals. That way, we can separate out the tension around whether it’s fair to evaluate a leader against highly ambitious goals. I think we need to separate what goals we’re setting for the district from how those goals guide the superintendent’s evaluation year over year, because we actually did this in the wrong order last time. Credit to the superintendent for mentioning this in his last presentation: policy governance assumes the board has done the work to set the vision for the district, [00:50:00] understands what success looks like, and hires an executive to set the plan for getting there, then holds that executive accountable for whether he or she achieved the results set in front of them. What’s actually happened over the last five years is that the board hired Alex Marrero, then asked him to write the district’s strategic plan and set its goals. Ever since, after he did what he was asked, the board has struggled with how to hold its executive accountable for a vision it didn’t create, a plan it didn’t approve, and goals it didn’t determine.
So I think we have to get the strategic planning process right, not just the board setting goals it holds itself and the district accountable to, but also changing how it evaluates the superintendent accordingly, because those two things are so intimately tied together right now [00:51:00] that I think that’s what creates some of the friction and conflict in getting to the right evaluation system for kids and for Denver. That’s going to take a shift in leadership too, in how board members show up to this conversation, and how the superintendent shows up to it. In a context where, over the course of this summer, we’ve seen differences and misalignment between board members and the superintendent, this is one of those opportunities for the board and the superintendent to actually create a shared strategic plan, because the district needs one, and to set meaningful goals we’re driving toward, so these conversations become less subjective, about what any one person believes is good, what the superintendent believes is good, what the union believes is good. Without an actual strategic plan where the board has said, “this is what success looks like,” we’ll continue spinning [00:52:00] in conversations where we get stuck defining what’s good, rather than understanding how to deliver a great public education for all kids based on the data we see. So I’ll get off my soapbox.
Alan Gottlieb: Yeah, the draft strategic roadmap that was presented last week, which is only a draft at this point, was not a promising start. We were going to talk about that a little, but we really don’t have time, so it’s a topic for another time in the near future. I don’t have anything more to say. Cody, you’ve been a wealth of information, and this analysis Maya did is so great. I’ll put a link to the blog post in this post, and if you want to send me a link to the deck, I will, if it lives on your website, I can find it. I’ll put a link to that as well, because I think people, the nerds, might want to dive into those fifty-something slides.
Cody Ostenson: Yes, well, thank you so much. Data transparency is incredibly important, we don’t know how to better advocate for kids and families, and alongside kids and families, if we don’t know where we’re starting from. So thank you for being part of a lot of people who want this data to be more regularly accessible to folks. We’re always happy to have these conversations. [00:53:00] You can also check out some resources Denver Families has that will be updated with this data, you can look at your school or the district by going to DenverEdExplorer.org. So if you want to see this data in depth, you can go there. And I’ll make sure our deck is also available to you, Alan, for your guests and viewers as well. But thanks so much, this is an incredibly important topic.
Alan Gottlieb: Thanks.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Thanks, Cody.
Alan Gottlieb: Well, anything more, Alexis?
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Nope, this was a great podcast. Thanks.
Alan Gottlieb: Okay.
Alexis Menocal Harrigan: Thanks.
Alan Gottlieb: We will be back soon. Thanks, everybody, appreciate your time.
