Alan Gottlieb

Based on state test scores released last week, many DPS students are in academic crisis, and some board members are ignoring that and opting to indulge in Trumpian grievance-fests instead of doing their duty.

The DPS board got back to work with a retreat Monday, and quickly got up to its old, bad tricks as well, violating the spirit if not the letter of Colorado’s open meeting law. 

Denver Public Schools board Vice President Tay Anderson discusses board relations, the coup that wasn’t, and other issues related to DPS board dysfunction

After last week’s 6-1/2-hour Denver school board meeting featured a couple of cringeworthy interpersonal clashes, I’m sure at least some board members are embarrassed by what the public witnessed. They should be. While the in-fighting rages, work of substance is being neglected.

A lack of clarity on academic goals for Denver Public Schools is emblematic of the district’s and school board’s struggles and strategic incoherence.

The extent to which Denver Public Schools and its board are stumbling and bumbling through an ill-conceived effort to limit the freedoms of their 52 innovation schools would be comical if the stakes for children weren’t so high

Reading at grade level by the end of third grade is considered predictive of future academic success. Yet according to the data, just 5 percent of Black third-graders and 5 percent of Latino third-graders met or exceeded grade level in assessments given last fall.

Simplified or not, the bottom line – curtailing the freedoms of innovation schools – remains the same. It’s a bad idea, and a classic case of a solution in search of a problem

Denver Public Schools staff presented some troubling student learning data to the school board recently, but the board seemed largely uninterested.

In Dougco, a new, conservative majority in the affluent, predominantly white district has fired the superintendent, in part over the contents of a reasonable equity policy that has nonetheless been sucked into the maw of the right-wing media’s hysteria over the often-mislabeled Critical Race Theory.