Alan Gottlieb

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.

The Denver Public Schools board threw a big bone to the Denver Classroom Teachers Association last month by proposing to strip the school district’s 52 innovation schools of freedoms they’ve enjoyed from the teachers union contract.

Give the Denver Public Schools board credit for approving contract renewals for 16 public charter schools last week. Unfortunately, a couple of board members cast their votes while spreading misinformation.

Denver’s new school board got off to a bad start today by declining to livestream its first-ever meeting, a daylong retreat, despite positioning itself as the most community-responsive group of individuals ever to hold board seats.