In the end, supporters of innovation schools and zones did not get everything they wanted out of a new state law offering an added layer of dispute resolution when innovation zone plans are changed or status is revoked, but they’re framing it as a step forward nonetheless.
One by one, each school paraded its seniors to the stage to make their big announcement. Each announcement was followed by thunderous cheers and more than a few tears.
If Superintendent Alex Marrero and his team intended to calm the storm that has erupted during the past month over the attempt to limit innovation school freedoms, a letter intended to muzzle dissent appears to have backfired. In fact, district employees are becoming more outspoken in their displeasure over a multitude of issues they say are being mishandled by the current administration.
Four Denver school board members have requested from Superintendent Alex Marrero a school-by-school inventory of how recently approved changes to policy could negatively affect the school district’s 52 innovation schools.
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
If passed, this legislation would update Colorado’s policies, practices, and data frameworks to make data about students’ experiences at school more transparent and to ensure that every student learns in an environment that is positive, safe and inclusive.
The initial idea to champion a financial literacy campaign started in 2019 when alumni partners came together in Ednium’s Design Lab to identify issues they could impact in public-school education.
For the last 19 years as a parent and 15 years being professionally engaged, I have heard the rhetoric of engagement and longed for the reality of it. But the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Should Colorado test its public school students this year to get some data on how the pandemic has affected different groups of kids? Or is the idea absurd on its face during a pandemic?
Colorado charter schools will receive more than $2 million in state grants to support innovative solutions to help state students affected by the economic, social and health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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
If passed, this legislation would update Colorado’s policies, practices, and data frameworks to make data about students’ experiences at school more transparent and to ensure that every student learns in an environment that is positive, safe and inclusive.
The initial idea to champion a financial literacy campaign started in 2019 when alumni partners came together in Ednium’s Design Lab to identify issues they could impact in public-school education.
For the last 19 years as a parent and 15 years being professionally engaged, I have heard the rhetoric of engagement and longed for the reality of it. But the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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
The current attempt by the board to limit the strategic plans of innovation schools is built on a fundamentally flawed argument because it assumes that the innovation schools are the problem.
It is clear to us that the so-called executive limitations on “Standard Teacher Rights and Protections” represent a solution in search of a nonexistent problem. The Denver Board of Education would be wise to turn its attention instead to the profound challenges facing the district as we cope with the fallout from two-plus years of disrupted learning.
What Rocky Mountain Prep has done for my family over the years just goes to show how a small school community can be responsive in ways larger schools or districts can’t be.
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.
In discussing what policy governance calls “community linkage,” it was revealed that the board’s “owners” under policy governance are voters. That is to whom the board is responsible and whom they purportedly should engage. Under this frame, the people most impacted by the decisions the board makes and the policies it dictates – students, families, teachers, administrators, other employees of the district, charter and zone partners, etc. – are not the folks to whom the board is accountable.
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.
We grieve the eternal promotion of another community servant, Ricardo Martinez, who with his wife Pam, built the powerful coalition Padres y Jóvenes Unidos, known today as Movimiento Poder.
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