Commentary

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.

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

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.