Commentary

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. 

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.

Two years ago I never would have imagined I’d be playing a role in bringing an outstanding school to my community in Commerce City.  

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.

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.

There has never been a more important time than now to re-evaluate our approach to education. We owe it to our children and families to embrace systemic change, not just incrementalism.

Because Blacks have been disparately treated in DPS for decades, true equity requires an abundance of resources to be distributed to the Black community to address these systemic inequities.