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C
OMMUNITIES
U
NITED FOR
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DUCATION
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BUILDING AN ANTI-RACIST SCHOOL SYSTEM
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The CURE is Powered by: Righteous Rage Institute
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June 9, 2020
A Lost Opportunity:
The Unimaginative Re-Imagining of the SPF
After admitting the current accountability system cements institutional racism and contributes heavily to inequitable educational opportunities, and after a ten month process of “community-led, District supported” re-imagining of the current
School Performance Framework (SPF)
, a hard working committee came up with…drum roll please… a plan that will continue the status quo that has given us, you guessed it, institutional racism and inequitable educational opportunities with some new twists and turns.
Initially there were no limits to designing a completely new way of evaluating quality schools, but it appears this three pronged
resolution
could pass even though it lacks clarity and could potentially add even more harmful data back into the school evaluation mix. This proposed District accountability tool could turn out to be even more punitive than the one we are trying to eliminate. The three gentlemen on the Board, Tay Anderson, Scott Baldermann, and Brad Laurvick seem to be NO votes, three of the four gentleladies, Angela Cobian, Barbara O’Brien and Carrie Olson, are YES votes. District 4 Director Jen Bacon seems undecided, in spite of the fact that her district will be most heavily adversely affected by the continuation of the current accountability system.
This is all happening while the District has no new Denver Plan in place, a process which has been postponed due to the pandemic. With this unprecedented opportunity for real change, real accountability, real different educational offerings and means of delivery, what has DPS decided to do? Embrace the status quo of education reform.
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Denver’s School Performance Framework accountability system has long been under attack for its complexity and continuously changing targets. This process has created a culture of competition not collaboration, setting schools up to be seen as winners or losers. The complicated algorithms which are applied inconsistently, are sometimes even based on bad math causing principals to have to scramble to find mistakes and correct them lest their ratings dip due to district mistakes. It emphasizes test scores, weighing academic growth heavily over academic proficiency, which in turn leads to a very uneven assessment of schools (i.e., schools with differing percentages of proficiencies in different parts of the city get very different ratings’ outcomes).
See our previous article on
Racism in the SPF
for more details.
Using the SPF, the District can promote the reform tenet of CHOICE, and drive school closures. Denver’s SPF has been the blueprint for the Colorado reform movement’s statewide accountability system and has been lifted up by reformers nationally as a hallmark “innovation” of reform. In truth, it has not improved outcomes for students at all. In Denver, the stated goal of the SPF in the Denver 2020 plan was to ensure all students had access to great schools, however today only
38%
of DPS students attend a Blue or Green school, compared to the DPS goal of 80% by 2020.
45,600
students of color (66%) attend lower performing schools (yellow/orange/red), as well as
11,400
white students (50%). Instead of creating more great schools, the SPF has created school closures and school choice that has allowed DPS to shuffle students around the system, masking the reality of continued failure on the part of DPS leadership to address performance gaps and meet student needs. Since its inception in 2008, the DPS SPF has undergone several changes that have resulted in a system riddled with complexities and full of metrics that don’t actually measure what they purport to measure and that few truly understand.
Enter a new board, one supposedly less reform-oriented and to its credit, this new Board was willing to tackle the criticisms being laid at the feet of the SPF. Headed by Board President Dr. Carrie Olson and Associate Chief of Portfolio Management Jen Holladay, the District convened a task force challenged with re-imagining the SPF.
Even with some administrative stumbles at the beginning, the group initially seemed aligned on getting rid of the complicated DPS SPF altogether. In fact, midway through the process the members voted 3-1 to no longer use Denver’s SPF and use the state SPF to meet state and federal accountability requirements. The specific language the committee voted on, which has now become “recommendation 1” in the resolution is:
1.Adopt the state performance framework to capture and track essential information about how our schools are performing and how they relate to other districts and schools across the state to meet state accountability requirements
And while the committee could have ended its work then, a new reform facilitator was brought in a few months into the process and the charge to the committee began to shift. Several members were committed to the possibility of real innovation and change and viewed this as an opportunity to see this happen. When members posed the possibility of slowing down and working through a true community-led process, they were told that the deadline for a recommendation to the board was not negotiable.
Unfortunately, in typical DPS fashion, the free thinkers were tactically outsmarted by the staff of DPS and real innovation was quashed. With an artificial timeline imposed upon the group, and a new Denver Plan still in its embryonic state rather than postponing the decision or ending the work, the DPS administration took over and began scheduling presentations from local and national groups, with all but one promoting the use of a framework or dashboard as a tool to determine school closures.
But DPS and the reformers weren’t done yet. DPS staff recruited like-minded committee members, to begin drafting recommendations to
create a data dashboard to inform all stakeholders on school performance and growth
(resolution recommendation 2),
and leverage a collaborative continuous learning and improvement cycle (resolution
recommendation 3), which in effect will maintain the exact same process as the old SPF, but now with more data and documentation.
The addition of recommendations 2 and 3 place a larger burden on teachers and school leaders who have not been given an authentic opportunity to provide input and feedback in the re-imagining process. In fact, upon learning that the Denver Classroom Teachers Association would be coming out with a resolution to approve recommendation 1 and not approve recommendations 2 and 3, DPS hastily arranged a Zoom meeting with the DCTA leadership and a few individuals from the 30-member committee. Following the meeting, DPS drafted a letter to the DCTA with proposed solutions to their concerns, claiming that a vote against the SPF committee recommendations is a vote against the vision of the committee, effectively shutting down any hope of real engagement and collaboration.
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The District says
WE
need an SPF to allow families to make the best school choice for their students, to provide equity among schools, and of course, to stop institutional racism. They have cloaked it in “equity” terms to send a message that things will change for the better with all the new data they will require every school to report on each year.
However, this “new” SPF will still allow DPS to continue to compare and evaluate schools, even though the wording is all around the whole child and climate and culture. It’s a ruse. They will still be able to close schools as NO board policies are changing related to that by passing this set of recommendations. The real purpose of these two recommendations is to continue marketing schools, promoting the choice system, and requiring that misleading data about schools be published while continuing the inevitable comparisons across schools, regardless of their needs and the different programs that exist. Yet...
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- None of the recommendations put any accountability on the superintendent, her leadership team, or central administration (despite the fact that actually addressing institutional racism requires changes to the entire system, not passing the buck to individual schools)
- A dashboard is a structure implemented by those who see our education system like an investment portfolio. The data tells you which stocks (schools) are performing and which are not. The goal is to off-load the lowest 20% of performers each year in order to increase your investment. But if the investment is supposed to result in great schools in every neighborhood, we will never get there with this approach. The problem will not be solved by re-imagining or rearranging or revamping an already flawed tool. The problem is deeply embedded in the structures of institutional racism.
- The market-driven school choice process has utilized the SPF to weaponize data in order to close down traditional public schools and benefit well-resourced private charters. Most often, the schools closed down are those serving majority Black and Latino students, and as they face closure, parents and students that attend those schools are always fighting to keep them open and calling out the SPF for its racism and inaccurate representation of the quality of those schools. Well-resourced charters that utilize communication and recruitment departments to advertise their schools and often spread false information about their traditional school “competitors”, in an effort to drive families and therefore resources away from those traditional schools, making it impossible to compete (the same playbook as those that instigated white flight in the era of redlining). This is all done by careful design, and a racist tried-and-true playbook to create a false narrative in our city that good schools are failing and that failing schools are high performing, all in an effort to prop up the failing facade of “choice”, which families often don’t really have.
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So while our country is ravaged by COVID-19 and racism, DPS is trying to squeak through a resolution that will ensure the inequities and institutional racism of the past will continue. That is, unless District 4 Director Jen Bacon hears from you about the importance of dismantling the SPF process.
The vote is Thursday, June 11, 2020.
If you wish to write to the entire board you can do so at:
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