Let’s say a group of parents at a neighborhood school banded together and proposed to a high-performing charter school that the two schools combine efforts to create a PreK-12 school that would help send all kids from the struggling neighborhood to college.
What’s not to like, right? Parental involvement at its best. Community engagement. A tacit recognition that ideological food fights over charter versus traditional public schools are meaningless; all that matters is how to serve kids well.
Who might object, and on what grounds?
Stay tuned for some possible answers.
Last Friday, Denver’s Cole Arts and Science Academy (CASA) parents, along with Principal Julie Murgel, held a news conference to announce they had asked the Denver School of Science and Technology to open its third campus at Cole in the fall of 20l1. See video). The idea, hatched by a group of parents, had been presented to DSST leadership some weeks earlier, and DSST had responded with interest.
Every member of DSST’s first two graduating classes has been accepted into a four-year college. Forty-five percent of the school’s students qualify for federally subsidized lunches. Measured by the Denver Public Schools School Performance Framework, DSST is the top-rated high school in Denver, by a wide margin.
Much remains to be negotiated. CASA is currently PreK-8th grade, and DSST offers grades 6-12. Presumably, DSST would take over the middle grades, but that isn’t set in stone.
Attendance boundaries would be another delicate negotiating point. How might a new, high-performing high school in the area affect Manual High School? Manual is still rebuilding, under strong leadership, after being closed down for a year in the wake of an ill-fated dalliance with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
One of DSST’s cornerstones is a socio-economically mixed student body. How would the school achieve integration in a neighborhood that, while gentrifying, remains predominantly low-income? That will be an issue requiring careful, sensitive handling.
These are real challenges, but they are surmountable with open, inclusive planning, transparency and good intent. In this regard, the potential partnership is off to a good start.
But signs have already appeared that, on the Denver school board at least, there will be opposition to this plan. Probably not enough to sink it, but enough to cause some anxious moments.
I asked board member Andrea Merida, who regards charter schools with a skeptical eye, for her initial reaction to the idea. It wasn’t warm and fuzzy.
“We need to step back and take a look at the range of needs for the entire near-northeast sector before we can jump into such an arrangement,” she said in an e-mail. She then listed some specific concerns:
- It is unclear, she said, how or whether the new school would address the needs of English language learners and special education students in the area. “I want to make sure we avoid any kind of a situation that might tend to benefit more affluent kids or segregate kids that need ELL or special education support.”
- Parents may not have reached out to “non-English dominant families” and didn’t appear to have plans to do so, Merida said. However, one of the speakers at the Friday press conference spoke only Spanish, and another, a parent named Miguel Oaxaca, clearly wasn’t a native English speaker. So someone has done some outreach into that group of parents.
- The principal sent information about this “unauthorized initiative” home in Thursday folders, thereby using “district resources…without having first cleared it with her instructional supervisor.” Sounds like a bureaucratic objection to me – not substantive.
Merida concluded by saying that she looked forward to receiving the proposal. “I hope that it will have recommendations for addressing these issues.”
From what I’m hearing, there’s also some skepticism among dissenters on the board that this idea came from parents. It must have been driven by DSST, or Superintendent Tom Boasberg, this line of thinking goes.
DSST CEO Bill Kurtz told me last week that near-northeast Denver “wasn’t even on our radar screen” until Cole parents approached DSST leaders. (The charter network is in the early stages of an ambitious expansion plan. Four new DSST campuses will open in Denver in the next four years, the first of those this fall in Green Valley Ranch.)
And Boasberg spokesman Mike Vaughn had this to say about the origin of the idea:
“The leadership and parent teams at Cole and DSST have proposed a partnership. We look forward to discussing the proposal with the entire community and with the Board of Education as part of our process for identifying locations for new schools.”
Board members might want to be careful about opposing this idea. If the new partners answer the pending questions, as I’m confident they will, it is hard to see how this isn’t good for kids in northeast Denver.
At that point, you’d have to wonder whose interests those in opposition would be promoting.
Popularity: 73% [?]
I love this progressive thinking! Julie Murgel is doing what any great education leader does – putting the student’s interests and needs ahead of other issues. If DSST and other schools have a better track record of engaging children with a love of learning and to pursue post-secondary options than some of DPS’ more traditional models, then how could members of the BoE consider attempting to block this?
So what’s the deal with DPS school board members?
A group of parents and possibly activists, the principal and some in district administration with support from the Mayor Hickenlooper, Speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives Carroll and other community leaders would like the third DSST to go Cole.
As Alan Gottlieb pointed out today this should be a kumbaya moment for the charter and district school crowds.
Instead, the first reaction from several board members was a concern about why they didn’t know first, who came up with the idea and whether DPS stationary had been used to announce a community meeting to talk about where Cole kids should go to high school.
Reminds me of how the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reacted to their recent democracy movement or how some Soviet block leaders reacted to various movements in the 80’s as the empire was crumbling.
Regardless of some board member’s position on expansion of DSST, they might consider getting a better political consultant given the gulf between DSST’s and many DPS secondary school results.
You’d think leaders of a district with over 40,000 low income students that prepares fewer than 200 low income DPS graduates each year for college (that’s less than 5%) might want a few more schools like DSST that prepare nearly all of their students for college.
I really hope that this is not another indication of what’s in store for Denver Public Schools. Just remember that we can follow in the direction of San Diego, New York or President Obama in terms of urban district improvement. San Diego’s improvement stalled after Alan Bersin was pushed out by the teacher union controlled board while New York has continued to make improvement after three mayoral elections.
Much will depend on whether the Denver community understands and is committed to making sure that every Denver kid can attend a school or set of schools where all kids are prepared for college, work and life. Come on Denver, I thought we were a fairly progressive city.
With mounting evidence that charter schools are contributing to the re-segregation of public schools, isn’t it time to determine the veracity of the claims by Chungmei Lee of the Harvard Civil Rights Project that, since 1995 when forced busing ended, Denver Public Schools (DPS) has acted in ways that contributed to that re-segregation? Obviously, since that time charter schools have proliferated throughout DPS. There is little, or no, evidence that DPS administrators or the board of education has monitored the progress of charter schools. Thus, Denver Arts and Technology Academy (DATA) existed from 2000 to 2009 with steadily declining enrollment, an almost annual fifty percent teacher turnover and stagnant or declining CSAP scores. Despite being advised of those conditions, DPS failed to act until the school’s own board voted to close. While the Cole community might benefit from such a relationship, why should there continue to be “sweetheart deals” for a few while the rest of the northeast sector and other regular schools continue to be ignored or scapegoated? Reform isn’t reform if it doesn’t contribute the common good. Charter schools, as legally constituted in Colorado, fail to contribute to the common good.
Good luck with that line of argument, Ed. Charter proponents tend to be idealistic and myopic and often fail to appreciate the special character of a charter-type school. It takes real dedication from all parties, including parents, to make a charter work and students who are not inclined towards science, then why DSST for them? Or, just the hand-picked, self-selected few? I agree that the more magnet and charter schools there are, the more marginalized the left-behind students become and the more stigmatized the traditional schools become for somehow having failed the remaining kids.
You may be interested in reading this new study, “Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards.” http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/pressreleases/CRP-Choices-Without-Equity-report.pdf
Van, how come it’s ok for you to point out all these community leaders and electeds are behind this Cole-DSST idea, but you were nowhere to be found when the VERY SAME thing happened at Lake?
Double-standard, much?
As Mr. Augden pointed out, charters have a tendency to segregate. It appears that you are thumbing your nose at a process that will ensure that education is equitable for ALL Cole-Whittier kids. Make fun all you want, but I will fight to make sure we have parity and equity in DPS, whether you and the other gentry like it or not.
Don’t you believe in equality, Van? This is America.
Andrea thanks for your post, yes, I believe deeply in equality and indeed this is America, a great country where promises sometimes don’t meet reality, particularly when it comes to public education.
I’ve spent my entire career teaching, running/opening schools and working to change policy so that more disadvantaged kids can access the American Dream. I’ve mostly done this in the context of schools that were more integrated ethnically and socio-economically because it does make a difference. I think that we would mostly agree here.
The argument that DSST at Cole, or for that matter, West Denver Prep at Lake is causing more segregation in DPS is not supported by the evidence here in Denver.
As for Lake, I have been very supportive of getting high quality schools like West Denver Prep and starting a new high quality IB school in the Lake building. The current school housed at Lake has not worked. It is failing far too many kids so I would not defend the program or the adults running the school.
Here’s what I know about segregation, socioeconomic or otherwise. WDP’s minority population overall is 94%. Unless something changed at the last lottery (I’m willing to admit that it might have), 100% of the kids at the South Federal campus are Latino. I challenge you to show me something different.
WDP’s is a high-stakes testing environment. Programs like theirs were developed in reaction to NCLB, with the objective of getting Latino and African-American children to test well…and therefore make spending money on them justifiable to folks that just don’t want to do that. However, while we pat ourselves on the back for high test scores, we force kids to toil in programs that don’t educate their whole selves. And yet, more affluent kids get the cool charters.
With regard to Lake, what’s indefensible is the way the district set up that school for failure. You don’t force a program into block scheduling, knowing that such a schedule often only results in more repetition, and therefore cause the program to cut out its music and arts. You don’t tell unionized teachers “no” when they ask for the flexibility in stretching out the school day to work on fundamentals, just because the school bus schedule is supposedly set in stone. No, you work collaboratively with staff and community to bring up achievement so that the full effects of IB can take root. But somehow, it’s ok for this to happen to Latino and less-affluent kids.
What’s also indefensible is the fact that the district is resistant to hiring a full-time, district-level IB coordinator to run interference for these programs. If you are really interested in a high-quality IB school at Lake, you and I should join forces to press the district to get on the ball. This move alone could have saved Lake.
Here’s another initiative on which you and I can collaborate: let’s see how high-stakes middle schoolers do in high school. It would be interesting to see how former WDPers, for example, are doing in the George Washington IB program. Are you game?
Andrea-
The minority population at Lake Middle School is 93.1%, per the 2009 SPF. I can extrapolate then that the student population of the new WDP will be predominantly minority as well, at least initially.
The difference is that the majority of children who have the opportunity to attend WDP will enter high school at or above grade level. The incremental improvements that other NW Denver middle schools are demonstrating equate to many, many years before they attain the caliber and results of WDP. I think that is a tremendous disservice to the children in my neighborhood.
As one who works in a rural area devoid of charter schools I am curious. I keep hearing about the concern that charters, as well as other forms of “atomization,” have a tendency to re-segregate the population. Indeed, we had a small and sputtering charter movement here, and in a discussion with one of the prospective board members, he confessed that one of his motivations for getting involved was to try to create a school where his kids would be separated from “those kids.” They wanted to close initial registration for the first year in February of the previous year, hoping that the enrollment would be stacked “in their favor.” Hmm… I can see that being “disadvantaged” can simply mean not having parents that value and/or are paying attention to educational options – or having parents that simply lack the skills or where-with-all to advocate for their children. Thus, students whose parents are educated or more “advantaged” work to get their kids in what they believe are the better schools, and the “traditional” schools end up “marginalized” with a population of the “left-behind.” The question then is who is advocating for the “left-behind”? It’s not like traditional school employees are going to coach the disadvantaged to try to get into better schools. Shouldn’t traditional schools be getting the message that they need to change in order to retain as well as attract students? Am I off base, or is this what seems to be going on? Is there something I’m missing here? How can we have choice while also ensuring that children coming from lower SES families get equal opportunity?
Charters, like any other education tool or program, can be done well or poorly — it is a function of the authorizing body, and not the type of school. Any good authorizer will take into account demographics when negotiating the charter contract. To take the intentions of one person and apply them across the entire Charter population sounds just a bit specious.
But if you want to examine the tendency of “atomization” I would suggest a better target might be the selective admissions programs — both within schools and entire schools themselves — that is part of the traditional public school system. I don’t know how this works in rural areas, but in Denver, among over a dozen selective admissions programs, I am unaware of a single one with higher FRL than the overall student population. If you want to focus on parents who are opting out of the base population pool, that is a much easer, larger, and more pervasive place to start — as long as you are willing to move past the labels and tendency to list all [insert group here] schools as bad.
[...] week, I wrote enthusiastically about a proposed partnership between Cole Arts and Science Academy and the Denver School of Science [...]
[...] week, I wrote enthusiastically about a proposed partnership between Cole Arts and Science Academy and the Denver School of Science [...]