I will be traveling for the next 12 days, part of a delegation from Denver invited on an “intercultural dialogue trip” to Turkey. We’ll be visiting schools and universities throughout the country as well as newspaper offices, religious centers and people’s homes. Since the focus is not solely or even primarily education-related, I’ve set up a separate, personal blog. If you’re interested, you can follow it here.
Meanwhile, let’s play a science fiction game. Imagine that the act of traveling somewhere far away and culturally distinct alters not only your perspective but also realities on the ground at your place of origin. What if I were to return June 12 to find Colorado’s educational landscape changed in significant ways? What would I hope those changes would look like? (fade to blur)
When I return to work Monday, June 14, here is what I find.
1. Denver Public Schools has gotten serious about autonomy. Instead of paying lip-service to freeing schools from district bureaucratic entanglements, DPS has given a dozen of its schools the kind of freedom normally reserved for charter schools. At the same time, the district has said an emphatic ‘no’ to a dozen other schools that sought autonomy but lacked the visionary leadership to succeed.
DPS Assistant Superintendent Kristin Waters made a strong case last week on the Education News Colorado blog for allowing equity concerns to override autonomy in cases where autonomy threatened equity. So let’s imagine DPS has hit upon an elegant solution: Only schools with strong leadership and poverty levels above the district mean would be granted autonomy. If equity means unequal resources for unequal needs, then DPS finally started walking its talk in this regard.
2. Leadership at the Colorado Education Association has had an epiphany and realized that for teaching to be considered a profession, teachers had to be treated like professionals – by school districts and unions alike. Across Colorado, massive collective bargaining agreements detailing working conditions to absurd levels of detail have been replaced by thin contracts dealing with pay, benefits, due process and other essential elements of professional employment. All the extraneous garbage is gone.
3. Speaking of equity, schools across Colorado now operate on different calendars. Schools with sub-par achievement and/or large numbers of low-income students now have school years 210 days long. To pay for this, schools in affluent areas have shorter years, and families fill the gap through self-funded experiential learning opportunities, for which students get credit.
4. Colorado’s open enrollment law has been amended so that school districts have the ability to promote socio-economically integrated schools through “controlled choice” assignment programs. This change has reduced achievement gaps by 25 percent and has not caused much-feared white flight.
5. The state has figured out an assessment system that measures student growth in a manner acceptable to the CEA and other unions. Highly effective teachers earn $120,000 or more. Teaching in Colorado becomes the “hot new profession,” as a Time Magazine cover story puts it.
6. David Singer’s University Preparatory Charter School has opened and replicated, and, despite its 98 percent free lunch population, each year outpaces Denver’s Bromwell, Southmoor, Steck and Slavens schools as hands-down the best elementary school network in Denver.
7. No one in Colorado even knows what the term “direct placement” means. When they hear about it from other states, they respond with “How stupid is that?”
So, I’ll see you in a couple of weeks. You’d better get busy: As you can see from the list above, there’s much work to be done before I return.
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