At the same time, Colorado districts have proved they can innovate with the best of them.  Two Colorado districts (DPS and St. Vrain) won in the much more competitive Investment in Innovation (I3) competition where there were 49 winners out of over 1,600 applications.

It is not that Colorado lacks the ideas or the innovators at the state level, but when we can’t draw that straight line of authority from the Colorado Department of Education to classrooms, we won’t win…at least as long as the current top-down perspective on how education systems work prevails among education thinkers and leaders.

The problem is not just that the bureaucrats at the Department of Ed don’t get the West; the reviewers don’t get it either. The scores for both of our R2T applications showed wide variation among reviewers.  This means Colorado’s tight-accountability, loose-compliance model is understood and supported by only some in the corps of evaluators. A significant number of education thinkers and leaders believe that top-down command and control is the way for states to get things done in school systems, regardless of how far that drifts from reality.

Colorado and the rest of the West will never win unless we can make the case that the tight-accountability, loose-compliance model can support innovation and improve student outcomes.  This should not be a hard case to make.

The success of Colorado districts in the I3 competitions as well as the innovations from our charter school sector clearly show the benefit of being firm on outcomes but loose on means. The fact that the U.S. Department of Education continues to support charter schools while also pushing top-down models suggests there is (or at least should be) a debate in their own hallways on valid theories of action at the district and state level.

So what do we do next?  There is plenty of work for everyone.

For our Washington representatives (that means you Sen. Bennet and DPS alum now Senior Advisor in the Department of Education Brad Jupp), repeat every day: “Local control is different in the West” and “Students are well served when schools and districts are allowed to innovate.”  Equally important, if the reauthorization of NCLB moves towards more competitive grants, do not set up Colorado to compete with other states. Focus the competition between districts and schools, where we can win.

The research and journalism community must get better about explaining how local control looks in the West and that it is not a bad thing for kids.  We all know that the words “local control” often are used to stall reform.  But researchers need to highlight our successes throughout the state and show that with accountability for outcomes local control also can lead to innovation, creativity, and better outcomes for kids.

The foundation community should continue to support Colorado reform AND support those researchers, journalists and bloggers who can make the case to the nation that we are different from the East Coast and that our students are better off for it.

Finally, the education community must demonstrate that we can raise student achievement and close the achievement gap in Colorado. Our reform plate is full with new standards, teacher evaluation systems, and approaches toward low-performing schools.  If we try to do too many things without enough resources, we are guaranteed to fail. We should slow down on teacher evaluation systems and focus on getting classroom fundamentals right by ensuring that teachers are implementing curricula that are aligned with our new standards.

AND we all should remember the core lesson from this: Stop trying to compete with other states. We can’t win.

Nevertheless, the state managed to rank only 17 out of the 19 finalists.  After the Feds decided to award only 10 grants, friends in Colorado are asking, “What’s up with that?”

A few assertions appeared throughout this process that deserve a response. Over the last year, I have repeatedly heard statements such as the following:

“But President Obama and Secretary Duncan want to support all our reforms, and they especially want to help Colorado’s new Senator, Michael Bennet.  Since he is such a reform champion, and potentially vulnerable in the next election, surely they’ll help him bring home the bacon to Colorado.”

Or

“This is too important a competition to leave it up to the bureaucrats and some peer reviewers. With 3.4 billion dollars at stake, the political appointees are definitely going to make sure the “right” states win, and we are certainly among the chosen in Colorado.  They can’t deny us!”

As these ideas, or more subtle versions of them, were raised over the last year and a half, I have politely tried to explain that federal grant competitions don’t work that way.  As a former employee at the U.S. Department, I worked around various national competitions for federal funds that were awarded through similar competitions – albeit for considerably smaller amounts and with lower profile programs and less political stakes involved.

I started out as neither a political appointee nor a career official at the department. I began serving with a temporary expert appointment and eventually I wormed my way into the Department’s career staff where I led the Department’s Public Charter Schools Program.

I’m not a lawyer so don’t ask me to quote the code, but all these competitions are run under the auspices of various federal rules and regulations and within the limitations of the statutory provisions for that particular grant program as they are written by Congress.  They are administered by career professionals rather than political appointees.  Peer reviewers rank the proposals in a “slate,” with the highest-scoring application at the top and the rest of the applicants listed in order of their score down the list.  The funds are awarded to each high ranked applicant in order until the available funds are used up, or until the remaining applicants were ranked so poorly that they were basically determined ineligible.

Keep this piece in mind if you ever apply for these grants. Unless it is in the criteria of the review, the amount applicants ask for is not really part of the decision-making process until after the ranking takes place.  Only then do the amounts matter, but only as they are totaled up in a running total as the officials designate grantees further and further down the slate.  When they use up all the available funds at the funding levels requested the applicants, a line is drawn through the slate. Those above get what they asked for, and the rest of the applicants are bitter losers.

Political appointees are not allowed to do much beyond provide input into the creation of the RFP and the rubrics, or the writing of selection criteria for peer reviewers. Even the rubrics are subject to the rule-making process, or a set of “generic” criteria are applied for low-profile programs.  Once those materials and the list of reviewers are set, the political folks would be violating the rules and regulations if they were making decisions.  If they put pressure on the non-political folks to change scores, or if they insist that the career administrators pass over one applicant and award funds to an applicant that was given a lower score, the political appointees (and their bosses) get in trouble.  It is juggling of this sort over Reading First that got folks in trouble during the last administration.

But there is one thing that political appointees could have done, or argued for, that might have changed the outcome after the ranked slate of applicants was determined by the application process.  They could have tried to argue that the awardees should get smaller grants, which frees up money to award grants to the next few applicants on the slate.  However, in this case, that is still extremely unlikely to have helped Colorado get funded. This is because of Colorado’s low ranking in the competition and the Department’s interest in ensuring that these grants be so incredibly big that states would do anything to get them.

An analysis of the states that were competing, their scores in the competition, their student populations, and the size of the awards granted to the lucky winners quickly shows us why any political shenanigans (even the quasi-legal effort to reduce award amounts to create money to fund lower-ranked applicants) were unlikely to have helped Colorado in this case.

The other forms of string-pulling that Colorado may have hoped, or other states feared, would generally produce scandals so distracting, and so potentially damaging to the Administration, that the risk of leaving Colorado – and even Candidate Bennet — without this prize would pale in comparison to the risk of trying to help them unscrupulously.

So if we assume adjusting amounts was the only strategy at their disposal, how could it have worked? It depends on how much states get and whether those amounts could have been adjusted enough to fund Colorado – not likely.  Figure 1. below lists awards received from the RTT in the first two competitions, the student populations of each state, and the award amount calculated on a per-student basis (as if every student in the state had a portion of the RTT grant award spent on their education.) In truth, districts are guaranteed only 50% of the total, and how districts spend the money is dictated by the application.  But the measure of each state’s student population gives a rough measure of the scale of their education system and the capacity to spend a huge grant like this.

Figure 1.

The RTT was not a formula. It was a competitive program. However, the amount a state could compete for was determined by a crude formula that set broad parameters for possible funds in each round of the competition based on relative state size. Under this formula Colorado was applying for $175 million.  All of the awards certainly pass the “ginormous test” by any state’s standards of avarice.  However, the variation in the dollars per student raise questions about the wisdom of such a crude formula driving the size of such huge awards.

There is unquestionably much that can be done to improve D.C. or Delaware’s education reform efforts, and maybe there are efficiencies of scale that make reform easier and cheaper in bigger states, like New York and Ohio — yeah, sure.  No matter how you cut it, it is hard to argue these tiny jurisdictions need four or five times as much money per student as Ohio (where reform is presumably a pretty cheap and easy affair).  But if you’re trying to fund additional states, these relatively excessive amounts for small states don’t help much because the totals would quickly be gobbled up by bigger states ranked higher than Colorado in the competition.

Given this distribution, and even despite regulations and announcements about the amount available to states of different sizes, there could have been room for political pressure.  A hypothetical discussion would go like this, “That seems like a lot of money for some of these states. Can they really spend that much? How about if you look at their budget and their proposal and see if there are areas where it is imprudent to give them as much as they asked?”

If the amounts requested don’t match the work proposed, or there was too much uncertainty about such budgeting issues, then the amounts funded would be negotiated by the career administrators and the states.  Again, the political appointees don’t get to do this directly.  But the political appointees could send serious signals to career staff, and given the scale of these proposals and the rush to get them in, inevitably some wiggle room in award amounts would be possible. The award amounts might plausibly then be reduced to see who else on the slate could be funded.

For arguments sake, let’s say that it was determined that the amount that Ohio actually received per student was a reasonable thing to expect of all recipients – and the original formula proposed in the competition was abandoned in favor of this “little adjustment” to match the Buckeye State.  Figure 2 below includes all states that were finalists in the second round, listed in a slate according to their rank.  The columns on the right indicate the amount the states would have received if total awards were run by formula, with a per student amount set at the minimum of the Round 2 awards ($229 per student).  The far right column indicates the total amount of spending given that per student amount.  As we see, if this strategy were pursued, three more states could have been funded within before the total amount available to spend expended was used up (New Jersey, Arizona and Louisiana).

Figure 2.

Continuing in this fashion, if the total grant award were reduced to $200 per student, with the current ranking, South Carolina would be the only state added. At $150 per student, it would add Illinois.  It would take a reduction to awards based on a formula of around $135 per student before Colorado and California would receive grants given the current ranking among the slate of finalists.  At that point the current round of successful recipients would have had to receive a total of $1.67 billion less to free up money to get down the slate all the way to Colorado. That’s a financial and political loss to all the current winners of an average of 167 million dollars less than what they actually received in the competition.

If Colorado were ranked 11^th out of 19 finalists, then the kind political pressure that might reduce a few grants to fund one more could have come into play.  Entering the part of the process where political pressure is most likely to benefit a friend ranked 17^th out of 19 applicants made that help entirely unfeasible. Apparently New Jersey, the unfortunate state on the bubble, isn’t high enough on the Administration’s list of political priorities to incent them to play games with this competition.

Looking at a spread sheet like this I suspect any political shenanigans start to look mighty risky, with many more losers than winners.  Even for the unscrupulous, a risk-benefit analysis would likely let this competition stand as originally conducted.

While there may be many reasons why people in Colorado are right to be angry at being slighted by the results of this race, the problems come from the score the state received and our rank relative to the other competitors.  There is plenty to gripe about in the process that produced those scores — so there is no need to stop feeling indignant.  But the problems come in the creation of the RFP, the rubric (to the extent they used one) and the various reviewer’s vagaries of scoring. It doesn’t look like the Western states had a chance, or that reviewers understood semi-rural states with their mixed levels of union representation and local control, or the courage Colorado’s leaders took to enact the reforms that are necessary yet offensive to some unions.

That still leaves plenty of reasons to raise your blood pressure. But these are different than the political ones I’ve heard. At least Colorado’s failure is not due to some imagined failure of political leaders to pull the strings a few people wish they had.

It is disappointing to see some leaders revel in the bad news by making dubious claims that SB 191 was supposed to make the state a shoe-in for the funds. This is disappointing because they miss the point of SB 191. It wasn’t about securing our chances. It was about reforming how we evaluate teachers.

Yes, the funds would have assisted in implementation of the new evaluation system. So I say screw the Feds (no I am not now writing for the Independence Institute!). It is time for our state legislators to raise revenues to pay for reforms that are necessary to improve student achievement. We also need to defeat the draconian 60 and 61 amendments and proposal 101 that would make the loss of the Race funds look like losing change in the cushions of your couch. Let’s not dwell on what might have been. Let’s not lose our focus!

So here we are, with grand, hard-won visions, no money to implement them, and bruised egos all around. What do we do now?

Let me suggest what we should NOT do now:

• Look to place blame on any one person, organization, or set of beliefs. I know many of you from working on education policy in Colorado, and I know that you are working actively to benefit education in Colorado in the best way you know how. We may have different theories of change or preferred strategies, but we would be doing Colorado children a real disservice if we decided to use this disappointing outcome as a political opportunity to drive further wedges among us. We experienced some intriguing moments of working together in crafting our Race to the Top applications – let’s remember that in moving forward.
• Ram through tough reforms without taking into account the current lack of money to do them well. Reformers will not advance the cause if we do not acknowledge the work involved in true change, and the resources needed to do that work well. Reforms that are implemented poorly become discredited reforms.
• Use the lack of money as an excuse for maintaining the status quo. Change will certainly be harder, but it remains the right thing to do – we just need to figure out how.

Without seeing individual scores, it’s hard to know what sank our application. My guess is that we’ll find out that our local control system of education governance led to uncertainties about our capacity as a state to get the job done. We’re used to working in that context, but reviewers may have been uncomfortable with it.

So what should we do next?

• Focus on the collective vision articulated in the Race to the Top applications and put the rest behind us. For all the difficulties and disappointments, Race to the Top really did prod us to come together and articulate what we want for education in Colorado – a valuable result that should not be discarded.
• Identify what we can do within the current system and get to work.
• Develop a funding plan for our other objectives that involves both private and public contributions.
• Continue the difficult conversations we are having around issues like teacher and principal evaluation in a spirit of trust and respect, acting as if we honor others’ commitment to education even when we may disagree about the particulars.

At the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, we have too much talent and commitment in this state to let this stop us. Let’s keep moving forward.

Alan, OMG!  How is this possible?!  I thought passage of SB91 was the only thing standing in our way to be a winner!  I am shocked….shocked that after all the hype Ed News and the pushers of SB91 placed on the need to pass SB91 to win, we were passed over!  Maybe the policy was really not up to the hype behind it?   Maybe the advocates oversold it? Hate to say I told you so, but….I told you so!!!! Michael Merrifield

If you think these decisions are mainly political, Colorado should have been a winner, with Senator Bennet in an important political race, a Democratic incumbent governor, and with DPS well-regarded by the Gates Foundation, which has lots of ties with US ED staff.

If you are less cynical, and view these decisions as mostly merit-based, the combination of CAP4K, Colorado’s growth model, local teacher compensation reforms like Procomp, all sealed with the “tough” new teacher evaluation bill, again Colorado should have been a winner.

And, Colorado did try hard to play this game well.   The approach in round 1 included a public participation process that was wider in scope than in any other state, and a clear alliance with the teachers unions, to demonstrate implementation “buy-in.”   When the teacher evaluation process was scored as weak, for round 2 Colorado produced important new legislation, in a tough political fight, that was meant to address that weakness.  Since that fight alienated the union support, it will be ironic indeed if lack of union buy-in is cited as a fatal flaw in the round 2 negative decision.

In any case, this leaves Colorado without the federal financial support that would have been used to jump-start the implementation of several of these reforms.  Given the state and district budget cutbacks already backed into this current fiscal year, and the larger ones looming in fiscal 2011-12, it will be a real challenge to finance these reform efforts.

Who has got some “gifts, grants, and private donations” ?

A reader commented, “It is actually closer to 30 percent of all kids that should be going to DPS, aren’t.”  The board member responded by saying, “Oh…you’re looking at that presentation that was given to the Board a little while back. This is another situation in which the Board gets info that isn’t substantiated at the Colorado Department of Education. I can’t imagine why the numbers are inflated in what we see. They’re trying to justify something.”

On the same page on the CDE website, there was another chart that showed DPS is losing another 10,923 students to non-public schools in Colorado and another 188 students who are being home-schooled.  Denver also has far too many students who are school-aged but do not attend any school. All these numbers together make the District’s estimate of 30 percent pretty accurate.

No one was trying to hide or make up anything. There was no “trying to justify something.” The DPS administration did give substantiated information to the board. Tom Boasberg is well aware of the number of students DPS is losing and is working hard to gain the trust of Denver families so that they will return to DPS.

The same day I got the call about this story, I saw a bumper sticker that made me think about the real problem here.  It said Wag More – Bark Less.  The bumper sticker really made me consider the implications of what seems like constant conflict.

Maybe I have a hangover from the primary campaigns and a steady stream of articles dealing with poor relationships on school boards.  I just keep thinking there has to be a way to resolve these conflicts without destroying relationships and reputations.

I know that as I sat on the board podium for eight years, I sometimes barked more than I celebrated.  I was so caught up in the urgency of the work that needed to be done that I at times failed to look back and see how far we had travelled. It is easy to become cynical and skeptical of the next fix for education.  Gains in test scores are sometimes painfully small.

Systemic change takes time, but even small gains help sustain us as we continue the messy work of reform. Open and honest communication can prevent the kind of “us against them” mentality that threatens to slow the progress being made. Celebrating a district’s successes helps stop the quarrelling, allows differences to be set aside for at least a moment and unites the district behind what is going right.

Failure to celebrate discredits the hard work of our teachers, principals, students and our central administration. Every gain in CSAP and every child who graduates represents incredible effort by all the partners in any district.  Teachers spend hours learning the newest literacy strategies and math programs.  They spend hours studying data and trying to pinpoint how to best help their students.

Administrators have become much better instructional leaders from their professional development which helps them focus on what really matters in their schools.  Central administration works to improve the systems that make academic achievement possible in a complex district.  Failure to recognize these efforts demoralizes the entire system.  Celebrating gives positive recognition for everyone’s hard work and efforts.

Celebrating also helps parents and taxpayers know that their district’s efforts are paying dividends and that progress is being made within the system. In tight economic conditions, enrollment is critical to the survival of individual schools and programs in every district.  If parents fail to see a district that is united in continued progress, enrollment will suffer. Many parents will only send their children to a district if they have confidence that their children will grow and learn.  Building that confidence requires sound leadership, good communication, and team work.

There is a time and place to air differences on any board and in any organization.  There were times during my service in DPS when we were accused of endless happy-talk.  Clearly a balancing act must take place.  Good leadership recognizes that celebrating successes and advocating for the kinds of reform that will transform a school district are not mutually exclusive.

The only people who lose in an environment of constant friction and barking are the children.  Spending time to wag will not slow progress.  It may actually speed it along.

-       Denver school board member Andrea Merida “Tweet,” July 28

This year we received the(CSAP) information on Friday July 30 and the embargo is until August 10.  I am particularly concerned since the principals received their scores early last week, and the embargo is now two weeks long.  Please explain why that is occurring.  This Friday is reasonable; a week from tomorrow does not seem so.

-       School board member Jeanne Kaplan email to DPS brass, August 2.

This was the rumor being floated last week: Denver Public Schools had done badly on the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) tests. To protect U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet (a former DPS superintendent) in his primary battle against Andrew Romanoff, Bennet supporters, including Education Commissioner Dwight Jones, had hatched a plot to delay the CSAPs’ release until primary day – today.

Well so much for nefarious conspiracies. DPS, we now know, has continued to make steady progress on the CSAP. Most impressive is the district’s trajectory over the past five years.

Overall scores in reading and math have climbed by 15 percentage points since 2005. In writing, the gain has been a more modest 5 percentage points. Still, this kind of slow, steady progress is what you want to see in an organization where real change may be taking root. One-year spikes are cause for skepticism.

Everything having to do with DPS has become politicized in this political silly season. Even before their big New York Times pension story coup, Romanoff supporters were peddling the CSAP delay tale. As circumstantial evidence for this conspiracy, whisperers told reporters to check out Commissioner Jones’ central Denver home. There they would find not one but two Michael Bennet yard signs. The horror!

Well that much was true. Jones, as is his right, displayed two Bennet signs in his front yard. (Yes, I took the bait and did a drive-by).

I don’t expect anyone involved in this nonsense to say “my bad” and retract anything. That would require some humility. As a community, though, we should acknowledge and celebrate success.

And it’s not as though I’m a DPS cheerleader. In 2005, when I was at the Piton Foundation, I co-authored a study with Van Schoales, then with the Colorado Children’s Campaign. Among other things, the study examined DPS CSAP scores from 1996-97, the first year CSAP tests were administered, through 2003-04. At that time, DPS was being lauded by then-Gov. Bill Owens as the state’s shining star.

The data told a different story. CSAP scores had basically been flat over the long-term. Telling this hard truth incurred the wrath of the superintendent and board members. But the numbers were there for all to see.

So by all means, let’s take a hard look at the numbers and dispense with happy talk, which has long been run rampant inside 900 Grant Street. Are Denver’s CSAP scores good? No, not yet. Do they approach those of the state, which sets a pretty low bar? Again, not yet. Are achievement gaps still a major problem? You bet. Is DPS still rife with problems? Yes.

Still, let’s give credit where it’s due. Gains over the past five years have been real and impressive. If they continue, Denver will catch up to, and eventually surpass the state. Sustaining this kind of progress is perhaps the most difficult challenge for urban public school systems. So I wouldn’t bet my house on the trend continuing over the long haul.

But I tip my hat to Bennet, Tom Boasberg and others for the legitimate progress the district has made under their leadership.

And what does Kaplan, an elected steward of the district, have to say about these new results? Once her conspiracy theory crumbled to dust, she resorted to badmouthing the CSAP scores. She may think she’s telling hard truths. But I catch the scent of sour grapes, which in this context strikes me as perverse.

In an email to Chief Academic Officer Susana Cordova and her fellow board members last week, Kaplan wrote (the following is unedited):

“Please explain to me why are results are really positive.  I understand the trend over five years, but honestly, when the Board set its goals in Policy A of a minimum of 3.5% gain per year per subject, and the only category where we came close in all 5 years was this year’s reading at 3.3% (which is cause to celebrate, I agree), what am I missing?  I don’t really care how we are doing vis-a-vis the state.  We are consistently 15 – 20% behind the state, and why is the state the benchmark?  The state scores are nothing to write home about.  68% in reading, 55% in math, 53% in writing.  State scores in Escruita (sic)  and Lectura aren’t any better 53% to our 47% and 59% to 51%.  Again, if our goal is to educate all kids, it seems to me we aren’t anywhere near where we ought to be, nor are we moving fast enough. Nor is the state.

“So, if I am wrong in analyzing these results, please tell me why. We have been instituting “reform” for almost five years now.  I had a conversation with Tom over a year ago before last year’s scores came out where we both agreed if we didn’t see significant improvement, perhaps it would be time to change course.  I don’t see significant improvement.  All I see is very, very slow growth with non-proven experiments added to already overburdened school environments.  Tell me what the next plan is and why I should believe it will have any better results.  One of my frustrations: this isn’t a pr campaign; this is about the kids and why we aren’t serving them as well as we should be.”

Reading Kaplan’s email, I  imagined a kid coming home from school one day, flush with pride. After years of failure, he has finally made the high school baseball team. He bursts through the door and tells his mother the good news.

She looks at him, unmoved. “I’m sure you’ll never get in a game,” she says. “You still suck at sports.”

Monday, the New York Times published an article about the preponderance of inexperienced organizations competing for federal money intended to facilitate school turnaround efforts. The Department of Education is historically well-funded under the Obama administration, and the uptick in available funds– without a commensurate uptick in effective oversight– has apparently led to something of a feeding frenzy among those who have no experience in working with so-called failing schools.

In the article, Center on Education Policy president Jack Jennings said that the companies “clearly just smell the money,” while former New York City schools chancellor Rudy Crew compared the current situation to “the aftermath of the Civil War, with all the carpetbaggers and charlatans” who moved south to exploit the situation for political and financial gain.

The only aspect of this situation that surprises me is the apparent surprise of government officials and reporters like those at the New York Times. Anyone who has ever worked in or closely observed low-performing schools and school districts knows that a stunning lack of firsthand experience in education has rarely stopped the truly motivated (or well-funded) from having undue influence in said schools.

The public has been consistently led to believe that the people who know the most about education and about these schools– the teachers and principals who have worked in them for years– are too inept to be trusted (“…Those who can’t, teach.”). The expertise that comes from direct experience doing this kind of work has been discredited because of the faulty assumption that these schools are “failing” because the people in them don’t know enough or care enough to do better. Whenever the government issues top-down mandates for what is supposed to happen in schools and classrooms, or offers teachers and students money and other external motivators to improve their performance, they send a clear message about their lack of confidence in true educational professionals.

So when the best-financed Secretary of Education in history then says,“We need everyone who cares about public education to get into the business of turning around our lowest-performing schools,” we shouldn’t be surprised when everyone–qualified or not– scrambles for their chance to get in on that business. We also shouldn’t be surprised when some of these people, faced with the kind of obstacles (poverty, violence, overcrowding, inadequate support, etc.) that stymie the real experts daily, fail miserably at great expense to all of us.

As a former vice president of the Denver Public Schools Board of Education, I voted to approve the refinancing of the pension fund.  From my first day on the Board of Education, the pension of DPS employees and a potential merger with PERA was a top priority.  I am writing this today to set the record straight regarding these transactions.

Let’s start with some simple facts about what this transaction did, and did not do.

All told, this transaction has SAVED DPS millions of dollars that they’ve been able to invest directly into the classroom. In fact, the district is estimated to save $20 million this year alone.

The transaction significantly STRENGTHENED the teacher pension program, and enabled a merger with the state pension system, so that teachers could move between districts without losing their pensions.

A report from independent auditors Cavenaugh and Macdonald last week showed that DPS’s pension is significantly better funded than any other school district in the state, and will be fully funded years before the statewide school pension division is because of the transaction Michael led.

The actuarial evaluation of the DPS division of the Public Employees Retirement Association shows that DPS’s section is expected to be fully-funded in 2031, while the rest of the school division won’t be fully funded until after 2040.  In other words, in large part because of this transaction, DPS is now more than a decade ahead of the rest of the state.  As a result, DPS will see a reduction in contributions to PERA when the true-up scheduled by the merger legislation happens in 2015.

The specifics of the transaction were complicated.  Banking on this complex subject matter, sadly, allies of Andrew Romanoff have been trying for months to lure reporters into writing slanted, biased accounts of the transactions, in a thinly-veiled effort to unfairly impugn Michael Bennet’s judgment.  Board member Andrea Merida, who failed to disclose that she has been a paid consultant on the Romanoff campaign, has been leading the efforts to discredit Bennet, along with Jeannie Kaplan, who has been with the Romanoff campaign since his announcement.

The New York Times took the word of a few DPS board members with a political ax to grind over the facts that have been reviewed extensively by local press in Colorado over the past few years. But the bottom line is that from the headline to the last line, the New York Times got it wrong.

In an editorial back in 2007, at the time this proposal was being considered, the Denver Post endorsed the transaction as the best option available to DPS.  Circumstances have more than proven the decision to be correct. While other districts are being forced to lay-off teachers, close schools, and cut school days, DPS isn’t thanks to Michael Bennet and his team.

I am also, to be candid, shocked by the biased perspective of the journalist who wrote this story. As board members of Denver Public Schools, we fully understood this transaction, and invited the New York Times reporter to Denver to sit down and review the facts with us.  Instead, she disregarded all the local reporting that’s been done on this story, she failed to accurately express the views of  the members of the board that she did speak to who are not Romanoff supporters, and she outright refused to meet with the rest of us.

The article is riddled with factual errors.  To note just a few:

• The article claims that DPS underwent $25 million in losses, when in fact the district has realized $20 million in savings as a result of this transaction.

• The article describes the financing as a new form of transaction for DPS.  Basic research would have revealed to the author that DPS had done the exact same transaction – variable rate pension certificates with an interest rate hedge or “swap” to protect DPS against changes in interest rates – in 2005.  At that time, Jerry Wartgow was superintendent and neither Michael Bennet or Tom Boasberg had yet joined DPS.  The Board fully vetted the 2005 transaction and it benefitted DPS.  There was no new “little spice” in the 2008 transaction, as Ms. Morgenson alleges. Rather, the 2008 PCOPS simply copied the 2005 PCOPS.

• Perhaps most surprisingly, the article quotes school board member Jeannie Kaplan, as one of the key sources, but it does not think it relevant to mention that she is in fact a leading fundraiser for Andrew Romanoff, and falsely claims that she raised questions about the pension in advance of the primary race. Kaplan voted with the rest of us to approve this transaction.  She did so after extensive conversations about the risks and benefits of the transactions. Kaplan then had two years to question the transaction and failed to do so.  It was only once the primary was in full swing that she suddenly began to question what she had voted for.  It is hard to understand why she is working so hard to launch these attacks on the school district she is supposed to be serving and attempting to cause as much personal damage as she can to both Michael and Tom Boasberg.  She says she just wants to have conversations about this issue, but if that is all she wanted, she would have waited until the August Board meeting where it is on the agenda instead of shopping the story to the New York Times.

As a long-time reader of the New York Times, I am disappointed and angered by this article.  It is not fair to the hard work Michael Bennet has done on behalf of this district.  It is not fair to the parents, teachers and students of Denver Public Schools, who deserve more than to be treated as political pawns.   And it is not fair to the Times long-standing readers, who rely on the Times to provide thorough, unbiased, accurate reporting.