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Charters Boost Denver Achievement

“Denver schools’ improvement due largely to charters, report says”
by Yesenia Robles
Denver Post
January 13, 2012

A handful of high-performing charter schools were what drove the bulk of the improved growth scores that Denver Public Schools logged this year, according to a report released Thursday.

The report by the A-Plus Denver advocacy group asks the district to figure out which charter-school strategies and programs are boosting performance and then find a way to share them in traditional settings. But DPS officials say they’re already on it.

“The district should be more careful when it says they’re doing remarkable,” said Van Schoales, director of A-Plus Denver. “In regards to charter-school authorizing, that may be the case. But it isn’t the case that what they are doing in district-managed schools is driving that growth.”

Overall, DPS’s growth score — among the highest compared with other large urban districts in Colorado — improved by 1 percentile point when charters were included.

But the analysis found grade-level growth averages for middle and high schools, where there are a greater percentage of students in charter schools, were nearly 5 percentile points higher with charter-school scores factored in.

In sixth-grade math growth scores, for instance, DPS had a median growth score in the 58th percentile. If charter-school scores are removed, the district-run schools score in the 52nd percentile.

“It goes to show looking at averages without disaggregating the data can hide important lessons about what’s working and what’s not,” Schoales said. “There’s not been very much time spent in really understanding what is working and how it’s working.”

But DPS director of innovation and reform Alyssa Whitehead-Bust said that has been her focus since her start at DPS less than a year ago.

“In my mind, that’s what this entire movement is all about,” Whitehead-Bust said. “First, to have a variety of options for students, but then to take what is working best and then use it to blur the lines between school types so that it doesn’t matter which one a student is at. The priority is that they are all high-performing options.”

To “blur those lines,” she said, DPS has been working on ways to share successful charter-school strategies with traditional schools.

In analyzing what those practices should be, DPS will release a similar report that also considers innovation school data.That report is expected to be released by the end of the school year.

Whitehead-Bust also said DPS will soon announce a new principal training program that will put leaders in high-performing charter schools for a year to learn strategies that can be taken back to district-managed schools.

There are now 32 charter schools serving more than 10,000 students in DPS.

In the meantime, a group of middle schools is working on a proposal to allow them to extend their school year and school days to mirror the calendar used by most Denver charter schools.

“The schools are not just having an impact on students they are serving directly, but also on other schools by starting to inform policy to change district practices,” Whitehead-Bust said.