Boasberg bowing out at helm of DPS with complex legacy
Rising test scores, persistent problems mark his tenure
Tom Boasberg paused on his way out of the elementary school and held his phone to his mouth. The October sky was growing darker, and the Denver superintendent had only half an hour to get across the city in rushhour traffic.
“Montbello High School,” he said, enunciating each word so his phone would understand.
GPS will still get you there, but the high school doesn’t technically exist anymore. In late 2010, nearly two years into Boasberg’s tenure as head of Denver Public Schools, he advocated for closing the academically struggling Montbello High and replacing it with three smaller schools.
Now, in the waning days of his superin tendency, Boasberg was headed back to Montbello for a celebration. The campus had just reopened its library after months of renovations and the football field was set to switch on its firstever stadium lights.
The upgrades were the result of relentless advocacy by coaches, parents and other residents. The scenes resembled countless others that played out over
Boasberg’s neardecade at the helm of Colorado’s largest school district, which he led through a steady stream of big and sometimes unpopular changes to try to improve its schools.
His legacy is deeply entwined with those changes. Supporters hail Boasberg, whose last day is Friday, as the engine behind an urban district success story. State test scores rose steadily under his watch. The high school graduation rate increased 15 percentage points from 2010 to 2017. And district enrollment surged by more than 14,000 students, which some see as proof of parents’ confidence.
“There’s been a continuity over a period of time that provided stability, capable leadership and direction,” said Bill Kurtz, founder of DSST, Denver’s largest charter school network. “That’s not the typical trajectory of a lot of large, urban public school districts.”
But critics point to stubborn problems that haven’t gone away. Schools, on the whole, remain segregated in a district where a majority of the nearly 93,000 students are black and Latino and come from poor families. Test score gaps between more and less privileged students haven’t closed. And those most affected by controversial reforms feel the district ignores their concerns.
“Trying to be on the cutting edge”
Boasberg never intended to be superintendent. He was recruited to the district from the private sector in 2007 by thenSuperintendent Michael Bennet.
At the time, Denver was the lowestperforming large school district in Colorado. It was also a few years into a big shift. Bennet was shak ing things up with ambitious but controversial strategies that included closing struggling schools.
When Bennet was tapped to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat in January 2009, the school board quickly chose Boasberg, then the district’s chief operating officer, to replace him.
“The opportunity for us, and the challenge, is not to rechart our direction or search for our destination,” Boasberg said at the time, “but to accelerate our reforms and do the work that will enable us to reach our goal of becoming the best urban district in the nation.”
For his entire tenure, Boasberg, 54, enjoyed the backing of a majority of the school board. The initiatives he successfully pushed for include:
• Putting in place a universal school choice system that allows families to use a single form to apply to any of the district’s more than 200 schools, including charter schools.
• Collaborating with charter schools by sharing district tax revenue and space in school buildings in exchange for the charters serving more students with disabilities and students learning English as a second language.
• Granting the principals of districtrun schools autonomy to choose their own curriculum and teacher training, and giving them more control over their school budgets.
• Closing both districtrun and charter schools with persistently low test scores — and, in some cases, replacing them with schools the district deemed more likely to succeed.
Those strategies made Denver a darling among charter school advocates nationwide and served as a cautionary tale to those who see this approach as “privatizing” public education.
But what Boasberg wants to be remembered most for is much lower profile: a collection of programs meant to raise the quality of the district’s teachers and principals.
“Above all, it’s been around talent,” Boasberg said. “The level of skill we need from our teachers, our school leaders, our district level folks is very, very high.”
The initiatives include residency programs that give student teachers handson experience in the classroom or allow aspiring principals to spend a year working under veteran school leaders. One of the initiatives Boasberg is proudest of has standout teachers spend half their time teaching students and the other half coaching other teachers.
“I have found purpose and a home in teaching students,” said Justin Jeannot, a teacher coach at Abraham Lincoln High School, “but it has been much nicer to be in a district that really is trying to be on the cutting edge of harnessing the leadership power of their teachers.”
“A dog and pony show”
Counted among those who think Boasberg will leave the district in better shape than he found it are school principals who took advantage of the flexibilities he afforded them, and the founders of Denver’s biggest charter school networks.
A decade ago, a quarter of the city’s schoolage children didn’t attend Denver Public Schools. Their parents opted instead for private or suburban schools. That’s no longer the case.
“What’s happened in this era over the last 10 or 13 years is there’s an expectation that if you live in Denver, you should be able to send your kid to a good school,” said Van Schoales, CEO of the advocacy group A Plus Colorado.
Others point to Boasberg’s commitment to equity, which included giving schools extra money to educate students with higher needs, such as those living in poverty.
Equity is one of the district’s six shared core values. Boasberg remembers the day in 2012 when district employees chose them as one of the most fun of his tenure. And he said he considers the core values “one of the most soulfulfilling aspects of being part of this team.”
But parents and residents whose schools and neighborhoods were in the cross hairs of his most controversial policies say he will be remembered for disregarding community voice.
Time and again, they said, district officials called meetings to gather feedback, dutifully wrote down people’s concerns, and then did whatever they were going to do anyway.
“You get a dog and pony show: DPS,” said Jeff Fard, a parent and community activist.
Even those who think Boasberg was a great leader admit that community engagement was a weakness for him.
“Maybe it was the type of decisions we had to make that were really hard,” said Mary Seawell, who served on the school board from 2009 to 2013 and was a Boasberg ally. But, she said, “it didn’t get better, it just deepened.”
“Confidence booster”
More than half an hour after leaving the elementary school for the Montbello campus, Boasberg walked into the new library. There was comfy furniture and $30,000 worth of new books.
The hardwon renovation “restores that sense of respect that the children do deserve nice things,” said new librarian Julia Torres. “This has been a huge confidence booster.”
Boasberg argues that the closure of Montbello High achieved its intended goal. In 2010, 333 students graduated from high schools in the region. This year, 768 did.
As the sky turned black, a small group headed outside. The football field was flooded with light. The head coach trotted over to shake Boasberg’s hand. It was a much different scene than when the coach had shown up at school board meetings to air concerns that his team didn’t have the same amenities others did.
Boasberg thanked him and others for their advocacy.
“We needed to get to work here and make some really necessary improvements,” he said.
Afterward, he stopped to chat with a group of girls standing on the sideline. He asked what they thought of the lights.
“Pretty good,” one said. And the library? They told him they didn’t go to school at Montbello. They went to a different school that doesn’t have a library.
As Boasberg left, he recounted the story to a school board member. Even though he was set to step down in little more than a week, he hadn’t stopped thinking about the future.
“I told them, ‘You’re next,’ ” he said.