DPS must keep its promise to open a DSST high school in far Northeast Denver
We interrupt this season’s glut of election coverage to bring you an important public service message: The Denver School Board appears poised to break faith with nearly 500 families, overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic, who were promised a DSST high school to complement the middle school their children are now attending in far northeast Denver.
The vote is scheduled Oct. 22, and prospects for the high school seem bleak based on comments and actions of board members in recent weeks. An era of exciting educational innovation in Denver has truly passed — last year’s school board election sealed its fate — but we are about to discover how far some board members intend to go in enforcing their skepticism of public- school choice and data- driven performance standards.
It’s one thing to reject a charterschool proposal that must build its student base from scratch. Elections have consequences, and union- backed candidates who flipped the board last fall have every right to pursue an agenda inhospitable to such schools.
But there is history here to consider. The 160 eighth- graders at DSST Middle School at Noel Campus have rightly expected to move next year into their own high school because the DSST program runs through 12th grade and because the school board in 2015 approved eight new charters for DSST, one of which would be used in this case.
Even board member Tay Anderson, who argues that a comprehensive high school in far Northeast Denver is a top priority, admitted at a candidate forum last year that “we have to fulfill that commitment and make sure that DSST Noel is expanded into the high school that we promised them.”
The fact that this is at all controversial is remarkable. Noel is the top middle school in Denver according to the district’s most recent School Performance Framework ratings. And the DSST network in Denver of six high schools and eight middle schools not only has an unparalleled record in Colorado preparing students of color for academic success and entry to good colleges, its record is among the best in the nation.
DSST high schools consistently rank among state leaders in terms of student academic growth as well as PSAT and SAT scores for Black and Hispanic students.
And this record is widely appreciated. For example, Front Porch, a northeast Denver newspaper, last year correlated the percentage of students who qualified for the “free or reduced lunch” program at 29 schools in its neighborhoods with the schools’ academic grades. Its headline: “No Surprise, Academic Performance Tracks with Affluence.” Well, not quite. As the article explained, “With few exceptions ( and DSST is the exception here), the higher performing schools are the ones with a greater number of affluent students.”
Note the significant aside: “DSST is the exception here.” All four DSST schools on Front Porch’s list scored high on performance despite having anywhere from 55% to 71% of their students on free or reduced lunch.
One more statistic, this one calculated by DSST itself: The network’s high schools serve 15% of high school students of color in Denver, but 71% of students of color in a green or blue ( higherperforming) high school.
Even so, the board this year has repeatedly delayed approval of a high school for Noel students, obsessing instead over DSST Cole middle school, whose performance has been disappointing, and Cole High School, which suffered a one- year dip in performance that district staff concluded in September has been rectified. One way or the other, the board needs to stop dragging its feet.
To be sure, the past 15 years or so of Denver’s pursuit of school choice and innovation have been far from a wholesale success. A depressingly large percentage of students are mired below grade level in reading and math, and the overall achievement gap between white and Asian students on the one hand, and Blacks and Hispanics on the other, remains stubbornly large.
If the Denver board wants to tackle those problems with new strategies, by all means, have at it. But rejecting a high school whose students would almost certainly enjoy above- average academic success would amount to willful blindness.
Brandi Chin, founding director of DSST Middle School at Noel campus, made an impassioned plea for the high school at a board meeting in September even as she acknowledged a solution for all district students “seems far away.” Nevertheless, she rightly insisted, the board has a “moral obligation” to deliver on a promise “that will ensure that 480 black and brown students in far northeast Denver will have access to a high- quality high school education that was promised to them, and that they deserve and that they have been historically denied.”