Former leaders: Imaginarium never got chance to make change

Ideas to remake education in Denver Public Schools didn’t so much crash and burn as fail to ever get off the ground, three leaders of the now-defunct Imaginarium charge in a new report.

The Imaginarium, which closed earlier this year as part of administrative cuts in the wake of the Denver teachers’ strike, was supposed to find new and hopefully better ways of teaching. The goal of the Denver Public Schools’ innovation laboratory was to close the achievement gap between students of color and white students in DPS, said Susan Trickett, who was director of research and strategy at the center until it shut down.

Four of 13 Imaginarium staff members still work for the district in the new Impact Office. Amy Keltner, chief impact officer at DPS, said in an email that the three employees’ report is a draft, and her office is working to add more context and perspectives about “lessons learned” from the Imaginarium’s five-year run.

“They plan to use all of this input from current and former team members to build on DPS’s commitment to innovation,” spokesman Will Jones said.

Black and Hispanic students in DPS scored about 40 points behind white students in both math and English on state standardized tests in 2018, and while all groups have seen improvement in recent years, the gaps haven’t narrowed. Trickett and at least some Imaginarium staff believed that wasn’t going to change unless students were given more freedom to direct their own educations, which they called personalized learning.

Their theory was that giving students more choice — whether to work on problems in a small group, for example, or read about the topic — would help them develop skills like self-control and persistence. Success, then, would be measured not just in test scores, but in whether students knew how to set and reach goals, felt comfortable in their classrooms and were motivated to work without clear rewards or punishments.

“While doing these different things, they’re beginning to own their learning,” said Meg McCormick, who was director of client experience. “It’s shifting the work on to the learner.”

They don’t know if it would have produced significant improvement, but the current pattern of raising scores by a few points a year isn’t enough, McCormick said.

“We wouldn’t actually have (all) kids proficient until 2070,” she said. “What we’ve been doing is not working.”

It takes years to tell if trying something new resulted in better test scores, let alone if it prepared kids for college or a career, Trickett said. The task was made even more difficult because not all teachers bought into the idea, so a student might get more personalized instruction in third grade, but not for the rest of elementary school, for example, she said.

“We didn’t have a long enough track record to see how it plays out over time,” she said. “You have to think of this as a long-term trajectory.”

Teachers didn’t feel comfortable taking risks by running their classrooms in a new way, because they were worried about pushback from their principals, who needed to please the central office, who had state officials looking over their shoulder, Trickett said. Ultimately, that meant no one felt comfortable trying something that might turn into a new best practice but also might fail, she said.

Administrators at the school level tended to be excited about innovation in the fall, but their enthusiasm cooled as the tests neared and they felt the need to spend more time preparing students, Trickett said. But the curriculum they’re using hasn’t produced significant gains, so it’s not clear what’s gained by spending more time on it, she said.

“It’s like talking louder to someone who doesn’t speak English,” she said.