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In the nearly five years since the pandemic-driven school closures, student performance in districts across the country has yet to recover. Achievement gaps are growing, student engagement is waning and school improvement efforts are a fractured tapestry of piecemeal approaches. 

Public confidence is at a historic low. Declining birth rates and the rapid expansion of private school choice are causing widespread declines in enrollment and revenue. The need to improve and expand educational opportunities is more urgent than ever.

A proven transformation strategy exists. Denver Public Schools’s pre-pandemic approach to educational improvement dramatically improved student achievement. The system was facing many of the challenges districts across the country are now struggling with: financial instability, low performance and declining enrollment. It required rethinking and redesigning the very role of a school district. And it worked. 

The latest research from the University of Colorado Denver’s Center for Education Policy Analysis provides clear, empirical evidence that Denver’s transformation of its public schools between 2008 and 2019 caused large gains in student achievement citywide, including for children the district has historically failed to serve. The study shows that significant, sustained, systemwide improvements in learning are possible, including in large school systems with high levels of student need. 

When Denver launched its reforms in 2007, it was in the bottom 5th percentile of all districts in the state. Its four-year graduation rate was 39%. After a decade of reform, the district rose to above the 60th percentile and raised its graduation rate above 70%.

The new study found that students overall who experienced two years of reform received the equivalent of six months to two years of additional schooling. Over five years, those benefits jumped to between 18 and three years of additional learning. Black and Latino students received at least an additional two years, and English learners got an average of an extra 18 months in math. 

By evaluating the improvements of students who started school in the district before the reforms began and continued to attend while they were in place, we demonstrate that these improvements were not due to changes in demographics, but are the direct results of the reforms. Their annual effects grew as they were implemented over time and more widely. Each year of reform produced larger effects than the year before. The longer students were enrolled in the district during the reforms, the more they benefited. 

These effects on student learning were significant and similar to those resulting from post-Hurricane Katrina school improvements in New Orleans.

So how did the district do it?  

Denver fundamentally altered the role and structure of its local school system, shifting away from a rigid, centralized institutional approach toward a more flexible and responsive model based on adaptation, differentiation and continuous improvement. 

Under the leadership of now-Sen. Michael Bennet and former Superintendent Tom Boasberg, the district confronted decades of low performance with a shift to a portfolio model to encourage choice for families, empowerment for educators and accountability for performance.

Every year from 2008 until 2019, the district evaluated all schools, issued public requests for proposals for new schools from internal and external providers, and implemented a process for intervening in persistently low-performing schools through closures, replacements and district-led school turnarounds.

The reforms implemented in Denver mark one of the first times that an elected school board voluntarily relinquished the exclusive power to operate schools within its boundaries while maintaining its authority to govern all schools in the district. In doing so, the district rejected the traditional model of singularity in favor of one built for multiplicity.

Denver’s portfolio district strategy included:

• A systemwide focus on ensuring equitable access to a quality education for all students through a common enrollment system while allowing for flexibility and innovation in how education is delivered;
• A framework for public reporting and accountability with a common set of performance metrics for all schools;
• A consistent enrollment and expulsion system;
• A strategic focus on attracting and developing effective teachers and school leaders by empowering them to take on new and different roles and holding them accountable for student learning.
• A flexible funding model that allocates dollars based on student need;
• An annual process for evaluating schools, intervening in persistently low performers with internal and external partners, closing schools when necessary and replacing them with new ones;
• Support for more public transparency in student and school goals and outcomes, collaboration between traditional public schools and public charter schools and decentralized authority with shared responsibility between school and district leaders for the success of all students.

Perhaps the most important lesson from Denver’s transformation is about the possibility of improvement and the need for leadership. The district still faces many challenges, but public education there is dramatically better in terms of measurable student learning because of its decade of reform. 

Today, as school systems nationwide grapple with challenges similar to those of the Mile High City in the early 2000s, Denver’s experience offers a proven alternative to the traditional model. Denver’s approach remains one of the most controversial, consequential, comprehensive and longest-lasting school reform initiatives in U.S. history. Its success illustrates that with vision, commitment and a willingness to innovate, districts can create dynamic educational opportunities that enable all children to learn more and do better academically.

Transformative change does not come easily, but Denver’s example shows that dramatic improvement is possible.

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