Superintendent Tom Boasberg is stepping down in Denver. He continued the Corporate Reform policies of his predecessor Michael Bennett, that is, a strong reliance on high-stakes testing and charter schools. Betsy DeVos praised Denver’s choice policies but criticized it for not having vouchers as a choice.
Denver has seen rising test scores and graduation rates but continues to have one of the largest achievement gaps in the nation among urban districts. Corporate Reform has yet to prove that it can accomplish miracles for the neediest children.
Denver is one of the cities where Reformers like Stand for Children and DFER have spent heavily to assure continued control of the local school board.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Denver is the birthplace of the infamous SLOs–student learning objectives in 1999. It is one small example of “corporate Reform.” An SLO is a writing assignment for teachers that requires them to predict the test scores their students SHOULD make by the end of a year, based on data about their prior performance, including tests given at the start of the year. That farce, with 23 criteria for writing a proper SLO, was introduced by William J. Slotnick (no evident background as an educator) as part of a pay-for-performance scheme strait out of managing a sales force with pay for meeting pre-determine “targets.” SLOs were then hardwired into Race to the Top competitions aided by tutorials on how to write SLOs. The tutorials were provided by “The Reform Support Network” created by Arne Duncan to enforce compliance with Race to the Top requirements. The current versions include taking a distributed score, meaning teachers can be evaluated on the performance of the school or the performance on tests of students whom they have never taught–reading scores for school are used to judge teachers of music, PE, visual arts and so on.
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Good riddance.
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We must give credence to the fact that MANY people in those areas of Denver where Boasberg/Bennet’s invasions have been most obvious — and most terrible — have made an enormous effort to publicly call out Boasberg, making him know that his term was up.
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