Jeannie Kaplan served two terms on the Denver school board. She spotted “reform” as a hoax from the beginning. For ten years, she has urged her fellow citizens to reject the regime of “test-punish-close schools-privatize.”

Today she feels vindicated.

Over the past 10 years millions of dollars from outside Denver have been spent to prop up a failed educational experiment. And failed it is.

But a new day has dawned in Denver, for on November 5, 2019 Denver voters said no to the outside money, no to the failure of the past ten years, no to education reform. They said it loudly, clearly and unequivocally…  

Some lessons gleaned from the November 5, 2019 School Board Election

 

  • Reform candidates lost by margins of 2-1 in all three races. WOW. Just WOW.
  • Denver’s teachers lead the way in the successful flipping of the board. When teachers struck in February, they energized and organized fellow teachers, parents and community members. Their activism carried over into the election cycle. Teachers ROCK!
  • Educational outcomes have NOT improved in the Michael Bennet/Tom Boasberg era despite press attempts to make it appear so.
    • The latest NAEP scores released late last month show 32% of 4th graders in Denver Public Schools can do grade level math, 35% can read at grade level. For 8th graders 29% are at grade level in both subjects .[editors’ note: “proficient” on NAEP is not “grade level”]
    • Denver as usual had the largest achievement gap of the entire 27 urban school cohort in the NAEP study.
    • DPS’ implementation of school “Choice” has been criticized repeatedly because it not only is inequitable, it has been found to actually add to the inequities in DPS.
    • The highly touted Denver Plan 2020 with its lofty goals made virtually no appearance in the reformers 2019 election messaging.
  • Reformers appear to win only when they have money and candidates with high name recognition. While the amount of money spent this cycle will most likely break records, reformers ran out of big names to run this time. And the reality is at large transformer candidate Tay Anderson had the most name recognition from the beginning of the election cycle.

So, the “transformers” beat the “reformers.” Thrashed them.

Or put another way, the “constructors” beat the “disrupters.”

Either way, it is an amazing turn of events for a city that has been feted by advocates for privatization for a decade.