The controversial education reforms implemented by Denver Public Schools more than a decade ago positively affected students’ academic outcomes, including increasing their likelihood of graduating, according to a new study released Monday.
But the improvements were not felt by everyone, with students of color having mixed results when it came to their math and literacy test scores and graduation chances, the study by the University of Colorado Denver’s Center for Education Policy Analysis found.
“What these reforms demonstrate is that they really did improve academic performance for everyone,” said Parker Baxter, director of the center and author of the study. (He worked as director of charter schools for DPS during the district’s so-called reform years.)
“It’s certainly clear that different populations of students experienced these forms differently,” Baxter added.
The research was funded by Arnold Ventures and the Walton Family Foundation, a supporter of school choice.
The study is the center’s second attempt at answering a question that has long plagued Colorado’s largest district: Did the reform policies, including the closure of low-performing schools, help Denver children learn better?
A prior study by Baxter published two years ago also attempted to answer that question and found that DPS saw higher high school graduation rates, enrollment growth and overall improvement in academic performance after the district implemented reforms.
But the earlier study’s methods were criticized, including for not accounting for the increase in student enrollment in Denver schools that happened during the reform years. So Baxter decided to use student-level data from DPS to better examine the effects of the district’s education reform policies — research that Superintendent Alex Marrero tried to prevent last year.
Marrero, who was hired in 2021 by a school board that largely opposed education reform, wrote a letter to the State Board of Education saying that he had concerns about Baxter accessing student data, Chalkbeat Colorado reported. The superintendent said in the letter that Baxter’s first study ignored negative impacts of school reform, such as the effect of school closures on communities.
DPS, which had previously rejected school choice, began implementing a series of controversial reform policies in 2007. The policies included simplifying how families apply to schools not in their neighborhood, evaluating school performance and closing low-performing schools, and replacing or creating new schools.
The strategy ignited a massive expansion at DPS that saw the district rise from the state’s second-largest school district to Colorado’s largest as enrollment swelled by tens of thousands of students.
The first study raised questions about whether the improvement in student performance was actually due to the district’s reform policies or because of the changes in DPS’ student population as the district gained about 20,000 more pupils during that same period, Baxter said.
The latest study used data from more than 40,000 DPS students to examine academic performance among students who were enrolled in the district for at least two years before the reform policies were implemented, he said. The study examined the period between the 2008-09 and 2014-15 academic years.
“We are in fact confirming some large portion of the overall improvement we find in our first study is directly due to the improvement of students who were in the district when the reforms began,” Baxter said.
Students who experienced two years of reform received the equivalent of between six and 18 months of additional schooling. Meanwhile, children who were there for five years of the reform policies received the equivalent of between 18 and 27 months of additional schooling, according to the study.
But the closure of schools due to poor performance also displaced students. Teens that attended Manual High School when it briefly closed in 2006 had a higher chance of dropping out after the closure, according to a University of Colorado study. (Marrero apologized to former Manual students last year when DPS distributed honorary diplomas to those affected by the school’s closure.)
Baxter’s latest study found that DPS’s reform strategies were generally positive for students’ performance the longer the policies were place — but not for every student group.
English language learners, for example, performed the same academically in English language arts as they would have if the reforms had not been implemented until the final two years of the study. Native American students also saw negative results in math for all seven years examined in the study.
“It’s important to remember that when we’re examining smaller numbers of students it can get difficult to know what is going on,” Baxter said, noting that there were fewer than 100 Native American pupils included in the study.
Baxter said that while, districtwide, English language learners did not see a significant improvement in literacy during much of the period examined in the study, that wasn’t the case for English language learners who were directly affected by reform policies, such as children who moved from a school that was closed for low performance to a new school.
English language learners who directly experienced the reform policies saw improvement in both literacy and math, Baxter said.
“English language learners who were in some of the most impactful reforms, including school closures, did in fact benefit from that,” he said.
While DPS students overall were more likely to graduate from high school during the reform years compared to other districts examined in the study, that wasn’t the case for Native American or Alaska Native students or children with disabilities, who had a lower likelihood of graduating, according to the study.
Students who attended a new school that opened during the reform years also had positive results in both literacy and math except for Black students and Native American or Alaska Native pupils who performed the same academically as they would have in their previous schools, according to the study.
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