These posts are the opinions of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of A+ Colorado.
Guest Blogger: Kristin Barnes I am the proud mama of three boys who attend our Northwest Denver neighborhood elementary school. When my oldest son started ECE there in the fall of 2012, I co-founded a PTO and immediately became more involved in the school. I later joined the Collaborative School Committee (CSC) and after that…
Guest Blogger: Dajia Maestas “ [You] were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that [you] were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: [you] were expected to make peace with mediocrity.” It was my freshman year at Manual High school.…
Guest Blogger: Richard D. Lamm, Governor of Colorado 1975-1987 Let me suggest that there is a single thing you can do in your new role to improve education in Colorado, that won’t cost much money, doesn’t require legislative approval and is not controversial. It is also simple: find ways to say “Thank You” to…
Guest Blogger: Alexis Senger “I don’t want to talk about it anymore!” My fifth grader was at the end of her rope. No, we weren’t talking about her grades or her daily grind of Wolfgang at the keys. We were talking about choosing middle schools. Denver Public Schools (DPS) has a school choice process for…
An Open Response to A+ Colorado Orange Paper: Learn Together, Live Together: A Call to Integrate Denver’s Schools (February 2018)Author: antwan jefferson, Date: 26 March 2018 University of Colorado Denver, School of Education and Human Development—————————— In its February 2018 Orange Paper, A+ Colorado published a report entitled “Learn Together, Live Together: A Call to…
By Beth Dalton, AmeriCorps Vista at A+ Colorado Twelve school districts in Colorado are seeking new leaders. While we believe that each school district should carefully select the candidate best qualified to serve their community, and that a person’s performance and not his or her race, gender, ethnicity, exceptionalities, sexual orientation, or creed should be…
By Sean Precious, Instructional Superintendent at Denver Public Schools The fitness of focus and coherence in school leadership I tell people that I have one of the most enjoyable jobs in the world. After classroom teaching, coaching other teachers, and leading schools on the East Coast, I moved to Denver five years ago and am…
By Robin Lake, Director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, Affiliate faculty at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell This blog originally appeared on January 17, 2018 on the The74. Denver Public Schools hosts endless visits from civic and district leaders looking for ways to reinvent public education.…
The leaders of six civil rights and community groups (Urban League of Metropolitan Denver, NAACP Denver Branch, African Leadership Group, Together Colorado, Alpha Phi Alpha, Inc., and Padres & Jovenes Unidos) issued a joint letter calling on the Denver school board to immediately correct what they called misleading and inflated School Performance Framework ratings. View the letter here.
by Peter Huidekoper Jr., Coordinator, Colorado Education Policy Fellowship Program, St. John’s College, New Mexico Remember the 3 R’s? Remember those days of yesteryear when our parents, grandparents, and other old fogeys thought it pretty important to be sure that, if nothing else, schools taught us reading, writing, and mathematics? Yes, writing. Not the nebulous “language…