Innovation schools across Colorado are largely failing to ensure their students meet grade-level benchmarks in subjects like math and English, with learning outcomes “truly subpar” in some areas, according to a report published Wednesday by the nonpartisan Keystone Policy Center.
The report analyzes how well Colorado’s more than 100 innovation schools are educating all students as well as specific groups of kids — including students of color and those living in poverty — by digging into state standardized test results from last spring on the Colorado Measures of Academic Success exams along with the PSAT and SAT and comparing those results with testing data from traditional public schools and charter schools.
Similar to charter schools, innovation schools are public schools that have greater control and flexibility than traditional public schools over major components of education, such as staffing, curriculum, class scheduling and teacher evaluations. A school must create a strategic “innovation plan” detailing the adjustments its leaders and educators want to make and the local and state policies they want to be waived, with buy-in from the staff and school community. A school can only move forward with its plan once it is approved by the local school board and the State Board of Education.
Additionally, clusters of schools in the same district can band together to form “innovation school zones” that share a common approach to educating kids.
The report’s findings highlight a “mixed bag” among innovation schools and innovation school zones, with clear evidence that there are more troublesome than positive achievement trends among kids in innovation schools. Students in many innovation schools are trailing behind their peers at traditional public schools and charter schools. Meanwhile, long-standing achievement gaps between students of color and white students as well as between students living in poverty and their affluent classmates appear to be widening. The data raises questions about whether the innovation school model is a promising way to help kids reach their potential in the classroom.
“Is it a strategy for creating highly effective schools?” asked Van Schoales, senior policy director at Keystone Policy Center. “At least in our analysis, we’re not seeing it statewide.”
Colorado introduced the concept of innovation schools in 2008 with legislation aimed at giving struggling schools a way to step beyond the mandates of their district that might not work well for their particular community and determine the best ways to go about educating their own students.
The legislation “embraced the radical idea that those closest to students — educators and administrators in a school, not district or state policymakers — should make the vast majority of decisions about what goes on in their specific school, so that a school’s programming can be fully and uniquely tailored to meet the evolving needs and interests of the students and families the school actually serves,” the report states.
By the 2020-21 school year, Colorado had 107 innovation schools teaching more than 48,500 students in 17 districts, including rural, suburban and metro districts. However, about half of the state’s innovation schools were part of Denver Public Schools, the report notes, citing information from the Colorado Department of Education.
During the last school year, Colorado had 10 innovation zones, including three in Denver that were overseen by organizations other than DPS — an alternative approach to school governance allowed through a change to state statute last year.
Innovation schools tend to educate bigger percentages of students of color, kids living in poverty, students learning English and kids with special needs than other kinds of schools in Colorado. And some innovation schools have been the result of school turnaround efforts for schools under state watch because of consistent low performance.
“Many of them were low-performing schools pre-innovation, and innovation was a pathway towards improvement,” said Bill Kottenstette, executive director of the Schools of Choice Unit at the state education department. “And so they disproportionately represent chronically underperforming schools. You wouldn’t necessarily anticipate seeing performance stronger than the state.”
Schoales said that those innovation schools that emerged out of school turnaround initiatives should see improvements in student scores if their innovation plan is working as designed. But much of the testing results tell another story.
“I think that sometimes people confuse freedom and flexibility as the primary means toward school improvement, and it’s not,” Schoales said. “It’s secondary. The primary means toward school improvement is high quality programs, understanding kids and what their needs are and high quality teaching and a coherent mission.”
“Autonomy and flexibility in and of itself is not a strategy for school improvement,” he added. “Effective schools are led by effective leaders with a faculty that’s committed to carrying out that mission. Autonomy and flexibility can allow for that to happen but … without amazing leaders and committed faculty that are all on the same page around the mission, just providing flexibility does not lead to a high quality school.”
Every innovation school has its own story
The report also takes a closer look at how specific groups of students attending innovation schools and zones — specifically students living in poverty and students of color — are performing compared with their peers at traditional public schools and charter schools.
The findings show that innovation schools with a high percentage of kids who qualify for free and reduced lunch had especially low proficiency rates in both math and English — a common trend across schools regardless of their school governance type.
Higher percentages of Black and Hispanic students in innovation schools met or exceeded grade-level expectations in English than Black and Hispanic students in traditional public schools. But their proficiency rates were still dwarfed by charter schools. Meanwhile in math, a smaller percentage of Black students in innovation schools met or exceeded grade-level expectations compared to Black students at both traditional public schools and charter schools. The same percentage of Hispanic students in innovation schools and traditional public schools met or exceeded grade-level benchmarks in math, but both remained behind charter schools.
And on the PSAT and SAT, the percentages of Black, Hispanic and white students in innovation schools who proved to be proficient in English and math were all lower than the rates of proficient students in traditional public schools and charter schools, the report shows.
“This indicates that innovation high schools are not only not serving students well overall, (but that) academic gaps are likely widening within these schools,” the report states.
Some innovation school zone leaders say that when reviewing performance data of innovation schools, regardless of whether they’re standalone schools or part of a zone, it’s important to consider the school’s background and what prompted it to become an innovation school in the first place.
Aggregating data at the state level is the “first step,” said Kristopher Blythe, senior director of zone operations for the Luminary Learning Network, a nonprofit organization that runs an innovation zone of six schools in Denver.
It’s just as critical to understand “the context in which schools are operating,” Blythe said, noting that an analysis of innovation schools’ performance also need to take into account the specific demographics of students a school is serving, how that school was performing before becoming an innovation school, the extent to which they are able to follow their innovation plans and where in the state they’re located.
“Taking those steps I think would generate an insightful discussion about innovation’s place in the state, its usefulness and where it can go next,” he said.
The Luminary Learning Network, which received final approval from the State Board of Education in 2016, educates about 2,200 students in grades K-8 and 260 preschoolers and has been the most successful innovation school zone in Denver.
The Beacon Network Schools zone was dissolved in April while the Northeast Denver Innovation Zone oversees Swigert International School, McAuliffe Manual Middle School, and McAuliffe International Middle School, according to DPS spokesperson Scott Pribble. DPS leaders scrutinized both innovation school zones earlier this year, Chalkbeat Colorado reported.
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Each innovation school within the Luminary Learning Network has its own distinct innovation plan and designs its school to be flexible in ways that best suit its specific students, with input and acceptance from staff and families.
Tackling each of those elements is “a necessary condition for any success that might follow for innovation schools,” Blythe said.
The nonprofit’s leaders focus on the specific priorities and needs of the individual schools. That could mean figuring out how to handle an influx of students from other countries or how to optimize a school’s teaching strategies. They then collaborate with each school to structure and tailor resources that will best meet the needs of every school.
Guiding a small cluster of schools and having an outside organization oversee the innovation school zone has also contributed to the zone’s classroom effectiveness, executive director Bailey Holyfield said.
The zone was created by DPS leaders who insisted it was important for leaders of the organization to sit outside the district “so that they can then push on the DPS structure so that we are actually able to exercise the autonomies and flexibilities that we are afforded by the Innovation Schools Act,” Holyfield said.
Not all innovation schools benefit from a full scope of freedom and flexibility, the report noted, with some “leveraging discreet, incremental autonomies that the powers that be can live with” instead of being “empowered to innovate in deeper ways that might truly transform outcomes for students.”
C3, overseen by the Luminary Learning Network, is one innovation school that has stretched itself to pair classroom lessons with real-world experiences. The school is guided by a trio of principles: creativity, challenge and community — a nod to its name. By partnering with a dozen community organizations each school year, including the Denver Botanic Gardens and a contemporary dance company, the school immerses students in different pockets of their community to deepen their learning.
For instance, fourth graders take what they learn about animal adaptations and use it to choreograph a contemporary dance alongside dance instructors.
Principal Brent Applebaum said the school also is diligent in regularly coaching teachers, tracking how well students are grasping new lessons each week and working with other innovation schools in the zone to continually learn from their successes.
The school also empowers teachers to have full autonomy over their classes so that they can make adjustments to better accommodate students.
Treating teachers as “the professionals they are” has helped C3 retain its educators, Applebaum said.
“Any time you can start to have strong teacher retention and strong leadership retention, I think you can start to see some amazing growth,” he said.
CMAS results from the spring show that more than 70% of C3’s students met or exceeded grade-level expectations in English, compared with nearly 44% statewide. More than 68% of C3 students met or exceeded grade-level expectations in math, more than double nearly 33% statewide.
Kottenstette, of the state education department, believes Colorado should continue offering the option of innovation status to schools, despite their mixed academic outcomes.
“It encourages effective design work, and it creates a way for schools and districts to access flexibility when they feel they need it,” Kottenstette said. “It falls on the district and the school to ensure they are making progress, and if they’re not, to re-evaluate what they may need to do different.”