Static test scores at many Colorado innovation schools have state, Denver officials questioning format’s effectiveness

In the two years since Prairie Heights Middle School received permission to implement a new curriculum and make changes to its staff training, principal Stephanie Knox has seen a change in students: They’re more excited to learn and increasingly open to talking with their teachers.

“We’ve seen some really positive outcomes,” she said.

The 700 students at Prairie Heights, located south of Greeley in Evans, also increased their math and language test scores enough over two years to move the school from the second-lowest ranking in Colorado’s accountability system to the top level. Knox said hard work by teachers, and a new emphasis on experimentation and hands-on activities, helped drive improvement.

Yet that quick turnaround makes Prairie Heights an anomaly among the more than 100 Colorado schools that have received innovation status, which allows them to waive some state and district rules — a move supporters hoped would improve lower-performing schools and let higher-performing schools better serve students.

More than a decade after Colorado passed the Innovation Schools Act of 2008, officials at the state level and in Denver Public Schools — the first district to take advantage of the law — are questioning whether that flexibility has yielded results.

Analysis by The Denver Post of state rankings data found that 60% of innovation schools in Colorado were at the same level two years after their status change: Most of those that were performing well at the beginning still were, and many of those that started on the state’s accountability clock couldn’t get off it.

Even after six years, about half of schools still were performing about as well as they had been before receiving innovation status. More schools had improved as time went on, but it’s not clear if that’s because the effects of innovation took time, or because successful schools were more likely to have their status renewed.

Innovation schools also were more likely than all schools to be in the bottom two performance categories, according to the state’s preliminary data for 2019. That could reflect that requiring schools to follow an innovation plan is one of the state board’s menu of options to try to improve struggling schools, though some high-performing schools seek innovation waivers for different reasons.

Joyce Rankin, who represents the Third District on the Colorado State Board of Education, said she’s skeptical that innovation schools overall are serving kids better than other options, such as traditional or charter schools. As of September, 102 schools statewide had innovation status, with about half of them in DPS.

“They want the waivers, they want the flexibility, but we haven’t seen the achievement,” Rankin said. “I keep coming back to ‘Does innovation matter?’ I haven’t seen that it does.”

Frank Coyne, one of the leaders of Denver Green School, which has innovation status, said he thinks critics of innovation schools don’t take into account the advantage of trying out new ideas on a smaller scale, before deploying them across a district.

Like the rest of DPS, the school in southeast Denver has significant numbers of low-income students and kids learning English, and budget flexibility has allowed it to better serve them, he said. Denver Green School has been in the state’s top performance level every year except for the first year it was rated.

“I think what (innovation) has done is made us a little more nimble, a little more responsive to the needs in our school,” he said.

No easy answers

The first three schools to receive innovation status were in Denver, but the practice has spread to other large districts, as well as small ones such as Kit Carson R1 on the Eastern Plains.

All have to go through the same process of seeking approval from staff members, their local board and the state board of education, but the waivers they seek and how they use them can vary widely.

Some of the most-common waivers allow schools to change the hiring and firing procedures for teachers, allow them to opt out of a district’s union contracts, or create a different school calendar. Some schools, such as Prairie Heights, use a waiver that lets them opt out of a district’s curriculum.

It would be difficult to sort out which waivers, if any, are associated with better results, said Colorado Education Commissioner Katy Anthes. There are hundreds of possible combinations, districts may implement waivers differently and schools may not use all of the waivers they have received, she said.

“I fear that there’s no one answer of ‘Does innovation work or does it not work?’ ” she said.

Innovation schools are required to seek a status renewal from the state and local school boards every three years, but some officials raised questions about whether they’ve asked the right questions when the schools come back.

Jennifer Bacon, who represents District 4 on the Denver school board, said she had hoped innovation would yield answers about better ways to manage all schools. But she hasn’t seen that so far. And she’s skeptical of the idea that flexibility itself is beneficial.

“Innovation status seems to me like a tool to get to the outcomes,” she said.

So far, the outcomes in Denver appear much the same, regardless of innovation status. A Stanford University study looking at growth in test scores in Denver from the 2014 to 2016 school years found no significant difference between innovation and traditional schools. A 2013 study from the University of Colorado Denver found much the same results on scores, though it did note teachers felt more empowered in innovation schools.

DPS is developing an innovation council to study what works best, according to a presentation to the district’s board in June. Initially, the freedom that came with innovation seemed like an improvement strategy itself, based on the idea that top talent would be attracted to schools where they had more autonomy. But the central office wants to see clearer plans going forward, according to the presentation.

It’s not shocking that innovation schools’ test scores would resemble traditional schools’, because most innovation schools also enroll anyone who lives in their surrounding neighborhood, Coyne said. He said innovation status has had benefits for DPS as a whole, however, because it has shown ways to give teachers more control over decisions, so they are more satisfied with their work and stick around.

At the Green School, some teachers participate in a decision-making committee and develop their own training for their colleagues.

“I think the moves the innovation schools have made have helped the district,” he said.

Average test scores can conceal wide variation, however.

Van Schoales, president of A+ Colorado, a nonprofit agency that studies education issues in the state, said the group’s analysis of Denver schools found traditional schools tended to cluster toward the middle, while innovation schools had more examples of high and low performers.

It makes sense that more autonomy leads to a greater variation in results, because so much depends on the school leader’s ability to try something new — but DPS has high-achieving schools of all types, he said.

“We don’t think that you should be making policy decisions based on governance,” he said. “It comes down to the people and the program, and how they mix with the community and the kids.”

People make the difference

Knox, the principal at Prairie Heights, said the new curriculum and training the middle school’s administrators pursued under innovation status allowed them to make classes more engaging, with experiments in science class and a mock Constitutional Convention in social studies.

On a Friday in early November, seventh-graders who were learning the difference between a dependent and independent variable in experiments got to test what happened when they combined an antacid pill with vinegar in an old film canister.

“I’ve never done this with vinegar, so I don’t know what’s going to happen,” teacher Karen Giesler said, after asking students to predict how the reaction might differ from when they’d tried the same experiment with water.

“Very reassuring,” one kid quipped, before the canister hit the ceiling.

Innovation status helped improve the school’s results, but what ultimately mattered most was the work the teachers put in — and the support they got from their district, Knox said.

“You can have all these outside factors, but unless you have the people that have the true belief that our kids can do amazing things, nothing is going to change,” she said.