Students at Denver Public Schools return to classrooms this week where they will experience equity and social justice under the district’s new educational roadmap where “Every Learner Thrives” under the leadership of a squabbling school board.
What about basic skills like reading and math that are necessary to get a job and buy food?
That was under the old ineffective and destructive educational systems, where only one in 20 Black and Latino third graders could read at grade level, according to April test scores.
Instead of going back and teaching kids who can’t even read, the new educational system will continue to pass children from grade to grade without learning. However, they will feel better about themselves for being functionally illiterate (not an approved woke phrase).
Schools will also shift how they teach students who are behind, said Deputy Superintendent of Schools Tony Smith. Instead of focusing on remediation, which means teaching a third-grader the first-grade skills they haven’t yet mastered, schools will use tools and strategies to teach that third-grader grade-level skills in a way they can understand. Some of those tools, such as virtual tutoring, were sharpened during the pandemic, he said.
Smith called it ending “this disease of remediation and that perpetual cycle of ‘You don’t know. You don’t know.’ And imbue people with their own intelligence.”
“There aren’t fancy bullets or initiatives that are going to get us out of this equity gap,” he added. “If so, we would have experienced those already. … We’re really getting back to the basics.”
It’s education justice through fel gud lernin tekneqs.
Denver Public Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero’s Every Learner Thrives plan is so fluid, goals aren’t even expected to be met until 2026, which is an entire generation of secondary schooling.
The plan, which Marrero calls a roadmap, focuses on three broad goals: improving the student experience, improving the adult experience for educators and families, and replacing “ineffective, destructive systems” with “equitable, transparent systems,” according to a copy obtained by Chalkbeat.
“If we are to accomplish our vision that every learner thrives, we must reframe education as a series of experiences that promote an exchange of ideas, the pursuit of passion, and a quest for justice,” the plan says. “This is the DPS experience.”
It’s everything we’ve come to expect from a dysfunctional school board consumed by the playground drama of Xochi Gaytan, Tay Anderson, and Scott Esserman.