Episode 33: Jennifer Holladay on the past, present and future of Denver ed reform

Transcript

Alan Gottlieb: 0:08

Hi everybody and welcome back to the Board Hawk podcast. We're recording this Thanksgiving week and we'll be publishing it on the Monday after Thanksgiving. We are very pleased to have with us today, Jennifer Holiday who is a longtime education advocate in Denver and a former Denver Public Schools administrator. She oversaw the district's portfolio of schools program and left the district in 2021. She received the Colorado League of Charter School's Lifetime Advocate Award for her commitment to advancing educational equity, access and excellence, and she's now a policy and strategy consultant working independently to advise education focused clients. Before coming to Denver, she served at the Southern Poverty Law Center, advancing educational equity and reducing exclusionary discipline practices. As a new school board with the union backed majority takes power next month. We thought Jen would be a, an ideal guest to have on to discuss how the new board could affect portfolio or reform values like accountability, choice, school supports, student based budgeting and school autonomy. So Jen, thank you so much for coming on and welcome to the podcast.

Jennifer Holladay: 1:15

Thanks for having me,

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 1:17

Jen. Welcome. We're so excited to have you on. And it's a pleasure to have somebody who I've had the opportunity to work with at DPS. I remember fondly, a lot of us on the floor, we worked on together would come to your office and have therapy sessions. I feel like you were the floor therapist at the time. It was a wild time. It was a wild time. So it's nice to have you on in, in this context. So before we get started with, what's the current state of DPS. I would love for you to just talk a little bit about what you did at D while you were at DPS and then for our listeners who don't know, describe what portfolio management is, please.

Jennifer Holladay: 1:53

Sure. I think I might take it just a step back. I think we got portfolio management and we got reform in Denver and in other cities across the country because what we had been doing before that point was not working. And so when you think about kind of public education. For centuries, right? What it typically looked like was you had a central office and you had schools and you had, money went to the district, to the school district, to the central office, and the school district decided how all that money would be spent. They told schools what their staffing model would be. They told schools what curriculum they would be using, right? People stayed in their jobs based on tenure, not based on performance. That is what public education looked like for decades and centuries. And, what we knew to be true before No Child Left Behind, I think got really clear after No Child Left Behind.'cause No Child Left Behind for the first time required every school and district in the country to disaggregate its data. So those of us who long suspected, we were running a. A public education system that served some kids well and other kids not well. That certainly proved to be true. And ever since NCLB we've had access to disaggregated data. And I think it's those opportunity gaps and achievement gaps continue to. Plague Denver, certainly. And we are not alone in that struggle. But Reform did and NCLB

Alan Gottlieb: 3:20

Just to be just, I'm sorry. Just to be clear, it passed, I believe in like 2001. It was under the George W. Bush administration, but was a. Kind of joint effort of people in the Bush administration and Senator Ted Kennedy, who was definitely a, they referred to him as a liberal lion of the Senate. So it was really a bipartisan and kind of bi ideological in some ways, effort at the time.

Jennifer Holladay: 3:41

And the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers also backed in CLB when it's passed. I think it's important to remember that. Yeah. I think the other big thing that changed within CLB was that for the first time families. Had a federal right to choice. So if your child was attending a school that was not making adequate. Progress in serving kids. For the first time ever, you had the right to attend a school that wasn't the school that the district told you to go to. So that is so I think the modern reform era or the modern portfolio era began really within CLB and, per the inter the introduction that you gave Alan. A lot of people when they think about reform, they just think about charter schools or in Denver's context, they might think about charter schools, innovation schools, innovation zones, but the portfolio strategy and the reform, which was the reform strategy we used in Denver, was that was autonomy is one piece of that puzzle, right? We made big bets around school choice. Certainly, we, and that, that particular program did not sit inside my office. We had a separate division of choice, I forget what they called it, but it was like the school choice division. And every single family in Denver has the right to choose the school that they wanna send their children to. And we historically have made that very easy for families. We got charter schools to the table, and the charters agreed to use our shared choice system instead of running their own lotteries. That doesn't happen everywhere. I remember when my daughter went to kindergarten. She's 21 years old now. That was before Unified Choice in Denver and we filled out choice forms at district schools. We filled out choice forms at charter school, like we were running all over town fill, filling out forms, right? And it was not easy. It was like a part-time job, right? So unified choice and getting every school in the system on board with a shared choice system was a really big deal during Denver reform. I think student-based budgeting is now I think we all take it for granted. I do think it's one of the things that's at risk right now, but it was the radical idea that this, that the money doesn't belong to the school district. The money belongs to the children and the money should follow children wherever they go to school. That was a big piece of our frame. There were a lot of other benefits. Can I

Alan Gottlieb: 6:03

stop you there for a, yeah, if I could just stop you there for a second because I know we're probably gonna get into this more a little bit in a bit, but I just think the student-based budgeting thing, this is something that has been puzzling me for a while and you may have a perspective on it. It's something that is strongly opposed by like the DCTA and members of the former members of the board and current members of the board aligned with the DCTA. Have been very strongly opposed to it, and it just intuitively doesn't make sense. Why would you oppose that if you're interested in equity? If kids with greater needs get greater shares amounts of money to take with them why would anybody oppose that?

Jennifer Holladay: 6:38

I think I think they're opposed to it because they I don't wanna speak for them. You should ask Rob Gold or somebody in the teacher's union. But I think my understanding is right that. The union and the more traditional way of running schools, like the pre-form era, right? Every school would have staffers allocated to them by the central office, right? And that would mean that like every school would be guaranteed an art teacher and a music teacher, and a PE teacher, and a. Whatever. I'm focused on specials in my brain in this moment for some reason. But it's more, and I think during reform, what we got to, it's related to the autonomy strategy. And in Denver that didn't just apply to innovation in charter schools. Our district run schools also had a lot of autonomy, but we didn't believe that school programming should be uniform across all the schools because different kids need and want different things, different families need and want different things. And student-based budgeting, allowed school communities, hopefully with their CSCs or their school accountability committees to put, put the money that they had in their budgets towards the type of programming that they wanted in the school. We didn't believe that every middle and high school should have a basketball team or a football team. Now if communities wanted that and they could source it in their budget, great. But I think that there is an interest for some that we have a more uniform kind of programming, particularly in the district schools. I think that's one, one argument maybe against student-based budgeting. But to your point, Alan, I think in a district like Denver where we, serve majority students who are experiencing poverty, majority students of color, we have a large percentage of kids now with IEPs or five oh fours special education kind of needs. And 40% of our kids, I think, are still language learners. It's really difficult to think, for me to think that Willow Elementary and Central Park needs the same programming as an elementary school in southwest Denver. I just don't think those communities want or need the same thing. And so to me, student-based budgeting allows those communities, the money follows the children, and then those communities in those schools can decide how they wanna allocate. The resources they have and what kind of programming they wanna offer. And the other thing about Denver, okay, thanks. We wait. Student budgeting student based budgeting very heavily in Denver. So a Title one school, a school that serves kids in poverty, gets far more money than a school in Central Park. And to me, that's how it should be. Those kids have different needs.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 9:23

Absolutely agree. Yeah, thanks. My kids' school doesn't have, doesn't get the most resources, but it's certainly not the most affluent school. And some at our school may disagree with that, but I think that's what equity truly is. And we should put our money where the needs are where we have the most need.

Jennifer Holladay: 9:39

Yeah. Yeah.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 9:40

That's great.

Jennifer Holladay: 9:41

A couple of other things about the portfolio strategy we used. I think. I'd be remiss to not mention kind of school supports. Historically, all supports for schools were done by the central office, and if you've ever talked to any educator anywhere, they will tell you they have been to really crappy central pd, right? And some central PD can be really great, but historically central, it's very, again, to the example we just used, willow Elementary and an MS Elementary probably need very different professional development'cause they serve different kids, right? They may have some things in common that they could do shared PD around, but it, in, in the portfolio model schools. We believe schools should have the freedom to, to get their professional development from the provider that best met their needs, whether that was the central office or something else. Now that didn't mean that all PD was optional. Everybody has to do mandatory reporter training, right? But like sources of support, districts have had a monopoly on professional development forever. That's part of the traditional way of doing public education. And the central office isn't always the best provider for what a specific school community needs. That's just reality. So we had a big bet around that. And I think on the autonomy piece we really focused on autonomy. People, again, think about it in terms of charter innovation zone schools and certainly those schools were the schools that made the best use of autonomy during the reform era in Denver. But it's really about how you use time, people and money to better serve your kids and to better support your educators. That's the essence of autonomy, really. And I would say that autonomy comes with greater responsibility and more accountability. Autonomy always has to be coupled with strong authorizing practices, right? Because it can't be the wild west, right? Like you actually have to do what you say you're gonna do and you actually have to serve kids better. That's the last piece of Denver's reform strategy was around performance based accountability for our schools. And we had every school in the reform era understood that, part of the deal right, was getting to green on the district SPF, and I think now maybe the state SPF as a baseline, the state SPF in particular to me is a pretty easy tool compared to what we used to have. But it, like the state SPF or the district, SPF was the floor, not the ceiling of what we hoped our schools could be for children and families. But we took it really seriously and everybody in the system understood that was a primary driver for us. So the portfolio office did a lot of the policy work with the board around this and a lot of kind of the in-house. Implementation work around each of these strategies across the family of schools. We also had 74 schools that kind of reported into our office. Those schools were the charters and the innovation zone schools. So I basically ran like the seventh largest school district in the state with the staff of nine people.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 12:58

I love it. That's a good way to describe it actually. Pretty accurate. Yeah. I know I have some follow-up questions and Alan does as well, so maybe we'll just take turns here'cause there's a lot of really good stuff there. So my first is, you mentioned it's important to have a strong authorizing in this ecosystem. What does that mean to you? What does a strong authorizing system look like?

Jennifer Holladay: 13:18

I think auth authorizing to me that's in the context of a family of schools or a portfolio of schools like we have in Denver. I think there are a couple of really important elements of that. I do think. The accountability piece is really important. There have to be ways to hold charter innovation zone schools accountable for the outcomes they're getting for kids. I think, so being clear what that benchmark is, whether it's the state, SPF or something else we've gotta be really clear about that. I think the other thing that is. Was true when I was doing authorizing. Two other things were true. I think first the authorizing. Portion of the team was walled off a little bit and protected from the politics. So everything they did was based on a rubric or based on evidence, based on data and. They independently came up with a recommendation that like we would then take to the board of Education. And the reason why that independence is important is because the district is both as authorizer. It's a regulator, but the district is also an operator of schools. And so it's, it was important in my era that the authorizing team have some. Independence in their work so that, the self-interest of the district didn't override what was best for children. So I think that is an important,

Alan Gottlieb: 14:48

always a challenge. Yeah.

Jennifer Holladay: 14:49

Yes. It's hard. It's hard to be a regulator of the charters if you're also, frankly, competing with the charters. Absolutely. And the authorizing team always needed to have independence from the politics. Or frankly like independence from what the chief of schools might've wanted, which was always a little awkward, right?'Cause like whether it was Susanna or Alyssa, like they were my colleagues, it's hard. And then I think like the other thing that was true is that. Although authorizing, is about accountability and authorizing does require some independence it also requires some collaboration with the schools that you're authorizing. Because the only time that schools hear from if the only time that an autonomous school hears from you is when they're in trouble. You don't have a relationship, right? And if you're gonna hold people accountable, they also have to see you as a support partner, and as a collaborative partner that's there to help solve problems so that everybody can serve kids better. So we, in our au we had two teams. We had an authorizing team that kind of operated very independently. And then we had a couple of support partners in areas like special education and multilingual multilingual language services tiered supports. We had a couple of support partners that worked with our autonomous schools.'cause those are services that at the autonomous schools pay for. And anyway the authorizing works when the authorizer is also. In addition to being an accountability partner is also a support and collaborative partner.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 16:25

And Alan, I know you have another one, but I'm gonna, I'm so sorry. I'm gonna ask one more. I apologize.

Alan Gottlieb: 16:30

I just wanna make sure we get into sort of the present and future. Oh yeah. That, that's actually

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 16:33

exactly, yep, that's exactly what this question is. So Jen, great. Right now an in DPS, does the district still provide those level of supports to charter schools? And do you think under this new board and this new leadership that. Will those supports continue to exist?

Jennifer Holladay: 16:52

So I just wanna be real transparent. Like I haven't directly supported Denver Charters as a consultant for about two years. So my, what? But I still talk to people, right? The truth is charter schools in Denver pay fees to the district, right? So they pay a special education fee. They pay an administrative fee. They pay the administrative fee covers. The authorizing team. It covers it covers, the superintendent's office, that, that sort of thing. If they're in a district building, they pay a facility fee. They pay all kinds of fees to the district. I think the general thing that I hear from schools that I heard two years ago, and I certainly hear now, district charter or innovation doesn't really matter. Is that. The services from the central office are really they're pretty stretched thin now. We've now, we've done rounds and rounds of layoffs at this point in the central office. And if I had to guess we haven't necessarily eliminated a lot of the things that schools think they should be getting from the central office. We haven't had those conversations. And so I think at this point, if I were still in the district, I would be encouraging the district, the central office in particular, to negotiate service level agreements with schools, do it with the teacher's union, do it with the principal's union, do it with collaborative council, district Charter Collaborative Council, and the innovation council. What is it that we should actually expect from special education from the central staff now that it only, it has. A fraction of the employees that had five years ago. What services do we actually get from you? Like I, I think some of those conversation, I just think we're having a mismatch. We've had to downsize because of how expensive union contracts are and declining enrollment and all that stuff. And we haven't realigned expectations between the central office and schools on the ground. And I think that needs to happen quickly.

Alan Gottlieb: 18:53

I guess one thing I'm wondering is there are external forces like that are beyond the district's control that you just described, like declining enrollment that are causing some of this, causing layoffs, et cetera. But I'm also wondering from your perspective how you know the board flipped. To a kind of a union majority supported by the union board. And then we obviously got a new superintendent that and Alex Murrow and I think it was 2021, or was it 2020? I can never remember. But anyway, he came in and clearly just started steering with the support of this board in a very different direction. So I'm wondering from your perspective, how has the portfolio management piece changed since 20 19, 20 20, 21? Ar arguably it was the high point. You were at the apex when you were there and when you left, it at once, Susanna Cordova left as superintendent, it started to change. And I'm curious where you see, just because of the policies and practices of the board and the administration, where that whole system sits now compared to when you were there at its height.

Jennifer Holladay: 19:53

I just wanna be real transparent. I think that Dr. Marrero had a clear charge, and I think that board believed that it had a very clear charge to do things differently. The, I believe in Susanna's last public evaluation, it was real clear to me that. Portfolio was one of the places that the current, the board of that time was really uncomfortable with. So the writing was a little bit on the wall. If you go back and read her evaluation, it was interesting'cause none of them had ever said that to me, but I read it in Susanna's evaluation and that certainly had something to do with my decision to leave the district. But I think Marro, I think Marrero and the board that hired him I think they felt like they had a mandate to do something different and, I think we, on the, those of us who were part of the reform side, I think we need to be a little more humble and have a, just generally a little bit more humility. We made really big promises about all the things reform was gonna accomplish. While things did get better during the 10 year period, that reform was really anchored in Denver. It did not. Radically transform outcomes for black and brown children who were the focus of a lot of the work. And so I think we need to be a little humble. I think what I don't understand now, I is where we are going, right? Because I don't, we all have to be honest that the traditional way of doing things. Didn't work reform didn't, had a lot of unintended consequences and also didn't get the big gains, huge gains we transformative gains we were hoping for children. So it didn't work as well as all of us hoped and promised either. So what is it that we are now moving into? And I think to me, a lot of times it feels like we're going back to a model that's more top down and more traditional in that way. I guess the challenge is we know that doesn't work either. And so what are the lessons we can learn right from the traditional way, from the reform era, and then like where are we going? And I'm hopeful that the. Next iteration of the strategic roadmap might lay that out in a way I can understand better than I understood Dr. Minero's first roadmap, which I think was a laundry list of all the things that people were pissed off about from the reform era.

Alan Gottlieb: 22:17

I, I have to ask you this, I hadn't planned to, but you talked about clearly the reform movement made some gains, but not the transformative gains that kind of had been promised. I'm just interested because it's so different than what you know. Parker Baxter did this study last year for University of Colorado at Denver that basically. Argues the opposite, that no district, urban district in the history of public education in the United States has ever made the kind of gains that DPS made under Tom Boasberg and Michael Bennett. And you seem to be saying something different. So I'm just curious like what your reaction to that study was, if you've read it and why you think your perspective on it is so different than Parker's.

Jennifer Holladay: 22:52

I haven't read that report, but I'm very familiar with the academic data in particular from the reform era in Denver. We ne we never got to a place where, you know, go back to the Denver Plan 2020, we never got to a place where 80% of third graders were reading at grade level, Alan. That was one of the things we ed and we, and it didn't happen. Now did more kids read at grade level? Yes. And did we have years when we were. We were, we're, we were the highest growth district in the state, I think every year that Tom was here. I'm not, I, maybe there's an exception or two in there, but like Tom was big on growth and our kids grew a lot. The, the challenges, a 55 MGP is great and it's better than the state average. But if a kid, kids, sometimes schools and at times need to produce MGP in the nineties in order for kids to get to grade level. And I think some of the measures that we used back then, like MGP, aren't the best measures. I think now the state calculates catch up and keep up growth. They're not on, I don't think they're on the state SPF, but they are calculations the state uses. And I think those measures, frankly, are more valuable. For practitioners than MGPM. It definitely

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 24:07

feels like MGP is is a lacking some

Alan Gottlieb: 24:11

medium growth percentile if we didn't say that.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 24:13

Yes. Sorry. Thanks Alan. Yeah. For those of you who didn't watch the board meeting there was a, this was maybe two weeks ago, John Young, director John Youngquist and Dr. Marto we're chatting about. The the new metrics for the superintendent, and that was one of the questions that John had brought up. And to what, what became clear to me is like, MGP isn't necessarily the best way to measure or evaluate how we're going to hold the superintendent accountable to student growth and outcomes, particularly for students of color or low-income students.

Jennifer Holladay: 24:46

Yeah, I mean at the last meeting I was at, there was conversation Dr. Marrero was talking to the board about, I think his Council of Great City schools was saying that, a 2% gain would be considered like That's right. And proficiency would be considered very good progress. And I think. I think that's hard. I think that's hard sometimes for people to understand, but in a system as big as DPS, when it's 90,000 kids and tens of thousands of kids at a tested grade level. It is really hard to move the needle now. I saw years where we might get a 4% gain or whatever, but really difficult for schools and for a system as big as DPS to sustain that over time. And I think that the current obsession with proficiency is related to the backlash of the reform era over emphasizing growth'cause people. Want their kids to be reading at grade level. That's what families want. They don't care if their kid is, they do care if their kid's growing, but what they want is for their kid to be able to read. And that's what proficiency tells us, right? So I have, and like with the first strategic roadmap that Dr. Morero put out he promised, 10% gains over the first five year period and that's proficiency gains and that's not going to happen. But if he had gotten 2% gains every year, we would've had 10% by the end of this school year. But I do think like board discussion and frankly community discussion about what the right metrics are. Is something that we need to revisit. One of the things yes Dr. Olson and I worked on together was the Reimagine SPF committee. And that committee met for more than a year. It was a very diverse group of stakeholders with very different opinions. Came up with some great recommendations. And then COVID happened and the board just voted to go to the state SPF and threw out everything that committee had said. Oh,

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 26:42

I forgot about that though.

Jennifer Holladay: 26:43

We really, yeah, Carrie and I co-chaired that committee together and it was tough. Those folks did a lot of hard work for more than a year. So anyway, I'm just saying I do think the district needs to get much more clear on the measures that it, that, that are the best measures of. Progress for kids.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 27:01

Since you mentioned the state SPF, one of the things that the district is really proud of and some of the outgoing board members were very proud of is the number of schools that were green and the district being green on the state, SPF critics of the district including, I would say Alan and myself have said, green doesn't necessarily mean, students of color in low performing schools are doing well necessarily. Some would argue like it means that there's more white students in the district and those students are doing well. What's your take, Jen?

Jennifer Holladay: 27:30

Yeah. I think that the state SPF. I'll repeat what was true in reform. I think it's true now. Like any SPF is just going to be the floor. It is not the ceiling of what we want or expect our schools to be. It is the bare minimum, right? That a school or a district should be able to create for kids. It's the minimum, it is not the ceiling. I think that DPS has gigantic opportunity gaps, achievement gaps whatever language sits well with you. I think during the reform era, we didn't do enough to close those gaps. We're not doing enough now. The two student populations that I've spent most of my career, whether in DPS in Adams 14 or or in at Southern Poverty Law Center that I really have spent most of my time on are black students and students with disabilities. And those children certainly are not being served well in the current state of things. And we really. We, and I know that the district has a black student success team and other things. Now, I think they renamed it'cause because of Trump. But there's, we got, we have got to do better by students with disabilities and by black children. And I've now been saying that for 25 years across all the Johnson had,

Alan Gottlieb: 28:54

and I mentioned, I Go

Jennifer Holladay: 28:56

ahead.

Alan Gottlieb: 28:57

I just wanted to mention that I had, I've said this on the podcast before, but I had a guy go back and I know these tests aren't comparable, but go back and look at tests going back into the eighties, like the Iowa test of basic skills, and based on whatever measure you were using at the time, those gaps, those opportunity gaps have existed as far back as there's data in DPS. So it's, yeah, it's just a persistent problem.

Jennifer Holladay: 29:18

Yep. And I know there are a lot of people who really oppose standardized testing because they believe it looked like it was born out of eugenics. And the tests are implicitly racist and I'm willing to sit down. It doesn't have to be me, it's not about me. But like we can all sit down at a table and talk about what is, what are the other data points we should be triangulating with standardized testing data. That might give us a fuller picture. And so a lot of the data that we go back and look at is standardized testing which makes those folks then say all of those arguments are invalid because standardized tests have always been racist. Or based in eugenics or IQ tests or whatever. And I think reformers have to get comfortable with the idea that we. For if for no other reason than like the politics of it. Like we've got to be willing to sit down at a table and talk about triangulating, standardized testing data with other data, whether that's teacher grades or. I whatev whatever. Let's just put'em all out there and then figure out what we can all be comfortable with as a community of schools here in Denver. Let's do that and stop arguing about

Alan Gottlieb: 30:28

Right on. I totally agree. I think that would be a great step. Alexis, did you have a question?'cause if not, I do.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 30:34

I do. Yeah. Jen, I know you and Brandon Pryor had formed a group earlier this year called Parents Demand Action. What spurred that? And, talk to me a little bit about some of the things you've been doing yeah. Over the last 20 years. But I'm curious what spurred that and what does that work do?

Jennifer Holladay: 30:50

So it's Parents Demand Justice, oh justice org.org. And it was actually not me. It was Mr. Pryor and a handful of other parents. I became aware of their work largely'cause they had a lot of questions about data in the school district for different disaggregated groups. And it's a group of, it's a group of. I would say not usual suspects. And they have a real interest in really understanding what the data is saying, juxtaposed against the promises for proficiency gains that were made in the strategic roadmap, right? So they're trying to hold the system accountable for what the system promised in the strategic roadmap. They're less concerned about like the metrics that the board keeps approving for the superintendent that may or may not be aligned right to what was promised in the roadmap. I would say that is the galvanizing point for them. I've done a lot of the data analysis for them so I like give them the data. And then, they do come back with. Recommendations about what the data means. They do look at data a little differently and I've been really impressed with some of their suggestions. I think a big one that I had not looked at this data not since I was in the district. Everybody always looks at data for Latino students in the district and says their data is not gonna look great because so many of them are language learners. But you can actually disaggregate the data to look at Latino students who are Mlls and Latino students who are not mlls. There are huge gaps for students who are not Latino students, who are not mlls, and that's not a conversation we're having at all.

Alan Gottlieb: 32:36

Interesting.

Jennifer Holladay: 32:38

Yeah. Wow. So that's like an example. They also really focus on catch up and keep up growth instead of MGP. So that's something else that particular group of parents and guardians are really interested in.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 32:50

That's great. Thank you. Alan, we should definitely try to get them on the podcast soon. Would love to hear their perspective as well. Yeah, I agree.

Alan Gottlieb: 32:57

Dive into some of that. So given that we just, jen had a school board election where the outcome was that four the four races were all won by candidates who had been backed by the Denver Classroom Teachers Association. What is your view about what that potentially means for the future of the portfolio district and like what, what gives you hope about this new board compared to the board that's outgoing and what gives you the most concern?

Jennifer Holladay: 33:24

I I don't have a lot of preconceived notions. About what? I don't know. The kinds of issues that I think they'll address first are the issues perhaps that we heard about the most from them on the campaign trail. So I'd be surprised if this board doesn't find a way to do class sizes as part of an executive limitation or something. Because they all four of the DCTA endorsed candidates talked about it so much on the campaign trail. Like I would imagine they do something like that. And I hope that in preparation of that, like the district is sitting down with collaborative council.'cause a lot, in a lot of the places where we do have larger class sizes, like in the far northeast, for example like that's an enrollment zone that also includes charters. So charters are gonna need to be part of that solution. If there are capped, if there are capped classrooms in. District schools, like everybody's, everybody in that enrollment zone's gonna have to come to an agreement about how to handle that. I think I worry I certainly worry about. Our autonomous sectors, whether that's charters or autonomous or in the innovation zones. Or the zone. I guess there's one left now.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 34:36

Yeah.

Jennifer Holladay: 34:36

And I le less because of overt hostility, more like death by a thousand cuts. Because I just think it's a really hard time to be an autonomous school in Denver. I think. And I think our charters, it's a little different in Denver than other places in the country.'cause our charters and our zones are so dependent on DPS for a lot of things because we created shared choice systems. We created shared sped programming. We created shared, like during reform, we did all of those things together, but now, right? Like they frankly don't have autonomy in a lot of pla. Our charter schools joined the consent decree in 2013, even though the consent decree was about issues that predated the existence of charter schools in Denver. They didn't have to do that, but they did in partnership and the

Alan Gottlieb: 35:28

just consent. This is one of those places we need to pause and describe the consent decree. Briefly in case people don't know what it's,

Jennifer Holladay: 35:36

yes. So the consent decree yeah the essentially the Denver public schools historically was awful to children whose home language was not English, shamed people for speaking Spanish and school forbade people from speaking Spanish in school. Lots of people lost their home language in school. And, we've been under a consent decree for decades now, and we renegotiated it with the union with Che and the court monitor in 2013, and the charter schools joined the consent decree at that point, chapter eight of the current consent decree is for charters, and they weren't even in existence when all of those problems happened, right? That was like a real partnership with the charters to come to the table and say, yes. We will do the following things as outlined in chapter eight of the consent decree. They didn't have to do that. Those issues preceded them, but that's how, like how interwoven Denver charters are in the Denver Public Schools central office. Ecosystem, and so I worry about death by a thousand cuts for our autonomous schools, and I worry about authorizing to some extent. It's not clear to me how much independence and how much evidence basis is gonna be allowed in the future. I just don't know.

Alan Gottlieb: 36:58

And what. What about student? You mentioned earlier student based budgeting. Yeah. You mentioned I think accountability. What about those things

Jennifer Holladay: 37:06

under Yeah, I worry, I certainly worry about student based budgeting and I think we all should worry about student based budgeting. We know that a couple of years ago LA Unified was looking at doing a weighted student based budgeting formula like we have in Denver. David Hart, who used to be the CFO of Denver Public Schools is the CFO at Los Angeles Unified. And Mr. Baldman and Mr. Gould actually got themselves involved in the conversation at LA Unified trying to defeat a weighted student based budgeting model there. So like we know that there is some DCTA hostility to student based budgeting, so we'll just have to see if that becomes a priority for this board. I'd say it's way more complicated, I think than most people give it credit for, but we'll see. And I am interested to see if the district wants to continue to use the state SPF as the only performance tool that matters. It has a lot of limitations and I think our communities want more than just the state SPF, but we'll have to see.

Alan Gottlieb: 38:12

That was a per, that's been a perpetual puzzle to me, which is why a couple of boards ago when the sort of. Anti-reform board, for lack of a better term, first came in, they did away with the district SPF, which was a more multiple measures way, holistic way of looking at school quality than just, whereas the state SPF is much more heavily weighted toward. The stand, the state standardized test. So that always puzzled me and it seems like there would be a way to return to something more balanced that the district produced itself.

Jennifer Holladay: 38:43

I think the other, if I were, if one thing I would just say about like the state SPF and. DPS is, the state SPF, for example, is not aligned to the competency menu that is now required for high school graduation, right? So in order to get, in order to qualify for your diploma, now you have to demonstrate competency in math and English. On a, on one of many things, on a menu that is approved by the state, and that is embedded, I think, in board policy. But the o, the only one of those that's on the state SPF is the SAT. Wow. And so if I were developing an SPF or a performance framework. For schools in Denver. Now I would want to look at all the things on the competency menu, right? Not just the SAT. Now, all the items on the competency menu are not created for the same purpose. And some would argue some are harder than others or whatever, but like our high schools are multifaceted spaces at this point with concurrent enrollment and. All different kinds of like career and technical programming. It's not 1995 anymore. And I think high schools in particular need a different set of performance metrics.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 40:00

That is such a great point. And I hadn't even considered that. That's yeah's a really good point. Wow. So one, one other question for Jen and I think I'm done with mine, but. Jen, one of the things that came up a lot on the campaign trail was school closures. Yeah. And all candidates who were running said that they wouldn't use test scores to determine which schools to close. If you were in charge of the district, how would you handle school closures?

Jennifer Holladay: 40:30

I just wanna be clear, I have no interest in ever being a superintendent. Let's

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 40:34

start

Jennifer Holladay: 40:35

a

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 40:35

rumor here. People

Jennifer Holladay: 40:36

no interest. No interest.

Alan Gottlieb: 40:40

You too are after Herrero's job, Jen. We know it.

Jennifer Holladay: 40:43

No, I You're gonna

Alan Gottlieb: 40:44

get censure now.

Jennifer Holladay: 40:45

Alan. Alan, no. Sassiness. I don't wanna participate in that and no sass.

Alan Gottlieb: 40:49

Okay.

Jennifer Holladay: 40:50

I think, I was really interested that Marrero was talking about the school transformation process, like the week before the board meeting. That was really interesting to me. I do think it's gonna be hard with this new board to get them on board with that policy and kind of what it means. And I haven't read the DCTA bargaining agreement closely enough. What I think is important is that if the Elevate Network that Marrero and Joe Edmondson and others have set up in the district to support schools that are struggling district schools that are struggling, if those supports don't end up. Getting better academic outcomes for kids. I think it puts, I think it puts the system in a tough spot.'cause at some point, all of us, whether we're a charter school or the district, or innovation school or zone we gotta ask ourselves, have we lost the moral authority to run this school? That's the fundamental question when it comes to like school closures. If on the basis of performance, like whoever is operating it, whether it's a charter or the district or a zone, have we lost the moral authority to run this school?'cause we've done everything we know how to do and kids aren't any better off. That's a really hard question. And it requires humility and it requires openness. To doing something radically different. And we'll just have to see if we not only have the moral wisdom to ask that question, but the political guts to answer it.

Alan Gottlieb: 42:29

The, I had another question I think is true though.'cause I think that's a really great place to end it and it's a very good point to make. Any last thoughts Alexis?

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 42:37

No. Thank you so much, Jen, for coming on. I could spend, hours just listening to you talk and would love to have you on the podcast again.

Alan Gottlieb: 42:45

Yeah. Your historical perspective's. Great

Jennifer Holladay: 42:48

copy. Thank you for having me.