Findings from a Denver Public Schools analysis reinforce the value of early childhood education but also show that for students who end up among the lowest performing in the district, even earlier intervention is needed.
For the past several months, DPS staff has been analyzing data in a way they had not previously — identifying the lowest performing students and tracking them to see who has the highest chances of catching up to grade level.
“It’s very clear to me that early investment could pay off, but by itself it isn’t enough,” board member Happy Haynes said during a recent meeting on the data. “There seems to be some opportunities for movement when you look at the first and second quartiles and the number of kids who were able to move up, but I don’t know how you create focus around that.”
Among the findings discussed last week, DPS found that factors like race, income and gender do not heavily contribute to a student’s ability to increase academic performance.
Instead, factors that can’t be easily tracked — like parent engagement, instruction practices or classroom characteristics — may matter most to a student being able to increase performance.
“With the data we have, we don’t have an ability to predict school success with any degree of accuracy,” said Grant Guyer, DPS director of assessment, research and evaluation. “You can say that’s really hard for the next step of this analysis to identify which schools we want to investigate. But you can also say you are not doomed to your fate based on these characteristics about you.”
After national discussions and prompts from the new Denver Plan to reduce achievement gaps, DPS board members started looking to understand why minority boys were often the lowest performing.
Researchers suggested changing the question to instead look at who the district’s lowest performers are, rather than assuming they are minority boys.
DPS data shows students in the lowest quartile, or the “opportunity quartile” as the district dubbed it, are mostly minority and low income.
Minority boys and students with disability are overrepresented.
According to the analysis, 56 percent of the lowest performing students in the district remained in the same quartile three years later. The best odds for improvement are in kindergarten.
Of the highest-performing students, 79 percent stayed at the top three years later.
“These kids are starting kindergarten and they’re reading two grades above kindergarten level,” said Susana Cordova, DPS chief of schools. “Even if they have a bad year, in a year they are very likely to be stable and at grade level.”
In the next step, DPS will identify schools where more low-performing students are increasing test scores and catching up to grade level to see what can be replicated at other schools.
Yesenia Robles: 303-954-1372, yrobles@denverpost.com or twitter.com/yeseniarobles
