Dec. 15, 2017
Dear Signatories:
Sean Bradley, Urban League of Metropolitan Denver
Dr. Joyce Brooks, NAACP Denver Branch
Papa Dia, African Leadership Group
Meghan Carrier, Together Colorado
Dr. Jeriod Patterson, Alpha Phi Alpha, Inc.
Ricardo Martinez, Padres & Jovenes Unidos
Thank you for your letter. We appreciate the partnership we have had with you over many years and our shared
interests and goals around ensuring that all our students receive an excellent education. We also agree that the
School Performance Framework is a very important resource for our school communities, helping to provide vital
information for teachers, students and parents, and to drive critical school improvement strategies based on
student data.
For us to now change fundamental rules of the game on the SPF one and two years after schools worked towards
the SPF’s established targets – and retrospectively introduce a measurement tool that was not even developed
until this year – would only undermine our shared purposes. It would be akin to moving the goals posts long after
the game was played to a new place on the field that was not even identified at the time the game was played
and then trying to recalculate the game’s score.
Denver Public Schools led the state in issuing the first family-friendly school report card in 2008. From the
beginning, a core principle has been to give school communities notice before major changes in measurement are
made so they can use the SPF’s targets to set their school improvement strategies. We do not believe to do
otherwise would be fair.
As you know, for the last two years, we have utilized the assessments and cut points for early literacy that the
State of Colorado uses under the READ Act. These did not change from the 2016 SPF to the 2017 SPF.
As we discussed, our experience has made clear over time that the scores on state early literacy assessments do
not closely predict how well a student will later perform on the state CMAS assessments. We have asked the state
to align these scores to provide greater clarity to school communities.
In the meantime, we are using our own data to provide better alignment and have begun this year to provide that
information to teachers, students and parents through our Early Literacy Aimlines. We appreciate how important
this information is for our families. We also made clear this fall that those Early Literacy Aimlines would be the
basis for SPF measures beginning in the 2018-19 school year.
We are grateful to our educators for their work that drove our largest early literacy gains ever last year. Finally, it
is worth noting that, even though the state’s SPF does not include early literacy measures, our schools saw
greater gains and higher ratings on the state’s SPF than they did on the district’s SPF this past year.
Thank you again for your letter and we look forward to continuing to partner with you going forward.
Best,
Tom Boasberg
Superintendent