Should Abraham Lincoln High School, and other low-performing Denver schools, be closed? (Editorial)

Denver Public Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero is right: the more accountability, the better for district schools that are struggling. We support his effort to reinstate district-led accountability metrics that bring support to low-performing schools, and as a last resort, include school closures.

Marrero announced last month his plan to end the 7-year hiatus of DPS school accountability by developing a new system to judge school performance.

We know school improvement plans often fail, but ignoring students who are not learning is not the answer either. This city has an abundance of schools where students are thriving academically, including some of the best schools in the state. We cannot allow zip codes to determine who has access to the best education and who is stuck in some of the worst schools.

Take, for example, Denver’s Abraham Lincoln High School, a place that is on Year 7 of accountability watch from Colorado’s Department of Education.

In 2024, despite having a “Directed Pathway” performance plan in place, only 12.8% of juniors met or exceeded expectations on the reading and writing portion of the SAT, and only 5.1% met or exceeded expectations on the math portion. In March of that year, the school’s former principal wrote that “overall academic achievement in math and English is low and decreasing from past years and this needs to be addressed comprehensively for all students.”

This year, Marrero and a new principal, Néstor Bravo, are optimistic that gains in test scores will show improvement.

“We’ve seen incredible evidence of our approach,” Marrero said, pointing out that Manuel High School has improved test scores, attendance and graduation rates enough to come off the state’s watch list. “We’re also seeing it with Lake Middle School.”

Continuous improvement is necessary at these schools to provide even a semblance of equity with the experience students have at other high schools and middle schools in the district. It’s what Marrero calls having a “minimum equivalency” for all schools in the district, and” having a Blue Ribbon school in every neighborhood.”

Bravo told us that he does think closure should be on the table for low-performing schools, but he added that Lincoln is an “iconic community hub” with a “multi-generational sense of belonging.”

“Closing a place like this has consequences that go way beyond academic performance,” Bravo said.

Which is why it makes sense for the district and the state to pull out all the stops to give students at Lincoln an equitable education.

Bravo said he took over the school and faced a $1.2 million budget deficit. Since then, he said, he has created a clean and efficient system that puts employees where they need to be based on their strengths, provides training and support, and then focuses resources on intervention and foundational skills for students.

The school still has a tough road ahead. Many students stopped attending school when federal immigration raids started in Denver, and Marrero said the school’s metrics on attendance took a hit. We don’t see any sense in the state holding Lincoln High School accountable for students who are afraid of deportation.

But we have also seen time and time again that accountability works to improve school conditions.

After years of pushback and reluctance from the Adams 14 School District, officials finally turned over Adams City High School to outside control. Almost immediately, test scores and performance began to improve. It took the threat of closure for the district to finally concede that it needed help running the school.

We know that every student in this district can succeed. Marrero said he knows that the state’s tests — the PSAT, SAT, and the CMAS — are imperfect measures of students’ abilities. The tests have an obvious bias toward good test takers and students who have been trained to test well; also, the tests have a bias against English language learners and students with IEPs or other learning needs.

But Marrero said he is eager to “prove that we can and our kids can in spite of the missing equity components.”

Marrero is asking charter schools in the district to agree to being held accountable by the district and not just the state. He pointed to the school board’s failure to close Academy 360 despite poor performance. There has got to be high accountability that comes with the autonomy of a charter school, he said.

We are concerned that, given the current anti-charter school ethos among district leaders and school board members, the policy could be abused to shutter good charter schools that perhaps just need a little help.

But we also resolutely believe that charter schools should be held to the exact same standard as district schools, and that closure should be on the table when charter schools fail students.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.