In 2025 Lewis-Palmer School District 38 became the only one of its high-performing neighbors to lose Colorado’s top accreditation rating, slipping from “Accredited with Distinction” to plain “Accredited.” It was not the parent opt-outs that critics like to blame. It was a slow decline in one number — student growth. The Independent examined a decade of state data across three districts, ran the comparison every way it would break, and set the result against the best national research, to ask a simple question: what actually moved the rating, and what merely happened at the same time?
For a district that markets itself on results, it went almost unremarked. When the Colorado Department of Education published its annual district performance frameworks for 2025, Lewis-Palmer District 38 — the schools of Monument, Palmer Lake and the surrounding Tri-Lakes — had dropped a tier. After years at “Accredited with Distinction,” the state’s highest rating, D38 was now simply “Accredited.” Its two obvious peers, Academy District 20 next door and Cheyenne Mountain District 12 to the south, kept their Distinction. D38 alone slipped.
The district did not put out a statement. There was no crisis; there is no crisis. D38 remains, on nearly every measure, one of the strongest districts in Colorado. But a downgrade is a downgrade, and it is worth understanding — not least because the reasons usually offered in the Tri-Lakes are the wrong ones.
The rating did not fall the way people assume
Colorado grades districts on a points system. A district earns a share of the possible points across a few “indicators,” and the total determines its plan type; roughly 74 percent of points is the line between “Accredited with Distinction” and ordinary “Accredited.” For most of the past decade D38 sat comfortably above that line. Then it drifted toward it, and in 2025 it crossed:
| Year | D38 framework points | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 76.8 | Accredited with Distinction |
| 2022 | 77.7 | Accredited with Distinction |
| 2023 | 76.9 | Accredited with Distinction |
| 2024 | 74.5 | Accredited with Distinction (barely) |
| 2025 | 72.7 | Accredited |
The first instinct in a district with a vocal share of testing skeptics is to blame participation: if enough families opt their children out, the reasoning goes, the scores and the rating suffer. It is a clean story, and it is wrong. D38’s participation rate on the measure the state’s 95 percent rule actually applies to — the accountability rate, which counts a formally excused student as having participated — held near 99 percent in 2024 and 2025, even as its points fell. On the total rate, which counts only the children who sat the exam, D38 recorded 84.2 percent in 2025. The district did carry a “low participation” footnote in earlier years, when opt-outs ran higher, and it kept its Distinction every one of those years. Participation is not what changed.
What actually slipped was growth
Colorado’s frameworks reward two very different things. One is achievement — how many students test proficient, a figure that, as this newspaper has written before, mostly reflects who is enrolled. The other is growth — how much students improve from one year to the next, which is the closest thing the state has to a measure of what a district itself contributes. On the national research, that distinction is not academic: Stanford’s Sean Reardon, working with a database of some 300 million test scores, has shown that districts’ proficiency levels track local affluence closely, while their learning rates do not — some high-poverty districts post growth well above average. Growth is where a district’s own performance shows up.
D38’s growth is what fell. Break its framework score into its parts and the culprit is plain: the district’s growth index dropped from about 67 in 2023 to under 60 in 2025, while its postsecondary-readiness score did not move at all. Its achievement score fell too, from 79.9 to 75.5, but less steeply than growth and from a much higher base. And the decline is specific to D38. Over the same window, Academy 20’s growth barely budged and Cheyenne Mountain’s actually rose. In 2025 D38’s growth index sat at 59.8, against 74.4 for D20 and 70.8 for Cheyenne. A district whose students were, a few years earlier, gaining ground as fast as anyone’s had become the laggard of the three.
That reframes the whole question. The rating did not fall because Monument’s children stopped being proficient, or because their families changed, or because too many parents skipped a test. It fell because, on the one measure built to capture a district’s own effect, D38 stopped keeping pace. The rest of this article is about why — and it is a story in which most of the usual suspects have alibis.
Follow the money, and it leads nowhere
Start with the explanation every school district reaches for: funding. It is a natural suspect, and the national evidence is real — a careful 2024 meta-analysis by C. Kirabo Jackson and Claire Mackevicius finds that an added $1,000 per pupil, sustained for four years, raises test scores by about 0.03 of a standard deviation and lifts college-going, with the largest effects for low-income students. Money matters, modestly per dollar and most where need is greatest.
But money cannot explain a gap between D38 and its neighbors, because there is no gap. Pulled from the state’s Financial Transparency records, D38’s total spending per student and Academy 20’s are all but identical — $13,338 and $13,380 respectively in 2025 — and both sit well below the state average of $16,845. Cheyenne Mountain spends somewhat more. If similar money bought D38 a downgrade and D20 a Distinction, the money is not the variable. What a district does with its dollars can differ; the sheer number of them does not separate these two.
Correction, 27 July 2026. The teacher-pay comparison in this article originally used the Colorado Department of Education’s combined figure, which blends each district’s own teachers with its charter-school teachers. Charter teachers are paid substantially less and the three districts carry very different charter loads, so the combined column is not comparable across districts — Cheyenne Mountain, for instance, reported 115.8 charter teaching posts in 2019-20 and none by 2022-23, which by itself made its pay appear to rise faster than it did. The comparison has been rebuilt on the non-charter column: teachers in each district’s own schools. D38’s pay is higher than we first reported and the gap to Cheyenne Mountain is smaller, but D38 remains the lowest-paid of the three in every year the state publishes the split, and the article’s conclusion is unchanged. Corrections, 24 July 2026. An earlier version of this article said Colorado had “tightened its salary definition in the last two years,” and advised readers to rely on the level of the pay gap rather than its trend. On review of CDE’s published workbooks we can find no evidence of such a change: the 2022-23 file already used the same teacher job codes as the later ones. That caveat has been replaced, and the year-to-year comparison is sound. The same version said D38’s achievement score “held near the top of the state” while growth fell; in fact achievement also fell, from 79.9 to 75.5, though less steeply than growth. A description of the three districts’ teacher pay a decade ago as being “within a couple thousand dollars” has been corrected to about $3,200. Separately, this article’s description of participation rates was clarified the same day — see the note under Participation above.
Two things do set D38 apart: what it pays teachers, and how many it keeps
Run the same comparison across the inputs a district actually controls, and almost everything comes back even. Class size is a case in point. The research is favorable to smaller classes — Tennessee’s randomized Project STAR experiment, analyzed by Alan Krueger, found early-grade gains of 0.15 to 0.20 of a standard deviation, roughly double for Black and low-income children — but D38 and D20 staff their classrooms almost identically, around 17 students per teacher. It is not the differentiator either.
Two things are. On both, D38 stands out from its neighbors — and it stands out in the same direction every single year.
The first is pay. D38 is the lowest-paying of the three districts, and the gap has widened. The comparison has to be made on the state’s non-charter column — the teachers in each district’s own schools — because charter teachers are paid far less and the three districts carry very different charter loads, which makes the combined figure useless for comparing one district with another. On that basis, D38 was already the lowest-paid of the three in 2019-20, at $52,447 against $54,877 in Academy 20 and $58,177 in Cheyenne Mountain. By 2024-25 the average D38 teacher in a district-run school earned $60,495, against $67,896 in Academy 20 and $72,066 in Cheyenne Mountain — the district that lost its Distinction paying its teachers some $7,400 to $11,600 less than the districts that kept theirs. (A note on the basis, in the interest of the sourcing our readers hold us to: the published workbooks provide no evidence that a change in teacher job codes explains the recent rise. CDE’s 2022-23 file already used the same job codes — 201, 202, 204 and 206 — that the later files name in their titles; the December 1 snapshot and the salary-divided-by-FTE calculation are documented as unchanged; and D38’s teacher FTE moved smoothly across the period. Average salary reflects workforce composition, so it is not the same as a salary schedule.)
The second is turnover. Teacher turnover in D38 has been the highest of the three in almost every recent year, running above 20 percent while Cheyenne Mountain’s has fallen into the low teens. In 2024-25 D38 turned over 24.4 percent of its teachers, against 19.6 percent in D20 and 10.6 percent in Cheyenne. Since this article was published the state has released its 2025-26 figures, which show D38’s teacher turnover falling to 18.8 percent — still the highest of the three, but a marked improvement. We examine what changed in the third article in this series.
Here the national research stops being reassuring and starts being pointed — because pay and turnover are exactly the inputs the best studies tie to a school’s own performance. Teacher turnover, in particular, has as clean a causal case as this field offers. A landmark study of nearly a million New York City students by Matthew Ronfeldt, Susanna Loeb and James Wyckoff found that turnover lowers achievement — and, strikingly, that it harms even the students of the teachers who stay, as institutional knowledge and collegial routines are lost. Twenty years of North Carolina data reached the same conclusion. Pay works through the same chain from the other end: higher relative salaries improve outcomes largely by recruiting stronger applicants and keeping good teachers in the building, as work by Barbara Biasi (2021) and, earlier, Susanna Loeb and Marianne Page (2000) has shown. A low-pay, high-churn district is, in other words, the exact profile the literature associates with a weaker contribution to student growth.
Two honest cautions belong right here, and we would rather state them than let a reader over-read the charts. First, turnover’s measured harms are largest in high-poverty schools; D38 is affluent, so the size of any effect on its students is genuinely uncertain. Second — and this is the finding our own analysis kept returning to — none of this proves cause. When we tested whether year-to-year changes in pay or turnover moved the framework number, the correlations were essentially zero. What the data can say is descriptive and consistent: D38 is the lowest-paid, highest-turnover, lowest-growth district of the three, while matching the neighbor that kept its Distinction on money and class size. That is an association worth the community’s attention. It is not a proven mechanism.
Blame the superintendents? The research says no
There is one more suspect, and it is the tempting one. The years of D38’s slide were also years of churn at the top. Karen Brofft retired in 2019. K.C. Somers led the district until the spring of 2024, when he left for Arizona. His successor, Stacie Datteri, resigned in January 2025, less than a year into the job; Amber Whetstine, long the district’s assistant superintendent, became the third person in the chair in roughly fifteen months. Lay that timeline over the falling scores and the temptation is obvious.
Resist it. The research on this is unusually clear, and it points the other way. A Brookings Institution analysis by Matthew Chingos, Grover Whitehurst and Katharine Lindquist found that superintendents account for about 0.3 percent of the variation in student achievement — less than teachers, less than schools, less than even the district itself — and that the typical superintendent’s three-to-four-year tenure shows no reliable relationship to test scores. Student characteristics swamp everything. Principals are a different matter: the evidence says a good principal is worth months of extra learning across a school. But the person in the district office, however dramatic the revolving door, is not where test scores are made. The leadership carousel is a real story about a district’s stability and morale. It is almost certainly not the story of the growth decline.
What the numbers can, and cannot, say
Put it together and the honest verdict is narrower, and more useful, than any single-cause headline.
The data can say, with confidence, three things. The downgrade is a growth story, not a proficiency or participation story — and growth is the measure that best reflects a district’s own work. Money and class size do not explain it, because D38 matches, almost to the dollar and the seat, the neighbor that kept its Distinction. And the churn of superintendents, whatever else it signifies, is not where the research locates the cause.
The data cannot say that any one factor caused the slide. Our tests of year-over-year change came back null; the sample — three districts, a handful of years — is too small to adjudicate. What survives is a portrait, not a verdict: D38 is the district that pays its teachers the least, loses the most of them, and, on the one measure designed to isolate a school’s own effect, has fallen behind neighbors it once matched. The national research says those are the right things to be looking at. It does not license the sentence “low pay caused the downgrade,” and neither will we.
If there is a worry worth the community’s attention, it is not the parking lots or the apartment permits or the name on the superintendent’s door. It is quieter and more structural: a strong, affluent district that has let its teacher pay drift to the back of its peer group, watched its turnover climb, and slipped on student growth while the districts next door held on. That is not a collapse. It is a signal — and, unlike a rating, a thing a district can still choose to answer.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: Four million dollars, frozen: the levy behind D38’s teacher exodus · our data analysis of D38 test scores and the apartment debate, our review of the district’s 2026-27 budget, and our School Spotlight profiles of Lewis-Palmer and Palmer Ridge high schools.
The state data: CDE performance frameworks · CDE Financial Transparency · CDE School/District Staff Statistics.
On school spending: Jackson & Mackevicius, “What Impacts Can We Expect from School Spending Policy?” (American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2024); Jackson, Johnson & Persico, “The Effects of School Spending on Educational and Economic Outcomes” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2016); Lafortune, Rothstein & Schanzenbach, “School Finance Reform and the Distribution of Student Achievement” (2018).
On teacher pay: Biasi, “The Labor Market for Teachers Under Different Pay Schemes” (AEJ: Economic Policy, 2021); Loeb & Page, “Examining the Link Between Teacher Wages and Student Outcomes” (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2000); Clotfelter, Glennie, Ladd & Vigdor, “Would Higher Salaries Keep Teachers in High-Poverty Schools?” (Journal of Public Economics, 2008).
On teacher turnover: Ronfeldt, Loeb & Wyckoff, “How Teacher Turnover Harms Student Achievement” (American Educational Research Journal, 2013); Sorensen & Ladd, “The Hidden Costs of Teacher Turnover” (AERA Open, 2020); Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, “Teacher Turnover: Why It Matters and What We Can Do About It” (Learning Policy Institute, 2017).
On leadership: Chingos, Whitehurst & Lindquist, “School Superintendents: Vital or Irrelevant?” (Brookings, 2014); Grissom, Egalite & Lindsay, “How Principals Affect Students and Schools” (Wallace Foundation, 2021); Béteille, Kalogrides & Loeb, “Stepping Stones: Principal Career Paths and School Outcomes” (Social Science Research, 2012).
On class size and teacher experience: Krueger, “Experimental Estimates of Education Production Functions” (QJE, 1999); Chetty et al., “How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings?” (QJE, 2011); Papay & Kraft, “Productivity Returns to Experience in the Teacher Labor Market” (Journal of Public Economics, 2015).
On growth versus proficiency, and income: Reardon, “Educational Opportunity in Early and Middle Childhood” (RSF, 2019); Reardon, “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor” (2011).
Statistics reflect the most recent year published per source. Spotted an error, or have a D38 story we should know? Email [email protected].
Methodology
The rating and points. District performance framework points, ratings and indicator sub-scores (achievement, growth, postsecondary/workforce readiness) are from the Colorado Department of Education’s performance frameworks (SchoolView), D38 district code 1080; the roughly 74-point “Distinction” threshold is per CDE’s framework scale. No frameworks were issued for 2020 and 2021.
Participation. Colorado publishes two figures, and they measure different things. The total participation rate is the share of eligible students who actually sat the assessment; D38 recorded 84.2 percent in 2025 for both English and math. The accountability participation rate, against which the state’s 95 percent requirement is applied, counts formally excused students as participating; D38 recorded 99.7 percent. Correction: an earlier version of this article described the accountability figure as a “tested-participation rate,” which was imprecise. The underlying figures and the article’s conclusion are unchanged.
Staffing. Average teacher salary, teacher full-time-equivalents and teacher turnover are from CDE’s Staff Statistics; student-teacher ratio is computed as enrollment divided by teacher FTE. Two caveats a careful reader should keep: CDE’s 2023-24 and 2024-25 salary files use a narrower “job codes 201–206” definition that raises the reported figure, so cross-district levels are the reliable comparison rather than year-to-year changes; and Cheyenne Mountain’s 2022 turnover and 2021 ratio are distorted by the departure of an online program, not by classroom churn. Teacher turnover by district is published by the state only from 2019-20 onward.
Spending. “Total spending per student” is CDE’s current-spending-per-student figure from Financial Transparency; the state’s site exposes fiscal years 2021-22 through 2024-25. CDE does not publish a per-pupil revenue figure, on the ground that it is not comparable across districts.
Analysis. We compared all three districts across a decade, tested each factor against the framework outcome three ways (year-over-year change, trajectory versus peers, and cross-district levels), and had the arithmetic independently re-derived from the source data. Every within-district change correlation was statistically insignificant; the findings reported here are cross-district and descriptive, and are explicitly not claims of causation. The composition effect of the district’s growing charter — examined at length in our earlier coverage — accounts for at most a few tenths of a point and is essentially flat over the recent window.