Greenberg's focus: More science, tech, college prep

By Rob Reuteman, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Friday, March 28, 2008

Soon after David Greenberg was appointed to the Colorado Commission on Higher Education in 1993 by Gov. Roy Romer, he reached the same conclusion many do.

"My God, they're sending kids to college who are unprepared," he recalled Wednesday.

In the ensuing years, Greenberg explored the roots of the problem, and in 2001 Gov. Bill Owens tapped him to spearhead planning and fundraising for the Denver School of Science and Technology. The charter high school opened in 2004, partly with money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its stated goal was to serve students typically underrepresented in science and technology programs - girls, minorities and students from poor families. Since it opened, DSST - as it's known - has outperformed nearly every high school in the state and has done so while sticking to its charter resolution of recruiting and retaining a student body that is at least 40 percent low-income and 40 percent female.

Colorado Department of Education Commissioner Dwight D. Jones visited the school last month and wrote the following in a Feb. 25 blog entry: "With DSST's first senior class ready to graduate this coming May, 96.5 percent of seniors have been accepted into four-year colleges, on track with the school's 100 percent goal."

Now that Greenberg has helped orchestrate success in better preparing students for college, he's moving even closer to the source. Next week, he'll help with a lottery to trim 300 applicants down to the first 130 sixth-graders for a new Science & Technology Middle School. It's an expansion project approved by Denver Public Schools in November and again assisted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

"Sixth grade is probably the right life intervention point for kids who may have fallen behind," Greenberg said. "With sixth-graders, there is still a chance to catch up. It's not a labor of Hercules to do it. By ninth grade, you run into a lot more trouble."

"Of course, you're better off if you get 'em at 3 years old," he added. That's probably why he's been a board member for nine years at the Clayton Foundation, which runs Head Start and other early childhood education programs. And wife Kerri Greenberg is vice president of community affairs at Mile High Montessori after years at the Daniels Fund.

"It's all related," he said.

Greenberg takes great pains to distance himself from the nuts and bolts of DSST's success. "My great claim is that I was smart enough to hire Bill Kurtz," he said of the man who has been the school's principal since it opened. "He's the reason these results are happening."

Education is Greenberg's second or third career. In 2000, he retired from the public policy consulting firm he co-founded, GBSM. He's the "G."

The new middle school will start up in temporary quarters at Westerly Creek Elementary - a DPS school in the Stapleton neighborhood - just as the School of Science and Technology started up at the old Bishop Machebeuf High School in Park Hill before moving to its $10.5 million campus at the southern edge of Stapleton.

Last year, Bill Gates testified in Congress: "High schools are emerging around the country that focus on math and science, and they are successfully engaging students who have long been underrepresented in these fields - schools like the School of Science and Technology in Denver . . . These schools have augmented traditional teaching methods with new technologies. . . . This combination is working to draw more young people, especially more African-American and Hispanic young people, to study math and science."

Greenberg adds, "If we are serious about employers hiring Americans in the future, instead of Asians and Europeans, we have to raise math standards, we have to grow our own. And we have to convince kids it's in their interest to achieve those standards. It's what keeps me going."

Business editor Rob Reuteman can be reached at 303-954-5177 or ReutemanR@RockyMountainNews.com. Add your comments at www.RockyMountainNews.com/Business.