Denver Public Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero met 88.4% of his goals during the 2025-26 academic year, according to an evaluation the school board approved unanimously among the five members present at a public meeting Monday. The score marks a sharp jump from the roughly 74% of goals Marrero met the year before, and it comes after months of visible friction between the superintendent and the board he answers to.
The board discussed Marrero's annual review for about three hours in a closed executive session before voting, according to The Denver Post. Under the district's governance model, a goal counts as met if Marrero achieves at least 75% of its stated criteria, with individual goals weighted according to their importance, per the evaluation document posted by the Denver Public Schools Board. That threshold system also governed last year's review, when Marrero earned 73.53 out of 100 possible points.
Board president Xóchitl Gaytán said the board remained fully committed to supporting Marrero. John Youngquist did not attend the evaluation meeting.
A Rocky Year Behind the Numbers
The praise followed a stretch the Post described as a tenuous period for district leadership, marked by struggles between board members and the superintendent. Board members expressed concerns about Marrero's commitment to Denver Public Schools after he applied to lead Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida this year.
The board also postponed a conversation with Marrero about how he would accomplish district goals.
Where Marrero Fell Short
Despite the higher overall score, the board found Marrero did not meet goals tied to English language arts proficiency among students of color and children living in poverty. That gap echoes the previous year's review, in which Marrero missed goals covering third- through eighth-grade literacy performance and student and staff well-being, according to the evaluation detailed by Chalkbeat Colorado. That decline in staff well-being and belonging was most pronounced among teachers and central-office employees, the outlet reported.
The 2024-25 evaluation had also credited Marrero with meeting goals tied to early-grade reading, enrolling older students in rigorous coursework, and recruiting a more diverse staff.
Test Scores and the Strategic Plan
Marrero's 2022 strategic plan set a goal of raising the share of students performing at grade level in both math and literacy by 10 percentage points by 2026. Chalkbeat Colorado's review of the district's own data found none of Denver's overall test scores hit that 10-point target, even though early literacy climbed from 60% in 2022 to 69% in 2026. Among district-run schools, 71% of kindergarten through third-grade students were reading at grade level or above this past spring, surpassing Marrero's early-literacy benchmark.
Gains were uneven across student groups. The share of Black kindergarten through third-grade students reading at grade level rose from 48% in 2022 to 58% in 2026, while the figure for Latino students climbed to 63%, the outlet reported. But districtwide CMAS literacy results told a more sobering story: just 42.5% of students met or exceeded expectations in 2026, up from 39% in 2022 but well below the plan's 49% target.
Accreditation and Graduation Gains
Denver Public Schools received a green, or Accredited, rating from the Colorado Department of Education for the second consecutive year — one of the top ratings available under the state's academic framework. The evaluation document also credited the district with a 94% teacher fill rate and 92% special education staffing rate on the first day of school, along with four-year graduation reaching 80% and five-year graduation reaching 83% during 2024-25. READ Act reading proficiency rose from 63% to 68% over the same period, per the board's own evaluation record.
The latest numbers build on a longer run of generally positive formal reviews for Marrero. His 2023-2024 evaluation found he met all of the board's expectations under its Executive Limitations policies and credited him with a 76% graduation rate in 2023, which the document called the highest in district history at the time, even as goals tied to COSAT math scores and the district's MLE program went unmet. The scope of what's measured has also narrowed considerably — the 2023-24 review tracked more than 230 metrics, while 2024-25 pared that down to just 27 goals, Chalkbeat reported.
