WESTMINSTER, Colo. | Learning dances on the edge of chaos in Renea Sutton’s classroom in the Adams County 50 School District.

The kids — who ordinarily would be called fifth-graders — keep coming.

“Mrs. Sutton! Mrs. Sutton! Mrs. Sutton …!”

Their ages range from 9 to 11, but there is no “fifth grade.” The students are grouped not by grade level but by what they have proved they’ve learned.

And even though it’s May, the last week of school, they aren’t slowing down. As Sutton roams among them, each child wants to show her evidence of more learning targets nailed — trying to move up another level and see their names advance up the classroom charts.

“Mrs. Sutton!”

This new system — called standards-based education — has revolutionized schools in the Denver area’s Adams 50 district over the past year.

Now it’s coming to Kansas City.

The Kansas City School District is aiming to become the largest in the country to launch standards-based education systemwide. Teachers have been working all summer to shape Kansas City’s version, which will start this school year in five “pioneer” schools.

And they’re doing this at the same time the district is rewriting its math, science and social studies curriculums, and changing reading programs.

A lot of eyes are watching to see how well Kansas City pulls it off, said Robert Marzano, a national researcher and proponent of standards-based systems.

“Kansas City doing it is a smart thing and very brave,” Marzano said. “But you hope they’re doing their homework and have their act together.”

Many schools and districts have adopted elements of standards-based education. And some small districts have attempted the “massive change” of taking it systemwide, he said. But this will be a critical test for the movement.

“Kansas City jumps it dramatically,” Marzano said.

Everyone, from principals to parents, has to see school differently.

Students don’t spend a year in the third grade and then move on with whatever scores they get on their report cards. Instead, students advance within different subjects as they achieve learning targets.

Students who are struggling in one subject can’t slide by with poor grades. But where they are excelling, they leap ahead more easily.

Be warned. Teachers, principals and the superintendent in Adams 50 have plenty to say about their first year — the frustrations, the hard lessons and hitting an October wall that nearly undid it all.

But Sutton never stopped believing. After a class during the last week of school, her eyes moistened as she thought about a boy named Gabe.

It’s been hard. It’s all she can do to find time to keep up with her students, checking each one’s progress. It took maybe three-fourths of the first year to get to where she and most of her students got it.

She knows many of her children don’t receive the support they need at home. They want to be successful, she said, “but I don’t think some truly understood what to be proud of.”

But now Gabe knows. The 11-year-old is getting ready to move up a level in math. “And he told me: ‘I’m really proud of myself. I can see my name on that board.’ ”

---

Adams 50 straddles Denver and the north edge of its aging inner suburban ring. Its enrollment of 10,000 includes a large immigrant population, mostly minority with high levels of poverty. It is chronically low-performing and on Colorado’s academic watch list.

Emily Boyet and Viviana Patino, both 9, in their own way sense some of the changes at work at Hodgkins Elementary.

They know their math learning targets for the day: Rolling dice to demonstrate probability equations.

And they know they like the new classroom style better than the old.

What was wrong with the old way?

Viviana answers by swooning comically at her desk, eyes rolling, tongue lolling.

And Emily says: “Borrrrring.”

The new way may appeal to them now, but the girls don’t know the storm their teachers have been through. The change to standards-based has been a jolt to the district’s performance on state tests as they’ve worked to get their new footing.

“We all feel like this was our first year in all our positions,” Sunset Ridge Elementary Principal Roger Vadeen said. “Everything is new.”

The process of internalizing classroom routines — usually a one- or two-week task — took six weeks or more, several principals said.

The transformation relies heavily on technology. Teachers and children man computers, pursuing individual goals, testing progress, charting it, sorting it.

It was hard for everyone, said teachers union president Melissa Walsh. The database was sometimes too much, and many teachers found themselves too often relying on pencil-and-paper worksheets to accommodate students working at so many different learning targets.

“I talked to a teacher in tears,” Walsh said. “She said, ‘I can’t be that worksheet teacher.’ ”

By October of that first year, Superintendent Roberta Selleck feared it all might unravel.

“We hit the wall,” she said. “The buzzword was ‘overwhelmed.’ ”

Everyone took a long, collective breath. They slowed implementation of the data program. Another major program under way — teaching personal and social skills — was put off until next year. And Selleck met with her principals and teachers.

“I told them, ‘Number one, take care of yourself. And number two, we don’t expect perfection. We expect to put the toe in the water and muck it up.’ ”

The prevailing mood is clear, however, Walsh said. As hard as it has been, few teachers would want to go back to the old way.

About 50 out of some 600 teachers left the district as it went to the new system, but that’s a typical rate of attrition, she said. And many teachers have come seeking jobs because they want to teach standards-based education.

The Adams 50 school board has maintained its support as well, unanimously passing a resolution near the end of the first year to carry on with the new system.

They’re carrying on because of scenes like these:

Here were Jennifer Kush’s first-level kids — 5 and 6 years old. Some scattered about the carpeted room in reading pairs. Some worked at tables, having picked the targets they needed to reach.

And Kush was checking progress on her computer. She’s a “beacon” teacher at Hodgkins Elementary — one of those trained first who trains others — and she is a wiz at the data. In an instant she was sorting by learning targets, noting two children who hadn’t tested out on learning shapes yet. She’ll pull them aside and give them a quick lesson, she said.

“These kids want to feel in charge,” she said. “Kindergartners can be empowered in learning.”

She surveyed the busy children in her room. New charts along the floor marked their progress as most have moved from Level R (for Readiness) to Level 1.

“You can see it,” she said. “They totally know what to do. Before, you never knew if they knew they needed (help) and why.”

And here were some of Sutton’s kids at Westminster Elementary, 10- and 11-year-old boys.

They were comparing their matrixes — the star-stickered charts in their folders they use to track their progress — with the zeal of boys comparing video game triumphs.

“Have you passed Level 3?”

“We’re on 4 now.”

“Who’s on Level 5?”

“We all help each other,” Juan Ramos, 10, explained. “You understand it more. If you teach it (to a fellow student), it’s a hit.”

They’ve come a long way since the first of the year, said Jonah Cortez, 11, remembering when it seemed they’d never be able to keep track of so many subjects and so many matrixes.

“Man, there were like 60 of them — whoa,” he said as the boys all laughed.

Even the art teacher produced a matrix, said Gabe Tafoya, 11.

He slapped his forehead.

“Art has matrixes, too?”

---

Kansas City school Superintendent John Covington had been molding a standards-based ideology at least as far back as his first superintendent job in Lowndes County, Ala., from 2000 to 2006.

He’d started mixing early childhood and kindergarten, letting early readers move ahead and giving strugglers a better chance to catch up.

By the time he’d taken his second top post at Pueblo, Colo., Covington was talking up ideas about how to unbind the nine-month school system. Why keep children who could soar ahead locked in grade levels? Why herd others onward at the end of the year with barely passing grades and crippling knowledge gaps?

That’s when he learned, in 2007, that kindred minds were at work at such a revolution in Adams 50.

Adams 50’s teachers were already planning reforms that they’d picked up from several small school districts in Alaska.

An Adams 50 board member had seen a presentation by Alaska educators at a conference and given materials to Selleck. When Alaskan educators came to Denver as part of another conference, Selleck went with a team of teachers.

“At every break in the conference,” Selleck recalled, “we would come out and say: ‘You think this might work? Do you think … ?’ ”

Back home they took the question to the teachers in large assemblies, handing out green cards and red cards. They wouldn’t go forward with the pilot classrooms until 85 percent of the teachers held up the green cards.

It’s been a lonely road.

Even the largest of the Alaska districts making the reforms had barely 2,000 students. Most had a few hundred.

Selleck already had a mountain of problems — much like Covington would encounter on a larger scale when he came to Kansas City in July 2009. Her district had lost 14 percent of its enrollment in 10 years. It was going on the state’s academic watch list for poor performance.

She was stiffening the review of teachers, deciding against renewing several instructors’ contracts. She had to close schools. All administrators had to reapply for posts when the district opened a new high school.

“We had a churn here,” she said. “The old didn’t pass muster. We started with a new team.”

Being on academic watch, Adams 50 was reviewed by a state team. The report at the end of the 2009-10 school year acknowledged that the district’s test scores would suffer. It wasn’t giving the same single-minded focus to state test preparation but installing a vast reform.

And the report urged them to carry on.

“I hear it all the time,” said Adams 50 school board President Vicky Marshall. “People tell me: ‘We’re watching you. … We’re watching you.’ ”

But so many of them are waiting, not willing to take the same leap. Kansas City’s company is comforting, she said. “The more that others get into it, the more we can work together,” she said. “A cultural shift has to happen. We have to get others to risk it.”

---

Putting teachers into standards-based classrooms isn’t polishing a car off the assembly line and handing over keys and an instruction manual.

“There is no book for this,” Kansas City administrator Lewis Gowin said.

It takes work. Lots of it. Dozens of teachers on stipends have labored throughout the summer to create the district’s new curriculums and its standards-based programs.

They sat around laptop computers, plugged into power boxes snaking across workroom floors, diligently tapping in the plans they shaped together on the newsprint sheets taped to the walls around them.

They were an army, taking on the persistent weakness bared in a state review two years ago, saying the district lacked a “guaranteed and viable curriculum.”

As they laid out the curriculum, the standards-based teachers took the learning targets and chopped them into levels. They created 18 in all, covering standards from prekindergarten through the eighth grade. The schools that are pioneering the system only go through the sixth grade, but the levels extend to challenge those students who forge above grade level.

The work only seemed to grow, teachers say, as they tried to create how it would all look in the classroom — trying to cover all the learning targets, building teacher resources for lessons and assessments. Working with BrainHoney, an education software company, to create an online system to harness it all.

And Covington, purposefully, handed the bulk of the work to district teachers.

“For the first time in my 25 years … they’re really trusting us,” said James Elementary teacher Anne Pritchett. “It’s teacher-driven.”

Enthusiasm for the project shows in how teachers have responded as the work grew harder and longer, said Garfield early-childhood teacher Loxie Stock.

“A lot of teachers thought this was going to take a couple of weeks, but they stayed,” she said. “Some made extra child care arrangements, and they stayed.”

But don’t think they aren’t nervous.

It will be hard this first year just to keep scores from sliding. That’s what happened in Adams 50.

In Colorado state test scores released this month for grades three through eight, the percentage of students scoring proficient or advanced fell by an average of 4 percentage points in math, 4.6 points in reading and 6.5 points in writing.

Both Adams 50 and Kansas City want to see gains like the ones in Alaska.

The Bering Strait School District, the largest of the districts using a standards-based system, serves 2,000 students scattered over many small schools, with virtually all the children coming from families who qualify for free or reduced-price meals.

Only a third of its students were scoring proficient or advanced early in the 2000s. But by 2007, 50 percent of the students were hitting that mark in language arts and 46 percent in math. That’s roughly where they’ve remained.

The district has seen even larger growth in student performance on Alaska’s high-stakes graduation qualifying exam. Over the past eight years, the district reported, the percentage of Bering Strait seniors who passed the test has risen from 15 percent to more than 85 percent.

Input from Colorado helps. Alaska educators have written many accounts of their experiences. Some Kansas City teachers have visited Adams 50 schools. And Kansas City has brought in Adams 50 specialists, including Selleck, to share their insight.

But in the end, Covington said, this has to be Kansas  City teachers’ own creation.

Covington and administrators dropped in throughout the summer to hear teachers report on their work, seeing the unpredictable results and assuring them it’s OK.

“If, after two or three weeks into the school year, anybody looks into your classroom and sees what they experienced in the second grade or third or fourth, standards-based isn’t working,” Covington told them. “It’s going to have to look like nothing we’ve seen as educators.”

It wasn’t surprising, then, that the flow charts they created, trying to chart a lesson’s course, admittedly seemed too linear.

A depiction of clouds, where teachers Brooke Taylor and Marsha Phelps let learning targets overlap in different lessons, made better sense. Or even Phelps’ diagram of sun rays — student activities — shining down on flower petals of instruction plans.

Confused? Teachers probably will be more than once, whether with standards-based or the new curriculum.

But the experts who can help them through this will be teachers in their own building, not a flown-in consultant, or an administrator downtown, said math teacher Linda Thomas.

“It’s going to be your fellow teacher,” she said, “saying, ‘Hey, we worked our butts off to do this.’ ”

---

When school starts this year, Adams 50 teachers and principals said, they’ll be ready.

Those classroom routines? They’ll have them down within two weeks, not six, they said.

Flynn Elementary Principal Anthony Matthews said that if his teachers weren’t ready to begin letting children hit new learning targets within a week, the students were going to be demanding it.

This time the teachers won’t lose so much focus on instruction. They’ll be ready for the distractions.

They’ll know their system for managing all those different daily goals and all those computer tests. Lesson plans for the different learning targets will be ready and organized at their children’s fingertips. Not so many of those will be default worksheets.

And the Adams 50 parents won’t be as confused. Even as the first year was ending, many parents were perplexed, wanting to know: Is my child moving up a level next year or not?

They’ll know that their children are picking up right where they were — ahead here, behind there.

And the “beauty of it,” Westminster Elementary teacher Chris Byrd said, is that the students will understand where they are and how to get where they are going.

“The kids know exactly what they need to know.”

The truth is, the path ahead is uncertain, said Hodgkins Elementary Principal Ricardo Concha. They can expect to hit more walls, endure more trials. So will Kansas City.

“Everyone’s learning curve is going to be steep,” he said. “Make sure you all are into it. Stand together shoulder to shoulder and see it through. Know how to open the valves and let steam out.

“It won’t be easy,” he said. “But it’s definitely worth it.”

| To reach Joe Robertson, call 816-234-4789 or send e-mail to jrobertson@kcstar.com.