Facing a gaggle of Harrington Elementary summer-school students Wednesday, Michael Bennet asked if they had any questions about his quest to run Denver Public Schools.
One fifth-grader shot up his hand – not with a question, but to lament the grease stain that had mysteriously appeared on his shorts earlier that morning.
Bennet responded by calling attention to the tattered place on his own trousers where he repeatedly has had to sew up a pesky hole.
“I don’t have grease on my pants, but I’ve got issues, for sure,” said the 40-year-old chief of staff for Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. Bennet is seeking a $200,000-a-year appointment as the district’s next superintendent.
The lawyer-cum-corporate turnaround expert-cum-city manager approached his 12-hour series of community interviews with the mix of confidence and self-deprecation that strikes most people who meet him.
Lacking even a day’s experience as a teacher or school administrator, he highlighted his successes uniting feuding debtors to merge bankrupt companies and prodding reluctant labor unions to accept reforms to how city workers are paid.
“I’m intimidated about a lot about this job, but the fact that I don’t have K-12 experience is not one of those … reasons,” he told reporters. “This is about implementation through difficult human relationships.”
Throughout the day, the man whom former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb described as a “boy genius” walked the delicate line between acknowledging the vast amount he has to learn about public education and arguing that he’s the city’s best hope for raising test scores, lowering the dropout rate and eliminating affluence as a predictor of student achievement.
The only male and the only white candidate of three finalists, Bennet played down the importance of race in leading the minority-majority district, saying, “Students will care far less what color the superintendent is than who their teacher and principal (are).”
He spoke throughout the day about the district’s “collapse of expectations” – citing as an example a teacher who didn’t feel she had the authority to force students to turn off their cellphones in her classroom.
To overcome that sense of frustration, Bennet outlined a three-point plan in which he wants DPS to:
Get parents and community members involved in mapping ways to create more “safe and orderly environments” where students can learn;
Ensure that the district’s faculty works constantly to improve its teaching skills and track students’ progress;
Train principals as instructional leaders and reverse the pattern of nearly 100 percent principal turnover in the past four years.
“People leave because they’re frustrated. They come here to make a difference, and they don’t think they’re making a difference,” he said, scribbling crude lines on a legal pad to illustrate what he calls the “thicket” of bureaucracy and disappointment he hopes someday to erase.
“We’re not going to be timid in our ambitions here,” he continued. “We need to get people to believe that we’re working on an enterprise different than anywhere else in the nation.”
