Upon learning of his appointment to lead Denver Public Schools, Michael Bennet picked up his cellphone Monday morning to spread the news.
His first call wasn’t to his current boss, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. Nor to his dad, president of Wesleyan University. Nor even to his wife.
Instead, Bennet dialed up Brad Jupp, the teachers union leader who is pushing a controversial plan to tie teachers’ pay to success rather than to years served in the classroom.
“It made me a lot more interested in applying for the job,” said Bennet, Hickenlooper’s chief of staff who, with not even a day’s experience as a teacher, beat out two veteran educators to lead the district.
Pro-Comp, as the pay-for-performance plan is known, tops Bennet’s short-term to-do list as superintendent. Denver teachers narrowly approved the ambitious system last year, and a $25 million mill levy to fund it is up for voter approval in November.
Bennet, who was instrumental in passing the city’s $378 million justice center bond issue in May, aims in the coming month to launch a campaign pushing the mill levy.
The proposal jibes with his longer-term agenda to provide unprecedented training and coaching programs for the city’s teachers and principals.
“It recognizes teachers’ willingness to work in schools with special challenges, to master their skills and to tie their performance to student achievement,” he said during an interview Monday. “It’s evidence that people in Denver who are inside the system have an appetite to make it better.”
Bennet was trained as a lawyer but gave up law practice to invest money for Denver businessman Philip Anschutz, agreeing to put himself through night school to learn business skills as basic as reading a balance sheet.
Likewise, he has studied up on educational issues, concluding that “there’s no mystery to making schools better.”
The solution, he says, entails better staff training and a commitment to more safe and orderly schools.
“What has eluded urban districts, including Denver, is to create those conditions at scale,” he said. “It seems to me the way you do that is to reach consensus that those are the essential elements and vigorously attack the systemic impediments that are frustrating our abilities to create those conditions.”
Specifically, his short-term plans include:
Developing over the next six months a “coherent strategic plan” for the district that reflects a consensus among parents, teachers and community groups;
Creating a “leadership team” of professionals from both in and outside the district;
Meeting personally with each of the district’s principals every two and a half weeks, and providing them with training as instructional leaders, not just as administrators;
Setting a standard for truancy rates and a communitywide plan to prevent students from skipping school.
“Response will involve the district, the city’s Human Services Department, Denver Housing, nonprofits and community activists,” he said. “It’s not acceptable that an answer is a child can’t come to school because they have to care for a younger sibling at home.”
Bennet aims to keep the literacy program started by his predecessor, Jerry Wartgow. He recognizes the increasing demand for International Baccalaureate programs, hoping to spread them more widely throughout the district. He supports charter schools “when they fulfill a gap that, for whatever reason, the school district can’t provide.”
And he downplays the effectiveness of publicly subsidized private schooling in bettering the lives of Denver’s kids.
“We’ve got 73,000 kids that we need to educate in this district. It doesn’t seem to me that vouchers is a way to reach a substantial number of them,” he said.
