Colorado took the first step Wednesday toward creating a system to track teachers, with the goal of one day matching the most experienced, effective educators with the students who need them most.
Gov. Bill Ritter signed a law setting up a commission of teachers, parents and education experts to develop a statewide “teacher-identifier system.”
The system will keep track of teachers’ college education, the number of years they stay at each job and possibly even how well their students do on statewide exams.
The primary purpose is to shrink the so-called teacher gap – that the best educators in Colorado are more likely to teach in affluent, white school districts and less likely to work with minorities and poor children.
Teachers have some fears about the new system, mostly whether principals could use it to punish or fire them. Many of their concerns center on tying student test scores to each teacher’s unique identification number.
The legislation signed into law Wednesday says the system cannot be punitive.
A recent study by the Alliance for Quality Teaching, which pushed for the new law, showed novice teachers make up 27 percent of educators in districts with the highest number of minority students, yet only 17 percent of teachers in mostly white schools. And that gap is widening.
“The teacher is the single most important factor in a child’s education,” said Jacqueline Paone, executive director of the alliance. “The goal is to find out what it is that we need to do to ensure that there is a quality teacher in every child’s classroom.”
Colorado has no way now of keeping up with teachers after they leave college. But superintendents in rural and poor school districts across the state complain that new teachers often use them as training grounds, then move on to richer districts.
With the new system, the state could use incentive pay to entice the best, most-experienced teachers to stick it out in districts with low-performing students.
“We know that there are teaching jobs that are more intense than others,” said Rep. Debbie Benefield, D-Arvada, who sponsored the bill with Sen. Nancy Spence, R-Centennial. “Are we adequately funding that type of a teacher? There is a reality of human burn-out.”
Many teachers move to suburban, affluent districts because “the kids are easier to teach” and “the families are easier to work with,” said Lynn K. Rhodes, dean of the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Colorado at Denver.
“You feel better when kids are learning right before your eyes,” she said. “It’s harder when you have to work on it for a while.”
Colorado also could use the data to determine which teacher- education programs are putting out the best teachers.
The state could analyze how teachers with degrees from the University of Northern Colorado stack up against those from Metropolitan State College of Denver, for example.
But “that’s a dangerous little path to go down,” Rhodes said. “The program does some of it, but it’s who they are, too.”
Ann Franco, who teaches first- and second-graders at Del Pueblo Elementary School in Denver, wants the state to use the data to pair new teachers with experienced ones in a peer-mentoring program.
“I see teachers coming into the Denver Public Schools and leaving before their fifth year,” said Franco, who has taught for 17 years.
The tracking system should not set districts up to fight over teachers, said Kelly Hupfeld, a parent and an education-policy analyst. Instead, people should take a broader view, she said.
“If my child is in a classroom with this excellent teacher, then I don’t want to change anything,” she said. “But if I look at it districtwide or statewide, changes have to happen. We can’t just keep doing what we’re doing.”
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-954-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
