There’s a legend in the Denver teachers union about Brad Jupp, the negotiator who zealously led the last strike against the district.
As the story goes, the middle- school English teacher, triumphant after the 1994 five-day walkout, stood before his colleagues and took an oath of administrative abstinence.
“Brad was a leader who people followed. He pledged he would never go to the dark side,” says Denver Classroom Teachers Association president Kim Ursetta. “Now what people say is that Brad bailed on us and lost touch with his roots.”
Union bitterness has run deep since 2005 when Jupp went to work as policy adviser to Superintendent Michael Bennet. Longtime friends called him a turncoat, banning him even from their book club.
Their invectives grew louder this week when Jupp pulled off a win over labor leaders who opposed a contract ending the union-negotiated salary system that perpetually increased earnings, even for bad teachers.
The district has persuaded more than 77 percent of DCTA’s voting members to revise ProComp, its pay system, by rewarding teachers for boosting student achievement. Now the city’s best — not just longest- serving — teachers are eligible for unprecedented 15 percent increases.
“Brad’s the intellect behind ProComp,” Bennet says. “Anyone who thinks Brad Jupp is doing what he’s doing because I’m telling him to do it doesn’t know Brad Jupp.”
Jupp, 49, left a Ph.D. program in the 1980s to help city kids learn to read. From the start, he noticed a disconnect between the academy and his classroom.
“I remember Brad raising his hand in a teaching course at (the University of Colorado), mentioning the Crips he was student-teaching. The professor admonished him, saying, ‘You can’t talk about the disabled that way,’ ” recalls friend Phil Gonring of the Rose Community Foundation.
Jupp worked from 1990 to 2001 leading the union’s contract negotiations. His hard-knuckle style once prompted Superintendent Evie Dennis to poke her umbrella at his chest and threaten, “I’m gonna get you, young man.”
He started questioning his loyalties after joining a team experimenting with performance pay, an approach he at first thought wouldn’t work. After shepherding the pilot project for six years, he grew critical of a labor movement he says values contract rules more than “the efficacy of teaching.” He ultimately accused DCTA leaders of “apologizing for their worst performers” and being on the wrong side of history.
Organizers, in turn, slam Jupp for dropping quotes from Michel Foucault and Flavor Flav in meetings, for being too smart and for tinkering with a pay plan that’s only 3 years old.
“He can be patronizing, even demeaning,” says Ursetta, who threatened a strike during last month’s Democratic convention, then managed to sour only 22 percent of her members against ProComp reform.
Much to Ursetta’s consternation, the rank and file have continued to follow Jupp even as he moved to what she deems “the dark side.” The 3-year contract shows that Denver teachers — if not their union — aren’t afraid of accountability.
If there’s a face behind education reform, Jupp’s is it.
While union brass deem him a sellout, it is they who have lost touch by framing education in terms of light and dark rather than student learning.
The evolution of Brad Jupp is not, as organizers will tell you, one of broken promises. Rather, it’s a covenant with good teachers that there is value in their work and that their first cause should simply be to teach.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
