You can’t help but admire a public school principal who speaks this bluntly about tenure: Teachers should enjoy “the same job protection I have,” Shannon Hagerman declares. “Do your job, and you’ll keep your job.”
The Montclair Elementary principal was discussing a proposal before the Denver school board next week to liberate that east Denver school from a host of laws and regulations governing hiring and firing, among other things.
Denver’s Manual High School is seeking similar freedom — which the state Board of Education also will need to approve under the Innovation Schools Act of 2008.
Not that tenure is about to be abolished at either school. Only future hires would work from year to year with no guarantee of future employment. Yet that alone is a huge deal. Remarkably, Montclair’s existing teachers supported their school’s “innovation” application by 22 to 2, Hagerman told me.
“Teachers want to know that the person in the classroom next door is working as hard as they are,” she said.
Rob Stein, Manual’s principal, is similarly eager to shake off the state’s regulatory fetters.
Although the proposals would release the schools from a broad range of rules that also cover curriculum, instructional models, school calendars and budgeting, it’s worth dwelling on tenure because it amounts to an absurd job protection racket for marginal teachers. Tenure doesn’t merely provide normal “due process” for employees on the chopping block, as the teachers union would have you believe. It creates a snake-infested obstacle course into which only brave or desperate principals venture — those who don’t mind months or years of costly hearings and appeals.
Doubt it? Check out the chart “How Do I Dismiss an Unsatisfactory Teacher?” at the website of Common Good Colorado, a group “dedicated to restoring common sense to America.” It follows the course of an actual case in which a district “spent 27 months and $87,360 . . . to accomplish one simple task — dismiss an unsatisfactory employee.”
Montclair and Manual are trying to create a culture of responsibility for academic outcomes. And that starts with a corps of teachers who know they’re good enough to survive on the basis of their performance.
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Electronic voting machines are so unreliable, it seems, that only the disabled should have to use them.
No one would actually say such a thing, of course, but that’s the logic of a recent report from the state’s Election Reform Commission.
According to the commission, e-voting should be banned after 2014. And never mind that those same allegedly suspect machines will be available to the disabled because federal law requires it.
Nancy A. Doty, Arapahoe County clerk and recorder, noted this absurdity in a protest letter she sent the commission. “If direct electronic equipment is good enough for our disabled voters,” she wondered, “why is it not good enough for all voters? Does the committee recommend the federal law — Help America Voting Act — be repealed because this equipment is unreliable?”
Doty contends that “there has not been one documented case of successful (or unsuccessful!) tampering with an electronic voting system during an actual election.” Even if that weren’t the case, paper ballots have been plagued with far more visible problems — with Florida in 2000 being the most memorable.
Fortunately, not everyone at the Capitol is ready to board the paper-ballot express, the most notable skeptic being House Speaker Terrance Carroll, D-Denver. So maybe there’s still hope for Coloradans who want to vote on a touch-screen machine with a paper trail.
Those of us, that is, who actually like the 21st century.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
