Will charter/district hiring divide foment change?
Monday, March 3, 2008Written by: Uncle Charley
The latest in Nancy Mitchell’s Rocky Mountain News series exploring student departures from DPS caught my eye this morning. It begins:
Some principals in Denver Public Schools say they’re losing the spring race for top teachers because charter schools and schools granted autonomy don’t have to follow the same state, district and union rules for staffing.
Diane Kenealy interviewed for a teaching job at West Denver Preparatory Charter School on Jan. 9, received a job offer within 24 hours and accepted the position three days later.
Compare that rapid hiring to this spring’s staffing calendar in traditional Denver Public Schools, which dictates principals can’t schedule interviews with teaching candidates until the middle of March.
Even then, they can only talk to candidates already working in a city school.
The successful competitive pressures created by open enrollment and charter schools in Colorado have been multiplied by the internal push for school autonomy from Bruce Randolph, Manual, and others. And as the cracks continue to open wider, it’s going to be nearly impossible to reassemble the edifice as it once was.
What do we see happening? Individual teachers gaining a little more leverage in the marketplace. As usual, teachers union guru Mike Antonucci has a nose for the irony:
Schools fighting for the best teachers? How can this be bad? Leave it to Kim Ursetta, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, to find the dark cloud behind the silver lining.
She told the Rocky Mountain News that some teachers will interview from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. before school, work a full day and then interview after school until 10 p.m.
“It’s very hard to have a quality interview with such tight timelines,” Ursetta said.
Whose convenience is being looked out for here? What if a current DPS teacher can’t use one of her 4 annual personal leave days, and in the worst case has to go through the admittedly grueling schedule Ursetta portrays? Won’t good teachers (whether or not they currently are employed in the system) still benefit from a more open marketplace? And won’t students, especially those in disadvantaged situations, benefit from having a good teacher?
It may be too early to overreact with excitement, but we may be witnessing something transformative happening to the face of education in Denver. How far it someday will extend, no one knows yet.
