Go to the mobile version of this Web site.

Login | Contact Us | Site Map | Paid archives | Electronic edition | Subscription Questions | Extras

Home › News › Education

Nontraditional achiever

Bennet in running for Cabinet after just 3 years at DPS

By Nancy Mitchell, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 12, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

Text size  
Denver Public Schools superintendent Michael Bennet will be named Saturday as the future U.S. Senate replacement for Interior Secretary nominee Ken Salazar.

Photo by Chris Schneider / The Rocky/2007

Denver Public Schools superintendent Michael Bennet will be named Saturday as the future U.S. Senate replacement for Interior Secretary nominee Ken Salazar.

Related Stories

More Education

More stories »

Map my news

Michael Bennet's name often is followed by the phrase "the smartest guy in the room," but it is doubtful even he could have predicted his current status as a contender for the job of U.S. secretary of education.

Three years ago, Bennet, 44, sought the job running Denver Public Schools as a "nontraditional" candidate, which means he admitted he had never spent a day in a school as a teacher or a principal.

He was, instead, an Ivy League-trained lawyer who became a corporate turnaround expert for billionaire Phil Anschutz who then gave up a lucrative salary to become chief of staff for Mayor John Hickenlooper.

"I'm more interested in outcome than theory," he said in June 2005, when, in a community meeting to assess his potential as DPS superintendent, he admitted he had never heard of Core Knowledge, one of the nation's most popular academic programs.

Bennet will not discuss the possibility of being named to the federal education job. But interviews with others in Denver and elsewhere suggest he's drawn the attention of Barack Obama because of a unique mix of accomplishment, pragmatism — and timing.

Bennet's chief rival for the job appears to be Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Arne Duncan, who employs a similar roll-up-your-sleeves approach to tough education issues.

But the Chicago connection is troublesome for a president- elect seeking to distance himself from the Windy City's political mafia, particularly in light of Tuesday's arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Political junkie

Bennet is a political junkie who reveled in this election year's ups and downs.

It's unclear when he first became enamored with Obama, but by late spring Bennet was among the advisers talking education to the candidate or his team in regular Sunday conference calls.

"The president-elect is in a wonderful position to give everybody who cares about education reform ... permission to think about our work differently," Bennet told the Rocky last month.

"I think that's tremendous because I don't happen to believe, even though I'm a Democrat, that there's a partisan answer to fixing this nation's schools," he added. "Making significant progress is going to mean that everybody needs to put down their arms and work together."

It's that desire to forge compromise, which Bennet has repeatedly executed for the city and for DPS, that makes him an attractive candidate, said Joe Williams, director of the New York-based Democrats for Education Reform.

Democrats are united in their desire to reform education, he explained, but divided in how fast that change should come.

Washington, D.C., Schools Chief Michelle Rhee, who has closed 21 schools and dismissed 270 teachers since June 2007, is the leading symbol of the "disrupters" camp, Williams said, or those who want change now.

On the other side are the "incrementalists," such as Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University professor and Obama adviser seen as more traditional and union friendly in her ideas.

"(Bennet) is seen as someone who can inch closer to the disrupters' side but in a way you can work with people on the incremental side," Williams said. "People on either extreme are not likely to move things very far."

Communication criticized

During Bennet's tenure, DPS students have made historic gains on state tests, and enrollment in the urban district is at its highest point since 1976.

Yet national attention on DPS focuses mostly on ProComp, an innovative merit pay plan for teachers that Bennet inherited in 2005. He helped pass a city tax to fund it, and he was instrumental in boosting its emphasis on performance incentives.

But Bennet is not necessarily seen as an original thinker in education. He freely admits the district reform plan is a compilation of the best ideas in education from across the country. He's also known for carefully studying the reforms of other urban districts — Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh — to avoid their missteps. That hasn't always worked.

Ricky Escobedo, now a college freshman, angrily criticized Bennet over the closure of Manual High School in 2006. Escobedo and his classmates were sent out of their neighborhood to schools across the city.

"Looking back at it now, I do thank him and I do see why he decided to close down Manual," he said.

But, "I do think he can improve his communication," Escobedo said, voicing perhaps the most common complaint about Bennet. "That is an area he needs to work on, sharing with the community what his plans are, how he plans to achieve his goals and get more people involved."

Bennet's hands-on approach to schools might seem an odd fit for the role of federal education czar, which has been somewhat symbolic. But Obama's education platform suggests he wants a more active secretary.

So does Roy Romer, the former Colorado governor and Los Angeles schools superintendent, who has met repeatedly with Obama. He believes the country needs a national strategy in improving its schools, from common standards and testing to national teacher academies.

"We need new forms of partnerships between the federal and state governments on education," Romer said. "I think there is a solution where people do not lose control of local schools ... but the nation has a much more coherent strategy."

Comments

  • December 14, 2008

    11:44 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    professor01 writes:

    Having a non-educator run the US Dept of Ed is not as smart as a fifth grader. What other top profession would allow someone from outside that profession to be its top official? What signal would it send to educators by having him, no matter how smart he alleged is, as DOEd secretary? That there's no "real" educator who's best qualified for the job? There are numerous well-qualified educators at local, state, and federal educational positions. Tap one of them.