As per a recent article by Chalkbeat Colorado, “Denver Public Schools [is] Set to Strip Nearly 50 Teachers of Tenure Protections after [two-years of consecutive] Poor Evaluations.” This will make Denver Public Schools — Colorado’s largest school district — the district with the highest relative proportion of teachers to lose tenure, which demotes teachers to probationary status, which also causes them to lose their due process rights.
- The majority of the 47 teachers — 26 of them — are white. Another 14 are Latino, four are African-American, two are multi-racial and one is Asian.
- Thirty-one of the 47 teachers set to lose tenure — or 66 percent — teach in “green” or “blue” schools, the two highest ratings on Denver’s color-coded School Performance Framework. Only three — or 6 percent — teach in “red” schools, the lowest rating.
- Thirty-eight of the 47 teachers — or 81 percent — teach at schools where more than half of the students qualify for federally subsidized lunches, an indicator of poverty.
Elsewhere, in Douglas County 24, in Aurora 12, in Cherry Creek one, and in Jefferson County, the state’s second largest district, zero teachers teachers are set to lose their tenure status. This all occurred provided a sweeping educator effectiveness law — Senate Bill 191 — passed throughout Colorado six years ago. As per this law, “at least 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation [must] be based on student academic growth.”
“Because this is the first year teachers can lose that status…[however]…officials said it’s difficult to know why the numbers differ from district to district.” This, of course, is an issue with fairness whereby a court, for example, could find that if a teacher is teaching in District X versus District Y, and (s)he had an different probability of losing tenure due only to the District in which (s)he taught, this could be quite easily argued as an arbitrary component of the law, not to mention an arbitrary component of its implementation. If I was advising these districts on these matters, I would certainly advise them to tread lightly.
However, apparently many districts throughout Colorado use a state-developed and endorsed model to evaluate their teachers, but Denver uses its own model; hence, this would likely take some of the pressure off of the state, should this end up in court, and place it more so upon the district. That is, the burden of proof would likely rest on Denver Public School officials to evidence that they are no only complying with the state law but that they are doing so in sound, evidence-based, and rational/reasonable ways.
Citation: Amar, M. (2016, July 15). Denver Public Schools set to strip nearly 50 teachers of tenure protections after poor evaluations. Chalkbeat Colorado. Retrieved from http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/co/2016/07/14/denver-public-schools-set-to-strip-nearly-50-teachers-of-tenure-protections-after-poor-evaluations/#.V5Yryq47Tof
