Boom market for teachers in Denver

Next thing you know, it won’t just be the skilled workforce in the private sector. Soon, the teachers will be leaving! A crosspost from Mike Antonucci’s Education Intercepts:

The autonomy movement in Denver is leading to a strange phenomenon: a boom market for quality teachers:

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.

A DPS principal who wants to talk to a college senior such as Kenealy, who spends her summers teaching poor children in Denver, has to wait another full month, until mid-April.

Kristin Waters, principal of Bruce Randolph School, the first of the autonomy schools, called the hiring process “a mad rush.”

“It’s very fast,” she said. “Everybody is kind of jockeying for the same candidates . . . and they get lots of offers, and you have to try to convince them why you are the best place to come.”

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.