Denver Schools Chief in Line to Complete Senator’s Term
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By KIRK JOHNSON
The New York Times
January 3, 2009
DENVER — The superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, Michael F. Bennet, a lawyer and prominent Colorado Democrat, will be appointed to fill the United States Senate seat being vacated by Ken Salazar, senior Democratic Party members said Friday.
Mr. Salazar was chosen last month to be secretary of the interior in the administration of President-elect Barack Obama, setting off a scramble to fill the remaining two years of Mr. Salazar’s term.
Mr. Bennet will be formally designated on Saturday by Gov. Bill Ritter Jr., Democrats said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because Mr. Ritter has not officially announced his decision. Mr. Bennet’s selection was reported Friday in The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News.
Mr. Bennet, 44, was born in India, where his father, Douglas Bennet, a diplomat, was stationed. He was raised mostly in Washington and will return there with a diverse résumé and a reputation in Colorado as a soft-spoken, analytical thinker who is not afraid to take on jobs that promised mostly headaches — specifically running the troubled Denver school system.
He took the job in 2005 after three years as chief of staff to Mayor John Hickenlooper of Denver. With no formal experience in education administration, Mr. Bennet was following a long-established pattern, according to people who have worked with him over the years: the willingness to leap into unfamiliar waters.
He arrived at Denver City Hall in 2003, for example, after six years as a managing director for an investment firm in Denver, and before that, he had served as counsel to the deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration.
He graduated with a history degree from Wesleyan University in Connecticut — which his father led as president from 1995 to 2007 — before getting his law degree at Yale. His wife, Susan Diane Daggett, who also got her law degree from Yale, has worked as an environmental lawyer. James Bennet, his brother, is a former reporter for The New York Times and is now editor of The Atlantic magazine.
From the start as schools superintendent, Mr. Bennet did not behave like a traditional educator. He liked to ride the bus with students on the first day of class and made it a point to be the public face of the district in public meetings with parents over some of its most wrenching decisions, like school closings. But he also came armed with a weighty Rolodex full of highly placed friends to personally lobby city officials, state legislators and others for what the Denver schools needed.
“Having a fresh set of eyes for the issues D.P.S. faced, but also being able to call the right people and get the right people involved — both were very important to his success,” said the Speaker-elect of the Colorado House of Representatives, Terrance D. Carroll, a Democrat whose district is in Denver.
Under Mr. Bennet, Denver pursued consolidation — closing some underperforming, under-populated schools — and merit-pay incentives for teachers. He overhauled the grading system to provide more information about students’ strengths or weaknesses. Student performance on standardized tests improved. Last July, for example, Denver posted the biggest increases in math and reading proficiency among the state’s largest districts.
And while Mr. Bennet sometimes clashed with the local teachers’ union, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, its president, Kim Ursetta, said his door was also always open.
“We’ve had our disagreements,” Ms. Ursetta said, “but he was always willing to talk and always accessible.”
Mr. Bennet did not respond to an interview request. And many other politicians in Colorado were hesitant to speak until Mr. Ritter’s announcement on Saturday.
“We will respect his timeline,” Mr. Hickenlooper said in a statement.
A former communications director for Denver Public Schools, Alejandra Garza de Gutierrez, described Mr. Bennet’s style as deliberate and self-effacing.
“Michael isn’t one to talk in vain — he doesn’t say things just to say things or because he likes the sound of his own voice,” Ms. de Gutierrez said.
But Mr. Bennet’s sharply reasoned decisions sometimes left him vulnerable to feeling misunderstood.
“Michael would take something and say, ‘We need to fix that, and it’s logical,’ and then be surprised by the reaction,” Ms. de Gutierrez said. “Whenever people didn’t receive ideas as warmly as we would have liked, he was a little hurt.”
-Dan Frosch contributed reporting.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company |
