January 24, 2012 09:18 PM UTC

Teacher Tenure Rules Passing Uncontroversially

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Durango Herald’s Joe Hanel reports:

The unanimous vote for House Bill 1001 in the Legal Services Committee was a stark contrast to two years ago, when a bill to do away with seniority-based job protections for teachers led to a civil war within the Democratic Party.

The bill pitted supporters of teachers unions against Democrats and Republicans who wanted to make it easier to fire ineffective teachers.

But after nearly two years of drafting rules for how to evaluate teachers, different factions appear to have agreed on a fair way to link teacher tenure to student performance.

“It truly is one of those times that everybody is aligned around a common purpose on behalf of our children,” said Diana Sirko, deputy commissioner of the Colorado Department of Education.

We’ve noted several times how the former high drama over the passage of 2010’s Senate Bill 191 teacher tenure reforms, a battle that pitted traditional Democratic allies in education against many fellow Democrats, has shifted to real cooperation as the process moved from passage of the bill to implementation of the new rules. It’s become clearer as the process has moved along that some proponents of SB-191 really didn’t want the teachers to cooperate as they have, because for them, SB-191 was only a baby step toward a much more far-reaching agenda.

This matters because that radical agenda is lurking, and people on both sides of the fight over SB-191 need to understand the difference between that fight and fights yet to come. Because not all education reform is radicalism, and not all reformers are radicals. But some of what we’ll see very soon masked as “reform,” with “reformer” proponents, are indeed…