We welcome Sidney “Chip” Zullinger to his new role as superintendent of Denver Public Schools.

Although we regret Zullinger’s lack of experience in bilingual education and urban districts, he is the very best of the four finalists considered. We’re glad to get him.

Zullinger has been in limbo this year, after being put on paid leave by the school board in Charleston, S.C. The board disliked his push for a “bottom-up” school hierarchy, which gave individual schools autonomy to work out their problems and forge their missions.

Their loss, our gain.

The educational philosophy of giving principals and teachers some authority to accompany their responsibility is one we applaud. Endowing schools with the freedom to plot their own paths would be a welcome change in Denver, where a thicket of bureaucracy long has thwarted schools’ efforts to improve.

Zullinger hasn’t any experience in bilingual education, and about 19 percent of our students speak primarily Spanish, posing a serious challenge for the new superintendent. However, with hard work, an ability to listen and a single-minded devotion to educating all children, that challenge should not be insurmountable.

Regarding bilingual education, Zullinger recently said at a public forum: “We need to examine where the best success stories are. It is important to have rigorous programs that quickly provide English proficiency so they can move into the system. What is good for the most affluent child must be good for the most disenfranchised.”

He also gave a novel response to the age-old question of how to reduce the dropout rate, saying the schools need to lose money whenever a child leaves.

“Within the system are teachers more than willing to teach the most difficult students,” Zullinger noted. “The challenge is to match them up.”

Zullinger may not have the full host of credentials we would have sought in a new superintendent, but he surely has paid his dues. He worked three years in Charleston, six years in Casper, Wyo., and has been superintendent of two little districts in North Carolina.

Zullinger doesn’t fear change, innovation or rocking the boat. That strikes us as a good quality in a district that clearly needs some rocking.

With his amiable, humorous, open-minded personality, Zullinger should be able to instigate real change and marshal support for Denver Public Schools.

On behalf of our 69,000 students, we wish him great success. — —



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