In her first teaching job out of college, Griselda Canas taught for three-and-a-half years at a west-side elementary public school. Canas, who has a master's degree in curriculum and instruction and a bilingual certification, got fired by Chicago Public Schools from her job last August—about a month before she would have received the protection of tenure. Since then, she's learned that she'd been secretly blacklisted: She can never teach in a Chicago public school again.

CPS has evidently created a policy for blacklisting untenured teachers—but hasn't announced it to the teachers its blacklisted, even if they're still applying for CPS teaching jobs.

It works like this: New, "probationary" teachers must teach at a school for three years before they can become tenured, at which point they get protection of the Chicago Teachers Union contract. Before the end of each school year in which they teach, their principal must officially renew—or not renew—them for the following year.

According to CPS spokeswoman Monique Bond, if a probationary teacher isn't renewed at the end of their three-year probation, CPS blacklists them: It marks their record as "do not hire" (DNH).

Basically [you're] now blacklisted . . .You can never work for Chicago Public Schools ever again. It's unbelievable . . . we're finding this across the spectrum of teachers—not just new teachers.

The DNH policy isn't written anywhere that union officials can find, including their contract. But Canas, who was not renewed at the end of her third year at Lloyd Elementary near Grand and Cicero, has had DNH applied to her—and had it confirmed by CPS's head of employee relations, Cheryl Colston.

Canas feels that dismissed teachers are knocking themselves out, applying for CPS teaching jobs, not knowing that the whole time that it's futile.

"You know how many people are looking for jobs as teachers?" says Canas. "I have friends looking for work and they haven't been hired anywhere." What they don't know is that CPS might have secretly classified as them as DNH.

As Canas found out from her own job search. "Before the last day of school, I had [found] a job—a job that I earned," she says. Canas tells how her prospective school's principal came to her classroom at Lloyd to observe her. The school offered Canas a job and she accepted. When, however, the school's administration had trouble processing her hire, Canas was told she'd have to straighten it out with CPS's human resources department.

After getting "transferred around a lot," Canas said she finally ended up with a staffer in CPS's employee relations section. It was only then—after she and the new school's staff had invested dozens of hours placing her in a new job—that she learned that no CPS school could hire her.

To make matters worse, Canas got conflicting information about the point at which CPS foists DNH upon a probationary teacher. In an e-mail she got from CPS's Colston, Colston wrote, "You were non-renewed twice therefore a DNH was placed on your file."

From this, Canas inferred that CPS has a policy of inflicting DNH status only on probationary teachers who didn't get renewed twice—not just once. If that's true, Canas says, then her DNH resulted from a technicality: In her second year at Lloyd Elementary, the principal told her that CPS required him to declare his renewal decision in May, when he said he "wasn't ready to commit to her." So he marked her in a CPS personnel system as a non-renewal—although, less than a month later, he did renew Canas for a third school year. (The principal did not respond to a request for comment.)

"To me," says Canas, "if he reinstated me, that first non-renewal should not have counted." She says that when she went in person to plead her case with CPS employee relations, "they said I could not do anything—that CPS was sticking to their decisions regarding the 'do not hires'."

Canas's take on CPS's not-renewed-twice DNH policy is corroborated in an e-mail message that we acquired from an organization called Chicago Teaching Fellows. (CTF takes people with established careers and helps them become certified teachers, bypassing university-based education programs.) The 9/3/10 e-mail bulletin, apparently sent by CTF to its fellows, is titled "Recent Updates with CPS." It says, in part, "Effective this summer, any teacher that is non-renewed twice will be ineligible for rehire in CPS indefinitely."

Tenured teachers have been similarly surprised by DNH on their records.

In the Sept. 23, 2010 article in the Chicago Reader that I wrote with Ben Joravsky, we described how Megan Ruthaivilavan was dismissed after teaching social studies for seven years at Peace and Education Coalition Alternative High School. Ruthaivilavan says the principal told her that her position had been eliminated. Later, she says, the school hired Ruthaivilavan's replacement into the same position.

Ruthaivilavan applied unsuccessfully for a half-dozen other CPS teaching jobs. Then, thanks to a friendly principal at another school who checked, she learned that her record had a "DNH" classification. The DNH resulted, according to the principal's search, because Ruthaivilavan's record showed that she'd received an unsatisfactory rating.

It's a lie, she says. In fact, Ruthaivilavan's had only two evaluations since getting hired, and both times received a "superior" rating—the highest that a CPS teacher can get.

Ruthaivilavan has since asked for, and received, confirmation from CPS employee relations that her record doesn't have the DNH mark.

But she remains skeptical. And she's angered by what she calls this "separate, secret system" of personnel records that CPS apparently has. "If a DNH flag system exists and your record's been manipulated, you're not gonna get that call" saying you're hired. "You keep on applying but you don't know you're on this list."

To add insult to injury, Ruthaivilavan found another discrepancy in her record: She obtained a printout from a principals-only, on-line CPS personnel system showing that she has two years of service rather than her actual seven. In a school system arguably replacing long-time teachers with cheaper, less experienced (and untenured) ones, it's hard to fathom why someone would alter Ruthaivilavan's record in this way.

In our Sept. 23 Reader article we also reported that the DNH classification has been lurking around CPS for a while, according to John Kugler, a member services coordinator with the Chicago Teachers Union.

"We've known it's been around for years," says Kugler. "The 'do not hire' was for people who were removed for cause. Basically, there were people who were charged with criminal offenses such as drugs, sexual contact with kids, or theft . . . something very egregious." In these cases, Kugler says, CPS would act to have the state revoke the teachers' teaching certification.

"If you do something wrong that hurts kids, or damages the school environment, then you shouldn't be working there," says Kugler. "That's the perception of everybody in the system . . . we all agree on that."

Though the union's contract with the Board of Education makes no mention of the DNH list, Kugler says "we knew there was this list, [though] we never had this list." But he questions the need for it.

"If your certification is stripped [by] the state, or you have a criminal record," he says, "then you would already be banned from teaching in the school district by its own board policies and rules."

Kugler says the union currently has evidence from about half a dozen teachers of their DNH classification. He says the union has requested that CPS provide a complete list of teachers classified as DNH; so far, CPS hasn't responded.

"One of the more troubling things," Kugler says, "is that new teachers are getting this classification" because of non-renewals, as in the case of Griselda Canas.

Imagine Kugler says, that you're "twenty-five, twenty-six years old, just went through school, just got certified, and basically [you're] now blacklisted . . .You can never work for Chicago Public Schools ever again. It's unbelievable." And, says Kugler, "we're finding this across the spectrum of teachers—not just new teachers."

Kugler says the DNH designation has the potential for ruining a teacher's career beyond Chicago. A question that appears on most district applications, he says, is "Can you still work in [your former] district? Why did you leave? So you'd have to say on there that you're on the 'do not hire' list . . . so you'll probably never get a job in another district."

Why would CPS have such a secret designation? First, Kugler says, "to instill fear in teachers—that we can do this to you, so you should all behave . . . don't rock the boat.

"Second, to get rid of some teachers and put other people in." Kugler believes that CPS has resorted to DNH because the union has busted the myth that the district is strapped for cash. "We've shown that there is no budget crisis," he says, "so now they have to develop a different system to get rid of tenured teachers . . . so they can't come back."

The whole dismissal scheme, says Griselda Canas, "gives the public the impression that we're bad teachers. We got fired 'cause we must have done something." It's like, she says, CPS is "putting us in the same boat as child molesters."