As school boards in four local school systems — Falls Church, Howard and Fairfax Counties and the District of Columbia — search for new superintendents, they will find it increasingly difficult with a shrinking pool of qualified candidates.
William Attea, managing partner of the search firm Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, told the American Association of School Administrators last year, “We jokingly used to tell [school] boards that it has dwindled from a pool to a puddle, and now we say we’re looking under the rocks for moisture.”
Certainly, increased demands for accountability, divisive politics and budgetary constraints all contribute to disinterest from many who might be qualified. Another factor that is often overlooked: the restrictive definition of “qualified.”
Superintendents, with less than a handful of exceptions, are uniformly those who rose through the ranks from teacher to principal to assistant superintendent to superintendent. The argument is consistently made that only a “qualified educator” is capable of running a school system.
But why? The District of Columbia’s shortcomings fall far beyond simply instruction: disintegrating facilities, disastrous special education transportation, and visible safety and security shortfalls have all contributed to the flight out of D.C.’s traditional public schools.
Meanwhile, in Fairfax County, Va., the superintendent sits atop one of the state’s largest employers (21,300 full-time employees), building operators (241 buildings), food service companies (140,000 customers a day), and transportation systems (nearly 1,500 buses). The job is often described as comparable to chief executive officer of a major corporation. Why not treat it as such?
Creating a team able to execute a large and complex organization in delivering the main “product” — the education of children — doesn’t exclusively require a manager with an education background. It requires a leader with the skills to provide clear objectives and bring all stakeholders together.
To claim only a person immersed in educational pedagogy can run a school system is comparable to claiming only a corporate CEO with a successful track record in one industry can be successful in that industry. It’s a claim demonstrably not true — witness the success of former IBM chief Lou Gerstner, who came to the technology company after years in the decidedly non-high-tech firms of RJR Nabisco and American Express.
So why not look “outside the box?”
“Nontraditional superintendents” have most often been chosen in deeply troubled school systems. Former Microsoft prosecutor Joel Klein is now school superindent in New York City, and former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer is running Los Angeles schools. Both are battling to replicate the turnaround demonstrated in Chicago during the tenure of former school superintendent Paul G. Vallas, once Chicago City budget officer.
Nor, admittedly, have “nontraditional superintendents” always succeeded. While Mr. Romer has driven reading scores upward by instituting a heavy phonics-based instructional program, Mr. Klein’s reading program has come under fire for lacking rigor. Retired U.S. Army Gen. John Stanford was widely credited with turning around the Seattle school system, while his nontraditional successor resigned after the discovery of $35 million in accounting errors.
By and large, however, nontraditional superintendents have been adept at identifying challenging issues and moving large systems toward solutions. And the future in school systems such as Fairfax, Falls Church and Howard County, Md., while different, is no less demanding.
The next superintendents in those places face growing and challenging demographics, budget constraint demands and a need to engage the whole community — not just parents — in confronting those challenges. He or she must appoint leaders with research-based expertise in their areas — academics, transportation, facilities and others.
Private-sector leaders who have successfully dealt with customers who can choose (or not choose) their products, and who have satisfied demanding shareholders, responded to inquisitive boards and appointed superlative leaders may just have the talents and skills needed to take those school systems to the next step in the 21st century. They ought to be added to the mix of potential candidates.
In 1997, the Fairfax County School Board on which I sat cast a sidelong glance at the idea of a corporate CEO as superintendent. But the board found a traditional candidate, Dan Domenech, who combined a pre-No Child Left Behind insistence on data with unparalleled marketing skills.
Since then, the pool of possibilities has become much shallower. And as the school boards of those jurisdictions search for their next system superintendents, they might just want to make certain the pool from which they draw their candidates is as wide and as deep as possible.
CHRIS BRAUNLICH
Mr. Braunlich is vice president of the Springfield, Va.-based Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy and served as the Lee District Representative to the Fairfax County School Board, 1996-2004.
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