Asking school board members to avoid superintendent meetings

The mere suggestion that Wake
County might consider someone
other than a public school lifer
to become the next superintendent of
the state’s largest school district has
given the education establishment the
vapors.
School board member Debra
Goldman has said the district should
look at outside candidates to succeed
Del Burns. Way outside — including
successful business leaders and retired
military officers. The board’s fivemember
conservative majority also
voted to end a policy requiring the
superintendent to have at least three
years’ experience over the past decade
in public education.
Local mainstream editorial
boards have fretted that an outsider
would lack “valuable” experience, because,
after all, the school “workforce
is motivated not by earning potential
or stock options but by trying to educate
young people.”
But by following the rote formula
of hiring public education veterans
to oversee Wake County schools, the
district hasn’t been educating young
people very well. So why not try
something else?
In recent decades, it’s hard to
find an underperforming urban school
district that has turned around unless
it brought in a nontraditional leader.
Innovators whose careers were made
outside the classroom or the district
office — and whose approaches were
not stifled by the platitudes of pedagogy
— have written a series of success
stories.
Some high-profile reforms were
supervised by:
• Joel Klein, New York City Public
Schools chancellor: federal antitrust
prosecutor.
• Roy Romer, head of the Los
Angeles Unified School District, 2001-
06: three-term governor of Colorado,
state treasurer, state lawmaker, and
owner of John Deere equipment
stores.
• Michael Bennet, former superintendent
of Denver Public Schools
(and now a Colorado U.S. senator):
investment banker and chief of staff
for the city’s mayor.
• Tom Boasberg, Bennet’s successor
in Denver: global mergers-andacquisitions
specialist, attorney with
the Federal Communications Commission,
and chief financial officer at
Denver Public Schools.
• Michelle Rhee, chancellor
of public schools in the District of
Columbia: three-year veteran of the
Teach for America program, which
brings teachers who don’t have traditional
education degrees to innercity
schools, and founder of the New
Teacher Project, a nonprofit operating
in 20 states that recruits teachers for
low-income schools.
• Arne Duncan, U.S. education
secretary and former CEO of Chicago’s
public schools: professional
basketball player in Australia and
operator of a Chicago charter school.
They’re all Democrats, by the
way.
These school chiefs may have
followed unusual career paths. But
they used their passion for education
— along with their talents — to blow
past bureaucracies and unions and
put students and parents first.
And make no mistake: The longer
Wake County and North Carolina
decision makers refuse to look outside
the school establishment for leadership,
the more kids’ education will
suffer. CJ