Interested in the Supe Selection Process? Tough

Sooner or later seven people whose names you probably don’t know will appoint someone to Southern California’s most important public position. Until then, they will tell you nothing about whom they’re considering to replace soon-to-depart Supt. Roy Romer. And if you don’t like the person the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Board of Education ultimately selects to take charge of the 720,000 students in its care?

Move.

Don’t move to Boston, though, because that school district has its own superintendent problem -- which may or may not have something to do with the fact that the same headhunter is conducting top-secret supe searches for both cities.

Boston’s case is interesting. The district had a full year’s warning that Supt. Thomas Payzant was retiring. Officials had intended to replace him by his June 30 departure. But the process went sideways. A recent Education Week article quotes one person who says the situation is “in limbo” and another who says it’s “in chaos.” No one thinks there will be a new supe before January.

Edward Hamilton, whose firm is recruiting for both Boston and Los Angeles, downplayed his East Coast problems. He blames setbacks not on himself or the search committee or district administrators or the candidates, but rather on the Boston Globe’s naming of five reputed finalists “without the authorization of the search committee.”

Four of the five people mentioned by the Globe instantly wilted in the spotlight and now say they aren’t interested -- and, to show how muddy things can get without the light of public scrutiny, two of those say they never were.

Elizabeth Reilinger, a Boston school board member and chairwoman of the search committee there, echoes almost everyone in the incestuous world of district administration in saying that the clandestine approach is essential for big districts hoping to attract the best candidates.

Why? Because most people belonging to this rarefied breed don’t want the people currently paying them to know they’re looking for better gigs.

Ramon Cortines, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s new education czar, has run a bunch of big school districts, including Los Angeles. “If someone is interested in this job,” he says, “they should really want it and be able to say, ‘Hey, look at me.’ ”

Los Angeles’ school board has a different take. It has decided that massaging job candidates’ delicate sensibilities trumps parents’ and teachers’ and students’ right to information about the selection of a public figure who will have a tremendous impact on their lives.

“The only name that will ever be made public is the name of the person appointed,” Hamilton says.

Will details of the search enter the public record?

“There’s no reason for that,” he says.

Hamilton gets annoyed as our conversation goes into a loop, with me asking how the public is supposed to decide whether he has really turned up 100 or so crackerjack candidates and whether the search committee is winnowing that list down to a wondrous handful without, say, pushing through a board member’s brother-in-law or discriminating against the left-handed. The essence of his repeated response: Trust us.

Bostonians, alas, must be lacking in trust, because officials there have at least given the public the courtesy of trotting out finalists for public scrutiny.

This can be good.

This spring, for instance, news reports pointed out that the search committee’s screeners for Cleveland had overlooked the fact that one of their five finalists, then-Pasadena schools Supt. Percy Clark, had years earlier OD’d on prescription drugs after the disclosure of an affair with an elementary school principal while running an Indiana district. The board was embarrassed.

But there is potential for more serious consequences in choosing someone who’s not up to a superintendent’s job stresses -- as a Cleveland student discovered in 1985 when he entered a high school stairway and found the corpse of a superintendent who’d shot himself after complaining about “petty politics.”

Risks aside, the national trend is toward less transparency in superintendent selection. More districts are taking Los Angeles’ approach and telling people it’s none of their business.

I can see why this exemption from accountability makes board members, headhunters and other inside-the-cult elites happy.

And who can blame these very special type of candidates for acting as if they’re entitled to parasol-wielding bodyguards, given fawning educrats’ eagerness to treat them with the delicacy that pop divas demand.

Look, for instance, at former New York Supt. Rudolph Crew. Even though then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani had fired him, several districts went all out in wooing Crew. Miami finally prevailed in the courtship by offering a contract that sounds as persnickety as those rock-star demands of “No brown M&M;’s in the dressing room.”

In addition to a salary that with all possible bonuses could hit $479,700 for 2006-07, Crew also gets a new car every two years -- it must be the equivalent of a Crown Victoria -- and a $14,400 yearly expense account, the Miami Herald reported. The district also handed him $40,000 in moving expenses, and Miami’s business community tossed in a $240,000 home-buying loan that might be forgiven over time.

For his part, Crew told me recently that he’s not in the running for the L.A. job.

But who knows? One of these days the board may send up Vatican-like smoke and announce that it won his heart by upping the ante with a yearly Lamborghini.

I just hope I haven’t frightened him away by recklessly printing his name.

Should the Board of Education reveal more about how it’s selecting L.A. Unified’s next superintendent? To answer this question or discuss education in general, visit latimes.com/schoolme. Bob Sipchen can be reached at bob.sipchen@ latimes.com.