Pick a Leader, Not a Symbol for Schools

By the end of April, we will all know who has been selected to head the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest public school system. This critical selection process has generated little in the way of public attention and is simply not high on the public’s radar screen. This must change. The selection of the next superintendent of schools--along with the offices of mayor and chief of police--is one of the most critical decisions to be made in terms of its impact on the future of our city. What’s at stake? Perhaps nothing short of the public education system we once revered.

With the announced retirement of Sid Thompson, the current superintendent, there is an opportunity to assess where we are and what students and parents need from our public schools. Far beyond simply the selection of someone to take the helm of the LAUSD is the fundamental need to reform the district and the basic requirement that schools educate children and prepare them for an ethnically diverse, highly interdependent, intensely competitive and technologically driven world. It is our responsibility as taxpayers to insist that final candidates for the job be held up to public scrutiny so that we all know how they would change things to benefit the needs of the community.

Faced with generally dismal test scores, rampant violence, ethnic tension and the threat of divisive district break-up plans, few can contend that L.A.’s public schools are models of excellence. However, there was a time when L.A.’s schools were considered among the finest in the nation. The choice of the next superintendent should mark the beginning of a new day in our city, when excellence in education once again is seen as paramount--and above the political fray.

As with the often ugly political battles surrounding Franklin White, former head of the MTA, and recent struggles around Police Chief Willie Williams, race and ethnicity has played a role in debates about a successor to Sid Thompson. But skin color or ethnic heritage has no legitimate role in this crucial decision.

The next superintendent of L.A.’s schools must be able to give cogent responses to questions about how he or she would address the district’s many problems. This person must also have immense managerial capabilities and a “get it done” style that will challenge and shock the district from its current slumber.

In this vein, Seattle offers an example of what fresh, reform-minded, community-participatory educational leadership looks like. With its public schools in a deep malaise, Seattle conducted an extensive national search and hired someone who had absolutely no previous educational credentials. Sacrilegious? Perhaps. But John Stanford, the former Army general who took on the job has made early progress in reforming Seattle’s schools.

What Stanford brought to the job was the ability to ask the right questions and a notion of what was possible, untainted by a sense of “bureaucratic-think” that has hampered local efforts to reform our schools. But what is perhaps most interesting in the Seattle example is the high degree of involvement by Seattle residents that extended far beyond the educational establishment and the media.

All of the final candidates for the job of superintendent were exposed to the public through a series of community forums that allowed the finalists to speak free of the limits of 30-second sound bites. The forums challenged them to outline their plans and discuss their educational philosophies and visions in a format that simply wouldn’t allow empty rhetoric and business-as-usual notions to prevail.

Why don’t we do that in Los Angeles? What better way to send a signal that L.A.’s school board is ready to shift a few gears in its efforts to reform the school system?

The process of school reform has already begun here. What’s needed is new leadership to push it through to completion. In addition to the work of LEARN and the Annenberg challenge, the district has made some beginning strides toward streamlining our public education. There needs to be support and augmentation of LEARN’s advocacy of school accountability, as well as LEARN’s thrust to bring about true assessment of student progress, along with more budgetary control for individual schools.

As this city hurtles headlong toward the 21st century, it is vitally important that we demand that our tax-supported schools provide our children with a world-class education. The selection of the next superintendent of L.A.’s public schools must first and foremost be about his or her plan to meaningfully implement reform and a real measure of broad-based community support for that plan. What it must not be primarily about is demographics or racial, ethnic or religious criteria. Leadership must be the most important criteria in selecting a new superintendent of schools, and L.A. must wake up and participate in the selection as if the future depends on it. It does.