2 Educators, Banker Vie for the Top Job

After a year of speculation and political maneuvering, the Los Angeles Board of Education on Thursday selected three finalists--two educators and one businessman--to battle for the position of superintendent.

Deputy Supt. Ruben Zacarias, a 31-year district veteran whose promotion to the job has long been advocated by a coalition of Latino activists and others, was joined by former First Interstate Bank President William E.B. Siart and Daniel Domenech, a regional school superintendent from New York and the president-elect of the American Assn. of School Administrators.

The school board is expected to choose one of the men within a month to replace Supt. Sid Thompson, who is stepping down in June. The selection will follow a series of private meetings between the candidates and select groups of people beginning Tuesday and three broad public forums scheduled for the weekend of April 19-20.

Whoever wins steps into a high-turnover job--this is the fourth time in a decade the board has picked a new superintendent.

Observers of the yearlong Los Angeles search said the makeup of the finalists, culled from a list of 50 prospects, seems to favor Zacarias.

“There are three choices--the out-of-stater, the businessperson and the insider--but do you think there’s any competition?” asked Tom Giugni, executive director of the Assn. of California School Administrators.

The scene at Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters Thursday afternoon as the names were announced gave but a small taste of the days that lie ahead. It will be a competition less among the candidates than among two factions: Latinos who favor the promotion of Zacarias and the school reformers, who pushed for alternative candidates to at least be considered.

Some board members mumbled that they wished the finalist field, recommended by a search committee, had been larger. The board had asked for three to five finalists.

One recruited candidate who turned Los Angeles down was Howard Fuller, the former superintendent of Milwaukee schools who now teaches at Marquette University.

“I’m not sure these jobs are doable and I like to be realistic about what I can do,” Fuller said Thursday.

Difficulty persuading good candidates to apply is a problem common in big-city school systems today, Fuller emphasized, because urban superintendents are “just caught up in myriad storms and more and more people are asking themselves how willing they are to get involved in it.”

Within minutes of the selection announcement, Zacarias’ advocates began denouncing the other two candidates as being out of touch with the issues in Los Angeles and not sufficiently qualified to run L.A. Unified.

“We have to have someone who already knows the district,” said Gina Alonso of United Communities, a multicultural coalition. “L.A. is a specific city and has specific needs, not like New York.”

The push for Zacarias began within minutes of Thompson’s announcement last year that he had decided to resign. Zacarias’ supporters first sought for him to be immediately appointed to the $163,000-a-year job, then fought against a national search, and finally launched an effort to mold the selection criteria to Zacarias’ background. The district’s student body, these advocates have frequently reminded the school board, is 67% Latino.

Behind the scenes, supporters of a broader search have expressed concern that Zacarias represents the past in a district that desperately needs to change to survive.

In recent weeks, the fight has focused on Mike Roos, president of LEARN, the district’s largest reform effort, which seeks to divest decision-making from downtown to the schools. Roos had lobbied the board to schedule the three open candidate forums.

“I don’t have a candidate in this process,” Roos said when asked if he was pleased that Siart was among the finalists.

The search committee, led by former Los Angeles Community College President Jack Fujimoto, emphasized the need to give the new superintendent the flexibility to choose his own team. More than two dozen top administrative contracts come up in mid-May; Thompson had been expected to routinely renew them.

“They kept talking, ‘team, team, team,’ ” said board member David Tokofsky. “We have to consider freezing those contracts.”

Zacarias, 68, began his education career as an Eastside teacher three decades ago and has held a deputy post since 1991. He said he had long felt confident that he would make the final cut, but now wants “to be judged for my experience, not my ethnicity.”

“I’m really looking forward to taking this public school system up and onward,” said the Chatsworth resident. “We need to pull this entire L.A. community together and with only one agenda, which is improved student achievement.”

Raised in Boyle Heights by his grandmother, Zacarias is bilingual and became a substitute teacher in 1966, abandoning a billboard sales career.

Domenech, 51, a native of Cuba, also is bilingual. He began as a New York City teacher in 1968 and became an administrator three years later.

He rose to become chancellor of the nation’s largest school district--New York City Public Schools--in 1995, but his ascension lasted only one day. The school board reversed its vote after intense lobbying by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani aimed at seizing control of the system. Giuliani described Domenech as being a product of a “business-as-usual bureaucracy.”

“That’s my claim to fame,” Domenech joked Thursday.

Domenech’s now works for New York state, overseeing a cluster of schools in the West Suffolk area of Long Island, with a student population of 74,000--about 11% the size of Los Angeles Unified. But he downplayed that size contrast Thursday, saying: “Once you get a certain number of students, the volume is not really significant.”

Asked to name his greatest accomplishment, he cited an intense effort to improve the academic skills of immigrant children on Long Island through such enhancements as full-day kindergarten and preschool.

Siart, 50, was traveling in Asia and could not be reached for comment.

At First Interstate, Siart helped guide a decentralization program that he compares to LEARN, a plan that he believes is the district’s best hope. He has said he would approach the district as a business, using his talents for streamlining bureaucracy and managing finances.

Before leaving First Interstate after its takeover by Wells Fargo, Siart handled a $3-billion annual budget. Los Angeles Unified’s budget is $4.9 billion.

Siart has said he would look to the district’s many educators for curriculum advice, but believes that improving reading skills is the key to improving test scores and should be his top priority.

Considering non-educators for school superintendents’ jobs has become something of a trend in urban school systems. Seattle and Washington have selected former Army generals in recent years. A Times poll conducted late last month, however, showed that Los Angeles residents favor someone with education experience--preferably with time logged in the classroom--over a businessperson.

When Thompson announced his resignation, national experts suggested there would be little interest in the job. In education circles, Los Angeles Unified is generally considered too large, too political and too difficult a job.

Of the 50 people considered, 27 applied (including Zacarias and Siart) and 23 more (including Domenech) were recruited by the executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles. Working with Fujimoto’s search team, the field was narrowed to 11 candidates, at which time two dropped out, board members were told.

Board member Tokofsky speculated that the search may not have turned up many truly qualified applicants. He said the search committee explained that it provided just three finalists “because Nos. 4 through 9 were significantly lower.”

Among the challenges facing the next superintendent will be breaking through administrative roadblocks to implementing LEARN; continuing academic improvements promised by Thompson a year ago under a “Call to Action” program; and staving off efforts to break away portions of the school district, including the San Fernando Valley and South-Central Los Angeles.

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The Candidates

The Los Angeles Board of Education is scheduled to choose one of these three men to be the new district superintendent within the month.

Daniel A. Domenech

District superintendent of the 2nd Supervisory District of Suffolk County, N.Y., overseeing 18 small school districts with 74,000 students.

* Age: 51

* Residence: Long Island, N.Y.

* Career highlights: Became a grade school teacher in Queens, N.Y. in 1968. Has worked for the last 19 years as superintendent in various small to medium school districts on Long Island.

* Education: Bachelor’s degree from Hunter College; graduate studies in experimental psychology at Queens College; PhD in education research from Hofstra University.

* Family: Married, four children ranging in age from 5 to 25.

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William E.B. Siart

Former chairman and chief executive officer of First Interstate Bancorp. Serves on the board of trustees at USC and the advisory board of the Boys & Girls Club and is a mayor’s appointee on the Ad Hoc Committee on Police Funding.

* Age: 50

* Residence: Westside

* Career highlights: Began his banking career in 1969 with Bank of America and became CEO of First Interstate in 1995.

* Education: MBA in finance, UC Berkeley; bachelor’s degree in economics, Santa Clara University.

* Family: Married, three children

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Ruben Zacarias

Deputy superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District. Also a mayor’s appointee to the Commission for Children, Youth and Their Families and serves on the U.S. President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans.

* Age: 68

* Residence: Chatsworth

* Career highlights: Started as an elementary teacher in 1966 at Breed Street School and returned there as principal a decade later. Became a deputy superintendent in 1991.

* Education: Doctorate in multicultural education, San Francisco; master’s degree in school administration, Cal State LA; bachelor’s degree in cinema, USC.

* Family: Single, four children