L.A. Unified Looks at Former Chicago Official

A former president of the Chicago Board of Education who now heads a federal agency that promotes international trade has emerged as a leading contender to run Los Angeles’ troubled school district.

With time running short to meet a June 5 target for installing a new superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Board of Education scheduled a meeting Tuesday with George Munoz, the head of the Overseas Private Investment Corp.

Munoz said in an interview Friday that he is enthusiastically pursuing the job that has now been spurned by four of the five candidates on the board’s original short list.

In the meantime, several other candidates remain in play for the job, which is expected to pay about $250,000 a year.

The board has also scheduled an interview Tuesday with John Murphy, former superintendent of the school system in Charlotte, N.C., according to sources close to the search. Murphy, who now heads the educational division of a Florida company, did not return a call seeking comment.

Henry Cisneros, the former mayor of San Antonio and ex-secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was the favorite of all seven members of the school board. His decision this week to turn down the job forced the trustees to begin looking at other candidates.

Cisneros was reportedly still being lobbied Friday to change his mind.

And Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, among others, has continued to solicit Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the former North Atlantic Treaty Organization chief. Clark has rebuffed attempts to interest him in the job. An aide said Friday that he was not available for comment.

The only remaining candidate on the board’s original list of five is Roy Romer, the former governor of Colorado, who has actively sought the job. Board members met with him Thursday but reached no decision.

After the meeting, board President Genethia Hayes said the board was “still in an interview mode” and planned to add two names to its short list. The names came from a list of six that the search committee had presented to the board in addition to the primary five.

Sources said four board members would have voted for Romer, but that there was a consensus that there should at least be other candidates to compare him with. The only comparison available at the time was to interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, who has repeatedly said he intends to leave the district June 30.

“If people made that comparison, they were for [Cortines],” one source said.

Although less publicly known, Munoz, 49, offers the board some of the credentials that made Cisneros attractive.

In Washington, the Texas native is known as a skilled political fighter. President Clinton appointed him to head the Overseas Private Investment Corp. in 1997, with House Republicans seeking to abolish the agency that provides insurance and loan guarantees to American companies that invest in developing nations. Munoz has won over critics by revamping the agency’s management structure and launching a grass-roots campaign to sell its role in creating jobs.

Though his career has focused on international law, Munoz played a key role in the reorganization of the Chicago public schools in the mid-1980s. As president of the Chicago Board of Education from 1984 through 1986, he presided at a time when the nation’s third-largest district was struggling under financial difficulties, racial divisions and poor student performance.

In the interview Friday, he said his varied experience in managing reform in a large urban school district and righting a troubled federal agency make him well suited for the challenges the new superintendent will face in Los Angeles.

In Chicago, Munoz said, he helped bring the stability to the board necessary to carry out broad reform.

“I see the same situation that Los Angeles is going through,” he said. “It was at that time we started talking about [sub]districts in Chicago. We fought hard in not breaking up the system but in creating [sub]districts, pretty much in the way Los Angeles has done.” The L.A. board earlier this year approved a plan proposed by Cortines to divide the huge school system into 11 smaller semi-autonomous districts.

Murphy, the other new contender, is an experienced educational administrator with a reputation for challenging administrators and teachers and developing standards.

He won praise for improving test scores in Charlotte and before that in Prince Georges County, Md.--a large suburban region outside Washington, D.C., that includes a number of towns with predominantly minority and low-income residents.

Since 1996, Murphy has been vice president of educational services for Arvida Corp. His job is to improve the quality of schools in nine master-planned communities that the company has developed in the southeastern United States.