Wanted: Schools Chief With Zero Experience
Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. John Fryer uses an earthy metaphor to explain why the Los Angeles Unified School District hired a military man as its next superintendent: Walk around in a cow pasture long enough, he says, and you lose the ability to smell it.
Translation: Career educators can become oblivious to the flaws in their schools.
That thinking animated the decision last week to hire retired Navy Vice Adm. David L. Brewer III as head of the nation’s second-largest school system. Brewer’s assets include leadership ability, charisma and a resume that is spotlessly clean of any experience running a school district, or even working for one.
School trustees picked Brewer over four other candidates, all of whom had spent at least parts of their careers in the education establishment. He will succeed Supt. Roy Romer, himself an education outsider who came to the job after three terms as governor of Colorado.
Such choices, while unusual in other fields, are growing common in education, at least in large urban school districts. If anything, it’s becoming the exception in the largest cities to hire a career educator to head a school system.
Chicago, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seattle and Washington, D.C. -- all have turned to nontraditional choices in recent years.
Former U.S. Atty. Alan Bersin ran San Diego’s schools from 1998 until 2005, when he became California’s secretary of education. Harold Levy was a Citibank executive before he became New York City’s schools chancellor, a job now held by a former U.S. assistant attorney general, Joel Klein. Paul Vallas was Chicago’s city budget director when he was tapped to become school superintendent there; he has since moved on to the School District of Philadelphia
And at least nine districts, most relatively small, have turned to career military officers, hoping that their lack of knowledge about education is offset by leadership, discipline and an ability to run a large bureaucracy.
In some cases, the results have been roughly analogous to what might happen if airlines hired pilots on the basis of their ability to perform heart surgery. Successors were left to sort through the wreckage.
But the same could be said of any number of traditional educators who rose to the top and crashed. And some of the nontraditional superintendents have won high praise.
“I think the track record’s actually been pretty good,” said Susan Fuhrman, president of Teachers College in New York. “I think an outside person can bring a fresh perspective and knowledge of running large organizations. You know, as long as they have good people around them who understand curriculum and instruction, they can do very well.”
Still, Michael Kirst, a professor of education at Stanford University who specializes in governance issues, said the record of military officers as superintendents has been mixed. Some, he said, have been “overwhelmed by the change from the command-and-control structure.”
Bonnie C. Fusarelli, an assistant professor of educational leadership at North Carolina State University who has written about military leaders becoming school superintendents, said problems arise when they impose a military command style on districts with a tradition of collaborative leadership.
One of the strengths that military leaders bring, she said, is that they are accustomed to using data, “so they can be very efficient at meeting the accountability standards.”
Those who have made the transition say there is no reason to believe Brewer can’t succeed. But they say he faces a steep learning curve -- especially when it comes to the most treacherous part of the job, local politics.
“Not that he hasn’t seen politics -- he certainly has -- but local politics are nastier and much more intense than anything he’s experienced at the national level,” said Fryer, who won plaudits for his stewardship of the Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Fla., from 1998 to 2005. He now runs the Washington-based National Institute for School Leadership, which trains principals.
Romer has said that, even as a former governor of Colorado and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he was unprepared for the politics in Los Angeles, with their cross-cutting ethnic currents and hidden shoals of personal rivalries. Brewer is stepping into an even more volatile situation, given the confrontation between the school board, which hired him, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is set to claim a share of the board’s power.
Villaraigosa, currently in Asia, has said he is disappointed that he wasn’t given a say in the hiring of the new superintendent.
Former Marine Col. Alphonse Davis, who had a short, stormy tenure as superintendent in New Orleans, said Brewer will have his hands full with “the rough and tumble, dealing with boards, people questioning your integrity and all the political hogwash that comes with that.”
Davis won some praise for raising student achievement in New Orleans but resigned when it was reported that his father, a school janitor, had filed for more than $85,000 worth of overtime. Davis says now that he’d know how to do things differently “if I did it a second time, and I’d have to have my head examined if I did that.”
The recent trend of turning to the military for school chiefs got its start in Seattle, which hired Army Maj. Gen. John Stanford as superintendent in 1995. Stanford’s tenure was cut short by his death in 1998, but his performance won wide praise, leading other districts to hire retired officers.
Among the notably troubled stints was that of Army Lt. Gen. Julius Becton, chief of the District of Columbia school system, who quit just 17 months after being appointed, citing chronic physical and emotional fatigue. Critics charged that the problem-plagued schools were little improved.
Last February, retired Air Force Col. John F. O’Sullivan Jr. resigned as superintendent of a 21,000-student district in suburban Minneapolis after a unanimous “no confidence” vote by the board of education.
According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, he was criticized for, among other things, insisting on being called “colonel” and alienating “most, if not all” of the constituent groups he dealt with as superintendent.
Michael Casserly, who is executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents large urban school districts, said there are essentially two reasons why districts hire nontraditional school leaders.
“One is that the pool of available superintendents who had experience running organizations as big as ours is pretty small, or pretty shallow,” he said. “The second is, I think, that big-city school districts and boards discovered ... that the talents needed to lead one of these systems could actually be found in a number of settings.”
There is also a desire by many districts to shake things up, to find someone who isn’t bound by tradition. As Brewer put it in an introductory news conference Friday, “I am not a reformer; I am a transformer.”
Klein, the New York chancellor, said he thought it was significant that Brewer had been in the military when it underwent a “very profound cultural shift” in the years after the Vietnam War. He called the modern Navy “an organization that is not only used to success but has a performance culture.”
Asked how he would classify the culture of most school districts, Klein said: “It’s an excuse culture. You see it all the time. ‘It’s the kids, it’s their families, it’s a lack of this’ -- it’s always something else. In my experience, organizations that are excuse-based, that tell you why it is that they don’t succeed, are organizations that aren’t likely to succeed.”
Fryer, the former Jacksonville superintendent, said Brewer would bring a number of assets to the job, one of which is “an ability to think strategically.” Most school districts, he said, get caught up in the machinery of running the system -- in military terms, “thinking tactically” -- and miss the big picture.
Perhaps most significant, Fry said, is that Brewer, as a former admiral, probably possesses courage. That, he said, should come in very handy in the new job.
mitchell.landsberg
@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Hiring non-educators
Cities that have hired people without experience in education to lead their school districts have had mixed success.
Seattle
Hired retired Army Maj. Gen. John Stanford in 1995 to be schools superintendent. Dropout rates fell and SAT scores rose; Stanford died of cancer in 1998.
Chicago
Hired Paul G. Vallas, a former legislative staff member and budget manager for the city of Chicago, in 1995. He was credited with balancing the school district budget and introducing innovative reforms, but test scores dropped. He was pushed out by Mayor Richard Daley in 2001 and is now head of Philadelphia’s public schools.
Los Angeles
Hired former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer in 2000. He built dozens of new schools and was credited with raising student achievement in elementary schools, but was criticized for lack of improvement in high schools. Another non-educator, retired Navy Vice Adm. David L. Brewer III, is replacing the retiring Romer.
San Diego
Hired tough-talking former U.S. Atty. Alan Bersin in 1998. He introduced sweeping reforms, clashed with the local teachers union and eventually lost the confidence of the school board. He left in 2005 to become the state secretary of education.
New York
Hired Harold Levy, a former Wall Street banker, in 2000. He fine-tuned the district’s teacher-recruitment system but left in 2002 before making a deeper imprint. Joel Klein, a former federal prosecutor, was hired in 2002. He has attempted extensive overhauls of the city’s school system, including giving principals more autonomy and announcing a plan to grade all schools from A to F each year. Klein remains in office.
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Times research by Scott Wilson
