If New York’s mayor gets his way, he will join political leaders from Seattle to Minneapolis to Chicago who have pried the reins of their troubled school systems from educators and handed them to CEOs, private consultants or teams of number crunchers. Last month Seattle even hired a retired two-star army general to run its schools. The days of searching for a visionary superintendent who will walk on water are over for these disgruntled pols. Faced with shrinking resources and decades of mismanagement, impatient city officials are looking for some quick solutions they don’t believe the shallow pool of current candidates will offer. Instead of education gurus, they want spreadsheet wonks. Instead of child-development academics, they’re looking for spit-and-polish executives to ride herd on wasteful spenders. The superintendent’s ethnicity is not the hot issue it once was. Being white is no longer a disadvantage in most cities. “Educators have controlled this system since its inception, and no one is happy with the results,” says New York City’s Deputy Mayor Peter Powers. “We need someone who can cut fat and ruffle the establishment’s feathers–make them upset.”
All this, understandably, makes big-city educators queasy. The nation’s top jobs in public education have always been pressure cookers. The average stay for a superintendent is just three years, according to Michael Casserly of the Council of the Great City Schools. Poverty, fractured communities and morality wars over how to teach about AIDS have made the position even more contentious. But to hire business people for the top post, some argue, is like putting accountants in charge of universities. “Education is not like any other business,” says Robert Peterkin, director of Harvard’s Urban Superintendents Program. “The leader needs to have more than a trivial knowledge of schools.” When the are balanced and the deadwood then what? Who will champion new ideas, or evaluate principals?
Chicago’s mayor believes he’s got some answers. Ever since the then Secretary of Education William Bennett dubbed them the worst in the nation, Chicago schools have been making slow but steady progress. Test scores have inched up, while the dropout rate has fallen slightly. But the system is plagued by a $150 million debt, segregated schools and political hacks still on the payroll. This spring the Illinois Legislature passed a bill eliminating the superintendent’s job, giving Mayor Richard Daley sole control over who would run his city’s $2.8 billion school system-a power coveted by nearly every big-city mayor.
Daley immediately replaced Superintendent Argie Johnson, a former New York deputy chancellor, with Paul Vallas, Chicago’s former city budget director, and installed his own five-member “super-board.” Lynn St. James, a former high-school principal, reports to Vallas on classrooms and curriculum. In his first month Vallas declared that headquarters staff should “live like Ralph Nader.” He banned his staff from ordering new carpets for their offices and refused his personal-driver perk. Another team member is rejiggering the inefficient ordering system for pencils and desks. And the notorious war over the teachers’ contract that usually spills over into September, delaying the opening of schools, has already been resolved. The ink is almost dried on a contract between the school board and the Chicago Teachers Union. But, watchdogs point out, the experiment is still new. “These are the rocky shoals of government reform,” says John Ayers, executive director of Leadership for Quality Education, a business-backed reform group. “No one can can claim victory yet.”
Chicago is not the first large district to try the management-team idea. Two years ago Minneapolis replaced its superintendent with a group of private consultants. In 1995 the school system was decapitated when officials suspended the then Superintendent Robert Ferrera for faulty budgets and poor record keeping. When it came time to pick a new boss, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that the finalist list broke down into “two men, two women and one business.” The anonymous business–Public Strategies Group, Inc., whose motto is “Beyond Bureaucracy” – won. Its plan, though wildly untraditional, struck a logical chord with Minneapolitans. One person, the argument goes, can’t be an expert in all facets of a multimillion-dollar bureaucracy. Instead, cities need to contract a group of specialists in food services, buildings, finance and, of course, education. Still, state law requires a chief. So former Minnesota state finance commissioner Peter Hutchinson, the firm’s founder, plays that role, attending graduations and handing out awards. “We have this system that’s not going to work in the next century. We call that system bureaucracy,” says Babak Armajani, Public Strategies’ CEO. “We have the advantage of not being burdened by it.”
But even after two years, there is little to indicate that the new way is a big improvement. In the $442 million Minneapolis system, test scores are not yet in, but school suspension rates went down slightly-not enough to jar public sentiment from its wait-and-see posture. “People are disappointed,” says Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change, a University of Minnesota policy institute. Fixing the central office is one thing, he says, and improving classroom performance another.
In Boston, these issues may soon become more real than rhetorical. Like Cortines, Boston’s superintendent was hounded out of office last month by her mayor. Though Lois Harrison-Jones raised test scores and balanced the budget in her four years as head of Boston’s $488 million system, former mayor Ray Flynn was relentlessly critical of her leadership style, and she never recovered from it. The short-list for her replacement includes two superintendents from other cities and the current mayor’s transition-team member, Lewis (Harry) Spence, a popular local government manager known for helping the bankrupt city of Chelsea, Mass., back on its feet. The fact that Spence has no education experience has caused barely a ripple of public concern, something Harrison-Jones finds ominous. Wealthy suburbs “wouldn’t think of having somebody at the helm who didn’t know anything about these fields,” she says. “Why do we experiment on our children?” Perhaps because a solution to complex urban school problems has yet to be found.
From Chicago to Boston, impatient big-city leaders with shrinking resources are fed up with the educators who traditionally serve as school superintendents. They hope to replace the bureaucrats with financial wizards–or, in Seattle’s case, a former top Pentagon aide–who can whip school budgets into shape.
