School superintendent openings hard to fill

Pay is high, but so are the headaches

June 14, 2000
Web posted at: 11:24 a.m. EDT (1524 GMT)

In this story: Superintendents 'are like single moms' Non-academics picked for top school jobs Outsider status doesn't bother new L.A. schools chief Clashes come with the territory RELATED STORIES, SITES

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- Finding superintendents who can lead the nation's biggest school districts is hard enough. Getting a candidate to take the job may be an even tougher assignment. The Los Angeles Board of Education, for example, chose former Colorado Governor Roy Romer -- who has no formal academic experience -- to run that city's troubled school system.

VIDEO CNN's Greg LaMotte asks why non-educators are taking over school districts. Real 28K 80K Windows Media 28K 80K     RESOURCES Superintendent vacancies and recently filled openings     ALSO Outsider school chiefs -- Roy Romer, Harold Levy -- get acquainted   MESSAGE BOARD Changes in education

Within the past year, the top positions have been vacant in nearly half of the country's 50 biggest school districts, whose students are among the nation's poorest and neediest.

While some of those openings have since been filled, searches still are under way in Denver, Philadelphia and Washington, where the superintendent quit last month after two years on the job.

Arlene Ackerman left to head San Francisco's schools after concluding she couldn't help a 70,000-student district controlled by a mayoral board, independent auditors and budget committees in the U.S. Congress.

Since 1970, the District of Columbia has had eight school chiefs. Kansas City, Missouri, has had 18 superintendents in 30 years.

Despite high pay offered to qualified applicants, superintendents most cope with a daunting array of challenges, such as low test scores, money shortages, union leaders, school boards, crumbling buildings and competition from alternative schools.

"Many boards are asking superintendents to be messiahs," says Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of nearly 60 large districts.

"Urban districts are a political stew composed of corporations, the unions, the press and community groups ... they're all fighting with scarce resources over the one thing they feel most passionate about: their children," he says.

Superintendents "are like single moms," says Larry Sykes, a school board member in Toledo, Ohio, where the search for a new superintendent has been going on for 10 months. "They have to be everything to everybody and still take care of the children."

A superintendent's average stay in a district is 6.5 years, but it's only 2.5 years in urban districts, according to the American Association of School Administrators.

Such instability hurts a school system, says Judy Seltz, a spokeswoman for the organization. "When there's that kind of turnover, any type of reform effort a superintendent puts in stops cold," she says. "You need five years before reforms work."

Casserly agrees. "It's not realistic that any superintendent could turn around some of these systems within two years," he says.

Increasingly, schools are turning to consulting firms to help fill the vacancies. But even those firms have trouble finding people with the needed skills in business and academic improvement, says John Isaacson, president of the Isaacson, Miller executive search firm, which handles many superintendent searches.

Some districts are looking outside the usual education areas.

Last month, Harold Levy, a corporate lawyer with no previous school leadership experience, was chosen to lead New York City's school district, the nation's largest with 1.1 million students.

The second-largest, Los Angeles, named Romer last week as its new superintendent.

Roy Romer, who has no academic experience, says he is committed to education 180K/16 sec. AIFF or WAV sound

After a 40-year career in Colorado politics -- including the governorship from 1987 to 1999 -- and a stint as the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Romer now has a three-year contract to see if he can turn around the Los Angeles Unified School District.

"I'm not just a politician," Romer said last week. "I'm a guy who has a real deep, substantive, commitment to education."

It's a commitment that will be put to the test. The Los Angeles district, with 712,000 students and 75,000 employees, has been struggling with low test scores, a high dropout rate, fractious leadership and the threat of state oversight.

Romer won the job over two experienced school administrators: former Chicago Board of Education President George Munoz and an official of another school district who asked the Los Angeles board to keep her name private.

Board members also spent a week trying to talk former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros into taking the job. Cisneros, who now heads Univision, the large Spanish-language television network, turned it down.

Even after Romer's unanimous selection, some board members expressed reservations. David Tokofsky, for one, said he fretted about the fact that Romer has never worked in Los Angeles.

"He's done an awful lot of thinking about education over the past 20 years, but a lot less time learning the contours of this city than one would hope,'' Tokofsky told the Los Angeles Times.

But Romer believes he understands the district's problems, even though he is not from Southern California.

"I come to this job having lived a long life that's very much like the same life you live here," he said after being named superintendent. "I don't think I'm ruled out because I didn't happen to live here."

Romer, 71, also dismisses concerns that he is too old, too white or too inexperienced to run the Los Angeles school system.

Raised in a town of 800 people, the new superintendent says he ran a farm and got a degree in animal husbandry before going into politics. And though he was never a public school teacher or administrator, he taught people how to fly airplanes.

"If you put that experience together and you do a profile of the people who live in this area, we come from the same place," he says. "We dream the same dreams. We have the same fears."

Romer also says there will be no cultural divide as he assumes leadership of a district that is 70 percent Hispanic.

"My name is Romer. You know, you could add an 'o' and it would be Romero," he says. "To a parent who is Latino in this community, what is more important? Whether or not I've got an 'o' at the end of my name or whether I can deliver a school program that helps their youngsters be the very best person they're going to be."

Day Higuchi, president of the union United Teachers Los Angeles, is among those who are optimistic about Romer's future.

"Maybe someone with the skills of a governor is better suited to do it than someone whose only background has been within education," he tells CNN.

As recently as 15 years ago, Casserly says, school systems were being led by educators who spent their entire careers in one district. Now, they come and go through a costly revolving door.

Districts spend six months to a year -- at costs that can range from $30,000 to $130,000 -- on searches for superintendents, he says. Then, school boards must win public support for salaries that average $175,000 but can reach $250,000.

While such salaries may attract top talent, superintendents face pressure to cut budgets and raise test scores. There's also confusion and conflict about who should run the schools: the board, the mayor, the state, or in the case of the District of Columbia, the federal government.

"Everyone wants to be involved in some way, shape or form in reforming the school system," says Daniel A. Domenech, who runs the 154,000-student system in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Mayors in Philadelphia, New York and Detroit have publicly clashed with school leaders as more politicians seek control over education, a popular voter issue. And that has taken a toll on career educators who are not politically astute, some leaders say.

"You are in a fishbowl," says Libby Socorro Gil, the schools chief in Chula Vista, California. "I'm not sure too many traditional educators are prepared for that kind of scrutiny."

Domenech, a school administrator for nearly three decades, says enough 4-3 board votes on issues near and dear to him taught him to join the political arena. "Most of us got into this business because we care about kids, but this is not a job anyone is successful in doing unless you have those alliances. On your own you're dead in the water," he says.

Like New York and Los Angeles, some districts have turned away from educators -- with mixed results. Retired General John Stanford led the Seattle schools with charisma and success from 1995 to 1998, when he died of leukemia.

But Julius W. Becton Jr., a former three-star Army general, quit as D.C. superintendent in 1998 after 16 months.

Dealing with school boards filled with aspiring politicians and with increasing expectations from voters has made the job of superintendent much more difficult, says Sykes, the Toledo board member.

"Nobody's going to come in here unless they truly love it."

Correspondent Greg Lamotte and The Associated Press contributed to this report, written by Jim Morris.

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Council of the Great City Schools
Los Angeles Unified School District, LAUSDnet

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