If you're planning some summer reading, allow us to suggest "An Impossible Job? The View from the Urban Superintendent's Chair." This superb report, funded by the Wallace Foundation and produced via the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education by a team led by former Milwaukee superintendent (and current Marquette professor and Black Alliance for Educational Options head) Howard Fuller, should be required reading for every urban school reformer in America. Based on data from focus groups and a survey of the superintendents of 100 major urban districts, it argues (in 90 pages) that the superintendent's job must be rethought from top to bottom; that the recruitment and training of superintendents needs a total overhaul; that the role of school boards has to change radically; and that huge alterations are called for in the structure and functioning of school systems. If, that is, we're serious about urban schools producing better results. You should read and ponder this report, at the core of which is the contention that today's superintendents do not have authority that even begins to equal their responsibility and the demands being placed upon their jobs. Here are some highlights:
- "Big-city superintendents require all the skills and talents that leaders elsewhere in government, business, and charitable organizations draw on. Of course, they need to know something specific about schooling. But they also need to be able to work comfortably with politics, finance, management, and setting directions in large, complex organizations. Nothing in the results reported here supports the idea that the people best able to learn the skills required of a superintendent are those who started out as teachers and worked their way up through the system. . . . [P]eople who start out in the classroom and administration may be put at a disadvantage when it comes time to manage the enterprise and learn these new skills. Leaders who start out in other fields need to learn about schooling. But they can learn what they need to know immediately before or after they take on a superintendent's position. It is equally true that traditionally trained superintendents need to learn politics, finance, management, and vision. But what they have to learn about these issues is so much more complex than what nontraditional superintendents have to learn about schooling, that it is possible they start their new jobs at a disadvantage. . . ."
- "The list of changes endorsed by overwhelming majorities of the respondents is daunting. They would limit board discretion, create more charter schools, enter into contracts to establish more schools, close buildings and reassign staff, deregulate budgets, and provide greater authority (along with accountability) at the building level. It is doubtful that such far-reaching and politically painful reforms would have commanded a majority among school superintendents a decade ago. Yet today, among urban superintendents, two-thirds or more agree with all these proposals."
- "[D]istrict reform cannot be carried out in a vacuum that ignores the state. Governance needs to be reshaped and doing so will require many different groups to take action. Governors, legislators, local elected officials, policy groups, and foundations interested in school reform all have a role to play."
- "If urban superintendents are to be expected to improve student achievement and close the achievement gap, a constellation of changes is required to empower superintendents: more authority over central office staff, hiring, and performance assessment; a greater say in defining district mission; explicit power to hire, assign, and fire school principals; authority to put the best teachers where they can do the most good; more authority over district funds. . . ."
- [S]uperintendents need more stable boards-and schools and communities deserve them. A sort of romance about school boards exists in the United States implying that their election is the embodiment of democratic ideals. . . . But . . . there is no a priori reason to think that elected boards are essential to this public service. . . . It may be time to consider board appointment as the best way to ensure public oversight of large districts, with senior local elected officials doing the appointing and being held accountable for board performance."
There's much more, including many points (about superintendents and, especially, principals and where to find and how to empower them) that parallel the recent Fordham-Broad "manifesto," "Better Leaders for America's Schools." Other findings and recommendations go further, however, such as the Fuller report's observation that 70 percent of superintendents would bar corporate and union PAC funding from school board elections.
This exceptionally timely and important report says, in effect, that while we need superb leaders for urban (and other) school systems, it won't do simply to seek super-heroes to slot into current jobs. The jobs themselves must profoundly change. And that means a great deal more in public education must change, too. - Chester E. Finn, Jr.
"An impossible job? The view from the urban superintendent's chair," by Howard Fuller and others, Center for Reinventing Public Education, July 2003
"Study: school leaders feel left behind," Associated Press, July 29, 2003
