I seriously doubt that Secretary of Education will be one of the cabinet positions chosen in the next couple of weeks. That’s good, because I hope that Obama’s advisors take the matter very seriously. The tendency will be to pluck an aggressive K-12 reformer out of the field–someone like Michelle Rhee from DC, or Joel Klein in NYC. This would be a terrible mistake.
As Rick Hess argued persuasively in his book Spinning Wheels, one of the most important reasons why urban schools rarely improve is constant cycling of leadership. This cycling means that leaders of school districts are rarely in place long enough to transform their ambitious plans of reform into durable, institutionalized change. What is worse, this cycle of reform makes teachers cynical and causes them to withhold commitment to change, since they expect the superintendent to leave town in a couple of years, and a whole new set of plans to be put in place. Better to just keep your head down and do just enough not to draw attention to yourself. While Klein has been in place considerably longer than Rhee, both of them took over deeply troubled school systems that need deep, comprehensive reform. This is the kind of task that takes a decade to achieve. Obama should leave these talented people in the field, where they can do some good for their cities’ schools, and set an example for leaders elsewhere.
Just to be clear, Steven Tales idea of an excellent leader is someone who openly disrespects their elected leaders, violates a court order, goes through five principals in the space of a year, fires teachers like Art Siebens, and principals like Bevadine Z. Terrell, Charles Harden, thinks a chauffeur is more important then student’s travel money, subsidizes the Catholic Church, creates astroturf groups, and has created such disruption that there has been an 8% decline in enrollment.
Big Media Matt has the same definition of excellence.
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