Districts try chiefs with no experience

Hiring outsiders as superintendents has sometimes worked, sometimes not.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
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 month 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 r & eacute;sum & eacute; that is spotlessly clean of any experience running a school district, or even working for one.
School board members chose Brewer over four other candidates, all of whom had spent at least parts of their careers in the education establishment. He succeeds 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 becoming 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.
Other cities' choices
New York; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; New Orleans; Philadelphia; San Diego; Seattle -- all have turned to untraditional choices in recent years. Former U.S. Attorney 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. Justice Department lawyer, 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 Philadelphia School District.
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 untraditional superintendents have won high praise.
"I think the track record's actually been pretty good," said Susan Fuhrman, the 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."
Another view
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."
The recent trend of turning to the military for school chiefs got its start in Seattle, which hired Army Maj. Gen. John Stanford as its 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.
Unsuccessful cases
Among the notable failures was retired Army Lt. Gen. Julius Becton, who headed the District of Columbia schools for fewer than two years, ending in 1998. He left his successor with a 62 million budget deficit and a roster of failing schools.
And 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.