James Harvey and his colleagues at the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington spent three years studying 100 urban school superintendents. They conducted interviews, performed surveys, compiled test scores and crunched financials.
When they published their report in 2003, the title of the 90-page tome betrayed their gloom. It was: “An Impossible Job? The View from the Urban Superintendent’s Chair.”
You know it’s grim when the only source of optimism is a question mark.
The report states that “veterans of the urban school wars in the largest school districts believe the job is undoable.”
But newly anointed Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet clearly doesn’t buy that. The extraordinarily successful political and business leader has accepted Denver’s version of mission impossible. And his first order of business is to convince a city of armchair critics, know-it-alls and finger-pointers that DPS is not just his problem.
It’s everybody’s problem.
“There are extraordinary high levels of public expectations for school performance these days, and they’re harnessed to a tax revolt,” said Harvey, who couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of that situation.
That said, Bennet is not at a disadvantage because of his lack of experience as an educator. Superintendents must be clever politicians, skilled CEOs and talented educators, Harvey explained. Regardless of which background they bring to the job, he said, “they have to surround themselves with talent to compensate for the holes in their experience.”
And though most people think a school superintendent can snap his fingers and make people jump, it’s not that easy.
“They’re also responsible for responding to a part-time, frequently ideological school board,” and they must deal with “a central bureaucracy that sometimes is part of the problem,” he said. “Superintendents don’t control their own agenda.”
In addition to all that, “the elephant in the room” is the issue of race and class, Harvey said. “No Child Left Behind pretends that’s not a problem.”
Proponents of the school-accountability program assume that children from vastly different social, economic and educational backgrounds all can achieve if the schools simply do their job.
If you question that, Harvey said, “people who support it are inclined to label you either as a racist or someone who has low expectations of public schools.”
If a superintendent dares to acknowledge that many children arrive at the schools with disadvantages that even the best teachers can’t overcome, he’s dismissed as part of the problem.
And that ultimately dooms real academic reform to failure.
“There’s a perverse effect in pointing to schools to be the solution to the problem when in fact they’re not entirely the source of the problem,” Harvey said.
It lets parents, students and the community off the hook.
“No Child Left Behind makes it very easy for people to wash their hands of these problems,” Harvey said. If we genuinely want to guarantee academic achievement for all, he said, “we have to address all the challenges in the students’ lives. Schools cannot do these things alone.”
So given that reality and the fact that Bennet is not good at failure, Harvey offered three pieces of advice for the new super.
First, get a complete financial and academic audit of the school system. “New superintendents are very vulnerable to being blamed for the problems of the prior administration,” he said.
Second, get the school board to concentrate on no more than five priorities. “He needs a firm performance-based agreement with the board,” Harvey said.
And third, develop some kind of community-engagement strategy so that the public is involved in every stage of the process of institutional change.
“You have to keep your ear to the ground,” he said.
No kidding. In the cutthroat world of education, an ambush is always just around the corner.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
