Superintendents

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In this election year, both Congress and the Administration are devoting a lot of attention to public school reform. The goal is to help the nation's public school system produce better-educated graduates and bring a system designed during the industrial age into the information and technology age. Running every school system is a superintendent, and some people believe public school reform won't work unless we train a new generation of superintendents. Running an urban public school system, where one in every four American students goes to school, is becoming more and more like running a major corporation. Most of them have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The LA Unified District, the nation's second-largest school district at 9 billion dollars, has the same revenues as the Nike Corporation.

Superintendent Jim Shelton believes school systems should look to corporate America to find managers trained to run them. "The competitive nature for profits continues to innovate and to change and to bring new systems to bear, and there's a lot of pressure to have those things happen and technologies and processes and best practices travel from industry to industry and within industries all the time. If you look at education, it hasn't changed a lot over time and even some of the best practices about organization structure and design and processes and systems haven't made it into the way we're actually doing everyday work of education."

Eli Broad, who founded the Broad Center for Superintendents, says, "Make no mistake, I'm not saying that a teacher cannot become a superintendent, but I firmly believe that superintendents need training, they need training in management, labor relations, systems, logistics, finance and other areas to effectively run a large urban school district. Yo Yo Ma and Isaac Stern don't manage symphonies in which they perform; Andy Warhol did not try to run a museum, he used his tremendous talent to do what he did best; creating amazing contemporary art. We should not expect teachers suddenly to become expert managers simply because you're gifted at instructing children." Broad recruited the crème de la crème of the business world - including the former publisher of the Los Angeles Times and former VP's of major corporations such as AT&T and Eastman Kodak-- to his Urban Superintendents Academy. They learn how to handle complex labor negotiations, how to manage thousands of employees, how to make decisions about allotting millions of dollars in resources to the best effect. That's something that few superintendents now have BEFORE they take over these jobs, because 98% of them come from the ranks of teachers.

One recent study found superintendents decidedly lacking when it comes to one important skill. Technology is changing the way children learn in America. The Southern Regional Education Board reports in 1999 public schools spent more than a billion dollars on educational software, and more than $5 billon on technology for grades k-12. But its survey of superintendents found, "Little connection between the demands of educational technology…and the capability of school leadership." Another survey found the nation's superintendent population profoundly lacking when it comes to women and minorities. Only 12% of superintendents are women, and 13% of Assistant Superintendents are minorities.