Nontraditional Superintendents Since 1984

Profile of Nontraditional Superintendents

Since 1984, number of nontraditional superintendents reported = 31

Average size of school district served: 156,585
Size range of district served: smallest = 1,087 (Seneca East, OH) to largest = 1,077,381 (NY City Public Schools)

Average length of tenure (nontraditional superintendent): 4.23 years
Average length of tenure in a large urban district (traditional superintendent): 2.3 years (Glass, 2001)
Range of tenure: shortest = 1 year (Adam Miller) to 8 years (Raymond F. Arment III)

Background
Military: 32%
Public service and higher education: 19%
Business and Industry: 49%
    Type of business and industry
      Banking: 13%
      Law: 10%
      Other: 26%

Status
Number still working as superintendents: 35%
Left public education: 35%
Became state/federal secretary of education: 6%
Left specifically for higher paying job/private sector: 6%
Running for political office: 3%
Retirement: 3%
Deceased: 3%
Unknown: 6%

Geographic Distribution
West: 29%
Midwest: 23%
East: 16%
South: 32%

Broad Academy: A Program for Nontraditional Superintendents

The Broad Superintendents Academy is a rigorous 10-month executive management program designed to prepare CEOs and senior executives from business, non-profit, military, government and education backgrounds to lead urban public school systems. Participants keep their current jobs while attending The Academy. All tuition and travel costs are covered by The Academy.

The Broad Residency in Urban Education is a two-year management training program for talented emerging executives seeking to ultimately lead urban school districts. Designed for graduates from the top business, law and public policy schools who have at least four years of work experience in the private and nonprofit sectors, The Broad Residency places participants immediately in managerial positions in the central operations of urban school districts.

Superintendent Demand and Search Process

In their survey of school superintendents conducted in 2000, the National Center for Education Statistics and American Association of School Administrators found that:
• 80 percent of the respondents were at retirement-eligible age
• An estimated 6,000 new school superintendents needed nationwide between 2000-2005

The Superintendent Crisis: A Review by Search Consultants by Thomas Glass, University of Memphis, 2001
• 60% of the search consultants responded that applicant pools are decreasing in size
• The average pool consisted of approximately 30 to 40 applicants
• 33% of the search consultants responded that applicant pools are decreasing in quality

The consultants evaluated the level of preparation of applicants:
• 13% of the search consultants found applicant pools to be .very well- prepared..
• 43% of the consultants found applicant pools .prepared..
• 40% of the respondents found applicant pools to have either .some. or .many. deficiencies.

The consultants cited several actions that would improve the quality and quantity of applicant pools, including (in order of priority):
• Less board micro-management
• Transportable retirement systems
• Better qualified boards
• Higher salaries and improved fringe benefits
• A more positive media presence.

The consultants also evaluated the skills of applicants who were finalists for vacant superintendent positions:
• Strong marks were given to the finalists. skills in communication, community relations and leadership.
• Lower marks were given to the finalists. skills in providing instructional leadership and financial management.

The search consultants reported on the skills they believed most important to superintendent success:
• Skills considered important to success include communication and interpersonal skills and school board relationship-building skills.
• Skills considered less important to superintendent success include skill in financial management and instructional leadership.

The search consultants reported the following information about the superintendent search process:
• A majority of searches last three to five months. The extensive time consumed by a search is a problem for many districts.
• Retirement is the chief reason given by consultants for superintendent vacancies. Superintendents not having a good relationship with the board or moving to larger districts are the second and third most mentioned reasons, respectively.
• A majority of the search consultants reported meeting with school boards four to six times during the search process. Search consultants typically meet not only with board members, but district staff and community members as they help develop a list of qualifications listed on the vacancy announcement.
• Twenty-one of the 30 search consultants indicate board members visit districts of finalists for superintendent vacancies. Such visits often are looked upon by employed superintendents as potentially damaging to the working relationship with their present board. Many superintendents believe this practice is not needed until an actual contract is offered.
• On average, four to six finalists are invited to attend in-district interviews. These finalists generally visit a district twice for separate interview sessions with the board, community members, parents, business community members, teachers, media and even students.
• 37% of the search consultants reported encountering boards not working well together to the extent of interfering with the search.

Superintendents and Reform

"Turnover at the Top: Superintendent vacancies challenge big-city boards."
By Bruce Buchanan
American School Board Journal, December 2004

A 2003 study by the University of Washington found that many urban superintendents feel they don't have the authority they need to do their jobs. Researchers surveyed superintendents of the country's 100 largest districts and found 90 percent believe they need more power to hire and fire employees, reconfigure struggling schools, and make curriculum changes.

Superintendents surveyed in the University of Washington study said politics often stymie their efforts to improve schools. Sixty percent of the respondents said their school boards interfere too much in the day-to-day details of running the district.

Bureaucracy and school leadership
Reason Magazine, May, 2002
by Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The policy research organization Public Agenda recently set about to answer that question. It surveyed 1800 principals and superintendents. The results are fascinating, sobering, and fraught with policy implications. Key findings include the following:

1. "Superintendents and principals ... voice confidence that they can improve public education, but say their effectiveness is hampered by politics and bureaucracy." Four-fifths (80%) of superintendents and half the principals cite that as the main reason talented people vacate those roles. Among their foremost gripes: excessive litigation, "teacher union fanatics," and school board meddling.
2. "What superintendents and principals need most, they say, is more freedom to do their jobs as they see fit--especially the freedom to reward and fire teachers." Fewer than one-third say they have the autonomy and authority either to "reward outstanding teachers and staff" or to "remove ineffective teachers from the classroom." (By contrast, four-fifths say they have the freedom to deal with student discipline.)
3. "School leaders are far less worried about standards and accountability than about politics and bureaucracy." Although principals and superintendents have multifarious complaints about standardized testing as used in their districts--and superintendents are far more bullish about test-based accountability arrangements than are principals--they're much more bothered by the shackles on their wrists.
4. They are concerned about money. Yet almost three-quarters say they can manage with the budgets that they have. Most vexing on the resource front are external mandates that limit their ability to spend those budgets as they think best. The worst offender is special education for disabled youngsters. "According to 84 percent of superintendents and 65 percent of principals ... special education issues exact an inordinate amount of district money and other resources."
5. Administrators believe that today's university-based training programs for "school leaders" are not adequate. Sixty-nine percent of principals and 80 percent of superintendents say such programs are "out of touch with the realities of what it takes to run today's schools." One principal commented, "If you want more qualified superintendents, change the focus of prep programs from making researchers to creating practitioners."

Articles of Interest

Outside the Ropes
By Scott LaFee
School Administrator 61 no10 34-9 N 2004

Superintendents from business and the military learn about system leadership informally and in seminars
      If there's one thing you can say about nontraditional superintendents--the men and women of business, government and the military who leave those fields to become school system leaders--it's that they never take the easy job.
      "School districts tend to look outside for a superintendent only when things have gotten so bad that doing the same old thing just doesn't feel like it's going to work," says Thomas Vander Ark, executive director of education and scholarship programs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a former business-man-turned-superintendent in Federal Way, Wash., from 1994 through 1999.
      "That's when boards start looking at alternative sources for a new superintendent, someone who will generally come into a job embraced by all manner of unreasonable expectations."
      And why not?
      Nontraditional superintendents are, almost by definition, great achievers'--at least based on their resumes in industry, politics or the military. These are people who have founded or run successful companies. They have been elected to public office. They are, in the words of Gilbert and Sullivan, "the very model of a modern Major-General."
      "That's not to say they don't come into their new jobs as superintendents without considerable trepidation," says Don McAdams, president of the Center for Reform of School Systems in Houston. "They know they're going into something outside their experience base. They know it's going to be tough. But they also think they can do it. They think they have something to offer."

Complex Challenges
      To be sure, most superintendents work their way up through the system. They begin as teachers, become principals and get promoted to the central office where they tackle ever-larger management roles. That's the traditional route.
      Nontraditional superintendents are a decided minority, though an expanding one. They work in all types of school districts, though most tend to receive appointments in larger, more urban systems.
      "When school boards start looking at nontraditional superintendents, they're looking for fundamental change," says McAdams, who formerly served on the school board in Houston. "They're saying that they don't believe that there's just one system or way of doing things."
      Such thinking is fairly common in big urban districts, where the issues are not merely myriad and confoundingly complex but also attain scales unseen in smaller districts.
      "You've got to remember a lot of urban districts are dysfunctional, low-performing. They need and want to change," McAdams says. "Many suburban districts, on the other hand, are pretty much well-oiled machines. Things work. That doesn't mean they don't have problems. but their problems are smaller. Big districts have big problems."
      A smaller district wrestling with the routine crises of education--making sure there are enough textbooks, that the buses run on time, that students with significant disabilities receive appropriate placements, that student performance meets the new federal standards of progress--isn't going to venture far into the un-known for a new superintendent. It doesn't need to and wouldn't want to for practical reasons.
      "Smaller districts have smaller management teams," McAdams says. "A superintendent must handle more of the nittygritty. He or she is more engaged in a fuller range of activities than a superintendent in a big district. A nontraditional superintendent coming in from, say, a big corporation, would have little or no knowledge about the finer points of running a small school district and there would be no one to turn to for help. Large districts have experts in every imaginable field: facilities, accounting, contracts, curriculum. In a small district, the superintendent probably wears most of those hats."

Training Programs
      Traditional and nontraditional superintendents do share at least one thing, says Tim Quinn, managing director of the Broad Urban Superintendents Academy, a rigorous, 10-month training program for public school chief executives. About half of the program's participants over the past three years have come from non-education fields.
      "It's the qualities of leadership. Both kinds know how to lead," says Quinn, who also heads the Michigan Leadership Institute, a private corporation that promotes professional development of leaders for school districts and other public service organizations. The Urban Superintendents Academy is funded by the Broad Center for Management of School Systems, part of the Los Angeles-based Broad Foundation.
      "The thing nontraditional superintendents don't have coming into their jobs is history, a knowledge of all of the things that can and cannot be done. As a result, they take a fresh approach. They don't accept that things can't be done because they come from worlds where things do get done, where excuses aren't accepted. Whether in reality all things are possible, I don't know. Reality is probably different from what they expected."
      That's a fact new nontraditional superintendents learn fast.
      "Most have some idea of what they're getting into," Quinn says. "But they are still quite surprised, generally, by how the system works, who has control and to what degree, the restrictions on how funds can be used, all of the regulations. Union contracts tend to be a real eyeopener."
      Vander Ark, who served as a consultant for Capgemini, a national business technology firm, before accepting the superintendency of the Federal Way, Wash., school district, says being a non-traditional superintendent, especially in the first couple of years, is extremely demanding. "The learning curve is steep. There's often a widespread impression that you don't understand and will never understand what it's really like to be an educator," he observes.
      "On the plus side, nontraditional superintendents have the benefit of being able to ask a lot of dumb questions. They can question everything. Sometimes this can set off landmines or offend incumbents in the system, but being new means bringing something new to the table. You can make impatience a virtue in the sense that you translate it into a sense of urgency."
      Of course the best and most successful nontraditional superintendents find ways to promote their vision and implement their changes with the fewest explosions and/or hurt feelings. How they accomplish that is what this story is about. Below are brief profiles of four nontraditional superintendents: Joseph Wise of the Christina School District in Delaware; Paula M. Dawning of Benton Harbor Area Schools in Michigan; Don Gaetz of Okaloosa County Public Schools in Florida; and Raymond F. Arment III of the Eatonville School District in Washington.
      Wise, Dawning, Gaetz and Arment were all successful before they became superintendents. All can still make that claim. How did they do it? Where did they turn for guidance, insight and wisdom for leading a public school system? What do they think makes a good leader? Can a good leader lead anywhere?
      Even in education?

Joseph Wise Christina School District, Newark, Del.
      Shortly after he became superintendent of the Christina School District in September 2003, Joseph Wise began a four-month tour of every school in the district, the largest in Delaware with 28 campuses and 20,000 students, pre-kindergarten through the 12th grade.
      Wise visited, at his count, 417 classrooms. He did it to get to know the schools, their staffs and the students. He did it to let them get to know him.
      Certainly there was curiosity. Wise arrived as an outsider, though one with some educational credentials. He had once been a teacher (in Orlando, Fla.) and had served as associate superintendent for organizational development in Anne Arundel County in Maryland and interim senior assistant superintendent for planning with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system in North Carolina.
      But the bulk of his resume was business-related: chairman and chief executive officer for eSchool Solutions, an Orlando-based educational technology firm, and director of organizational development, employment and resort entertainment for the Disney World division of the Walt Disney Co.
      Wise was hired to resolve a worsening financial crisis and shake the school district out of its doldrums, to "rock the paradigms," according to The Business Ledger, a local newspaper. He acted quickly, revamping accounting procedures and asking for a state audit of the district's books and an independent evaluation of all district programs. He says he's tried hard to get everyone to buy into his administration, to see that they have a place, a role, a responsibility.
      Principals, for example, are expected to act "like CEOs, not Waffle House managers," he says. They develop their own budgets and run their own schools within broad, but precise, parameters.
      "It's both tight and loose," Wise says. "The tight part is the curriculum, the pacing, the standards. These are not negotiable. These are where principals and schools must be held accountable. The loose part is in the application. If a school is doing something that works, great. Every school doesn't have to be exactly the same, as long as they get results. I try to let people do their jobs and only get hands-on if a situation becomes bad."

Past Experiences
      Perhaps because he's moved back and forth between education and the private sector, Wise doesn't see much difference between the two.
      "Bureaucracies are pretty much the same everywhere, in school districts and in theme parks. There's a difference in how success is perceived, of course. In business, profits are the scorecard. It's all about making money. The bottom line in education is not as clear because obviously we're talking about educating children, not selling a product. But the difference between success and failure is still a lot clearer than some people say. You can tell when something's working or not. You can hold people accountable."
      (And Wise does. In less than a year on the job, he changed 80 percent of the school principals in his district, saying, "It's my job to not only get the right people on the bus, but get them in the right seats.")
      Wise says he draws strongly upon past personal experience, but also reads widely. "I'm a huge fan of a number of writers, though not necessarily in education."
      He likes Jim Collins, author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... And Others Don't and Charlotte Danielson, who has written several education-themed books, most recently Enhancing Student Achievement; A Framework for School Improvement. He is a big believer in the work of the late Don Clifton, former chairman of The Gallup Organization and chief designer of the Clifton StrengthsFinder Profile, a 25-year-old program that helps participants to identify and reinforce their personal strengths.
      Wise says he also keeps tabs on the work of Phillip Schlechty, whose Louisville, Ky.-based Center for Leadership in School Reform advocates institutional change that leads to quality work.
      Wise believes he can bring significant academic gains to Christina. He knows he has to try.
      "I decided to become a superintendent because, with the enactment of No Child Left Behind, the growing achievement gap between the haves and the have-nots, the ongoing war on poor people, I thought it was time for all hands on deck.
      "I didn't think or want to remain in business. I thought helping get public education fixed was probably the most important thing I could do in a democracy."

Paula M. Dawning Benton Harbor Area Schools, Benton Harbor, Mich.
      After two decades as an executive at AT&T, Paula Dawning decided it was time to do something else. "I had this internal feeling of needing to give something back," she says.
      But what to do? Dawning thought hard. One day, she says, she prayed for inspiration. A few minutes later, an e-mail arrived from a friend passing along some information about a place called the Broad Academy.
      Created and funded by business magnate Eli Broad and operated through the Broad Center for Management of School System, the Broad Urban Superintendents Academy is a 10-month program designed to bring business executives and others up to speed on the demands and leadership skills involved in running not just a school, but an entire school system.
      Participants retain their full-time jobs and attend academy sessions over seven extended weekends around the country, during which time Broad Center staff and outside experts cover subjects like effective leadership, school governance, implementing institutional change, boosting student achievement and finding that first superintendent's position.
      Descriptions of the academy intrigued Dawning. They inspired her. She quickly applied for a position in the next class and was accepted. She was on her way.
      Before enrolling in Broad, Dawning did a little homework. She visited a school district in Omaha, Neb., where she had friends. She interviewed principals, some retired administrators and an assistant superintendent.
      "I didn't want to be naive to the challenges," she says.

Opportunity Knocking
      Attending Broad expanded and refined her knowledge. It also provided networking in a new field. She received her first shot at a superintendency even before she had finished the leadership training program.
      "Someone in the Broad Institute knew someone at Benton Harbor who said they were looking for a superintendent. Somebody knew I was born in South Bend, which is close by. It was opportunity knocking, but I still spent a lot of time meditating and praying about whether I should go for the job."
      Dawning was the only job candidate without traditional credentials. The school board, struggling with serious financial and academic issues in 2001, was looking for someone who could look at the district as a business. "They wanted someone with academic experience and business acumen," she says.
      Dawning had both--a master's degree in adult counseling from Boston University, a master's in business administration and 20 years of marketing and sales management experience at AT&T.
      Dawning landed the job in July 2002. Neither her experience nor her Broad training fully prepared her for the reality of running the 5,300-student K-12 district. "I began in a time of economic recession, when we needed to make cuts and yet I could see what we really needed were new programs to boost academics. I'd never seen a financial model like education, where revenue streams are' fully variable but business costs are essentially fixed. My enrollment declines and I lose funding, but my costs don't change. Rather, they go up. Teachers want raises. Everything gets more expensive."

Peer Influence
      She has learned to adapt. Her business experience, her exposure to cutting-edge technologies at AT&T, her knowledge of how to manage large numbers of people have all paid off. "Everything I've learned comes into play," she says.
      And Dawning is still learning. She says she reads constantly, "but not necessarily books. I read a lot online. I read a lot of newsletters."
      Attending relevant conferences is another primary source of knowledge, she says. And talking to her superintendent peers. "I belong to a group of African-American superintendents. We have a lot of conversations. Most of us head similar sorts of districts so we talk about issues like poverty, single households, student preparation and readiness, parent participation. We compare our most effective strategies."
      Working in education has been a little bumpy, she says. It's clearly not like the business world. Being a superintendent isn't a job, it's a lifestyle.
      "At first my staff didn't know quite where I was coming from when I started asking for data, for rational approaches to programs, says Dawning, who held management roles in sales, marketing and technology during her two decades with AT&T. "But we're all on the same page now. I'm the accountability queen. I talk in terms of outcomes, not programs. Children are our brand. We are known by our success in educating them.
      "When I lost a big account in the business world, it would bother me. But it wasn't like I was messing with someone's life. Education is different. We're talking about preparing children for their lives. If we mess up, that child is not going to get that chance back."

Don Guetz Okaloosa County School District, Fort Walton Beach, Fla.
      There's no disputing that Don Gaetz has turned things around in the Okaloosa County School District.
      In 1999, no school in the 28,000-student district had rated a grade better than C on a state formula that measures student proficiencies and rate of improvement at every public school in Florida.
      Gaetz knew well the sting of that assessment. He was a parent and a school board member in the district, first elected in 1994, then again in 1998. He says he thought the school district "could do better, especially in a county with a highly educated population."
      That belief, coupled with a financial scandal in the school district, prompted him to run for the superintendent's office, an elected position, in 2000. He prevailed in a three-way race, winning 76 percent of the vote.
      Gaetz says he did not run for superintendent as an education expert. He was a businessman, co-founder of the VITAS Healthcare Corp., one of the nation's largest providers of hospice services to terminally ill patients and their families with more than 5,000 employees working in 24 cities and annual revenues approaching $500 million. (Gaetz and his partners sold their controlling interest in the company earlier this year.)
      The local business community thought Gaetz could instill a similar sort of success in the Okaloosa County school district and pushed hard for his election. Gaetz wasn't quite so certain but was eager to try.
      "I founded a health care company without any knowledge of health care. I've made a career of treading where angels fear to go," he says, chuckling. "I had a lot of doubts going in. And I very quickly realized I couldn't lay a classical business template over education. There were some false starts."

Sweeping Appointments
      But he had ideas and a business-inspired agenda, which he advocated with the fervor of a corporate president who knows he must answer to stockholders. Gaetz slashed administrative costs and eliminated 41 central-office positions. The savings were funneled to individual schools where principals and parent-teacher advisory councils control 91 percent of revenues.
      In return, Gaetz demanded accountability. He made sure he got it by installing the right people for each job. "I thought it was my job to find the strongest, brightest education leaders in the district, people who may have become marginalized."
      One result: He replaced almost every principal in the district.
      His efforts were sometimes unsettling and Gaetz is not without his critics, but it's hard to dismiss the results. In the latest statewide assessment, 86 percent of Okaloosa's schools earned the grade of A. No school was rated lower than a B. For the second consecutive year, Okaloosa topped the state's 67 counties with the biggest percentage of high-performing schools. No district in the state, crowed Gaetz, is rated higher academically.
      Gaetz graciously diverts compliments to his fellow administrators and teaching staff. He says improvement came, in some ways, simply by reducing "institutional inertia."
      "Institutions can get used to doing things a certain way," he sighs.
      His contribution was to offer a different path, to propose alternative options.
      He stays on top of things by being a self-described "voracious reader" of everything written about education management and learning practices. In some ways, it's a simple matter of survival.
      "When the cabinet gathers around the table to discuss, say, math proficiencies, I'm the least experienced person in the room. So I read a lot and I listen a lot."
      He also turns to his peers, like colleague John Rogers, the veteran superintendent of Santa Rosa County District Schools in Milton, Fla.
      "John has more than three decades as a teacher, principal, administrator and mentor. He can speak with the voice of experience. With him, I can share ideas."

Raymond F. Arment III Eatonville School District 404, Eatonville, Wash.
      Ray Arment isn't quite the traditional nontraditional superintendent. That is to say, there's quite a bit of education in his background and his blood. He majored in the subject and earned a teaching certificate in Pennsylvania. His parents were educators.
      But before Arment could become fully engaged in the teaching profession as a young man, he went to war. "It was the time of Vietnam. I joined the Army. I just stayed longer than most of my friends."
      In fact, Arment remained on active duty for 28 years. When he retired, he was a colonel looking for a new mission. He found it at the age of 52 in Eatonville, a small town of 2,000 residents located 30 miles southeast of Tacoma at the edge of Mount Rainier National Park.
      In 1998, the Eatonville school board was looking for somebody different, but not just for difference's sake. They had had plenty of that with four superintendents in eight years. Arment has lasted longer than any.
      "Coming in I felt like Rip van Winkle," he says chuckling. "I was full of ideas from my undergraduate days in the '70s, but obviously everything had changed. There had been three decades' worth of research and learning. People knew a lot more."
      Arment worked hard to catch up, but he says learning to be an effective superintendent isn't much different from learning to be an effective military officer. "It's all about taking time to think and communicate. Contrary to what people might think, there's a lot of give and take in the Army. Military decisions might be a little more formal, but they're still collaborative."
      It's the same with leadership, he says. "There are certain ethics and principles that are common. In education, though, they have to be coupled with a caring commitment. You have to believe in this work. I was offered jobs in defense industries after I retired from the Army for much greater salaries, but I didn't have any passion for them."
      If passion comes from within, Arment finds inspiration and direction from without, from talking with fellow superintendents, from reading various education-related magazines and from spending time with students.
      "Like any job, there are great days and tough days. On tough days, there's nothing better than to go read a book to a 1st grader or eat lunch with some middle school students. They're not afraid to tell you what you need to know."
ADDED MATERIAL
      Scott LaFee is a staff writer with the San Diego Union-Tribune. E-mail: scott.lafee@uniontrib.com

Roster: Superintendents From Nontraditional Fields
      This is an up-to-date list of superintendents who came into school system administration from a completely different career-field.
      * Raymond F. Arment III: superintendent, Eatonville, Wash., appointed July 1998; previously U.S. Army colonel
      * Alan D. Bersin: superintendent, San Diego Unified School District, appointed July 1998; previously U.S. attorney, San Diego, Calif.
      * Paula Dawning: superintendent, Benton Harbor, Mich., appointed July 2002; previously vice president of sales at AT&T
      * John C. Fryer Jr.: superintendent, Duval County Public Schools, Jacksonville, Fla., appointed June 1998; previously U.S. Air Force major general
      * Don Gaetz: superintendent, Okaloosa County Public Schools, Fort Walton Beach, Fla., elected November 2000; previously owner of VITAS Health Care Corp. in Miami
      * Joel I. Klein: chancellor, New York City Public Schools, appointed July 2002; previously CEO of Bertelsmann USA, and assistant attorney general, U.S. Justice Department
      * Joseph J. Redden: superintendent, Cobb County, Ga., appointed November 2000; previously U.S. Air Force general
      * John F. O'Sullivan Jr.: superintendent, Savannah-Chatham County, Ga., appointed April 2001; previously U.S. Air Force colonel
      * Roy Romer: superintendent, Los Angeles Unified School District, appointed July 2000; previously Colorado governor
      * Paul Vallas: chief executive officer, Philadelphia Public Schools, appointed July 2002; previously budget director, city of Chicago, and CEO, Chicago Public Schools
      * Michael Wank: superintendent, Seneca East Local Schools, Attica, Ohio, appointed August 1998; previously vice president of enrollment services, St. Francis College, Fort Wayne, Ind.
      * Joseph Wise: superintendent, Christina, Del., appointed 2003; previously, CEO of eSchool Solutions in Orlando, Fla., and an executive with the Walt Disney Co.

Nontraditional Thinking in the Central Office
By Jay Mathews
School Administrator 58 no6 6-11 Je 2001

      When Brian L. Benzel remembers his friend John Stanford, one of the earliest and most notable of America's new breed of nontraditional school superintendents, it is the spirit rather than the mechanics of Stanford's success that first comes to mind.
      "John Stanford changed the public's perception of the Seattle school system," says Benzel, who was superintendent of a neighboring district when the former U.S. Army major general took charge in 1995. "He brought hope and energy to the system. His charismatic presence was demonstrated by a positive, 'can-do' attitude."
      But that enthusiasm and energy, characteristic of the many new superintendents who have arrived from the fields of business, law and the military, focused on one thing--results. Stanford wanted a clear accounting of the district's financial health and the achievement of its students so that he knew exactly what needed to be done, just as he had had to do when he oversaw all transportation plans and programs for Operation Desert Storm.
      Stanford set the tone by making students and parents and their complaints about bad service the first thing he talked about when he met reporters to discuss his new job. In Chicago and New York, San Diego and Oklahoma City, wherever a nontraditional superintendent has been hired by a school board eager for a change, the first administrative changes have almost always pushed school staff toward making more frequent and more accurate measurements of what is going on. The word "customers" was not so popular in schools before the nontraditional superintendents arrived, but many of them use it without embarrassment and their message is that the people being served must be satisfied.
      Benzel, now the chief operating officer in the Seattle system, joined Stanford's management team when the former general was fighting a losing battle with the leukemia that would take his life in November 1998. He says Stanford "brought a rigorous focus on customer service. He created a unit in the district that still exists to coordinate and respond to the public: parents, citizens, businesses, etc. ... He proclaimed early and often that the system would be student-focused and he rallied the public, educators, support staff and students to that cause."

BOTTOM-LINE FOCUS
      This is the direction most school districts are now going, some with more success than others. The focus on students and parents has been interpreted by some as administrators putting too much emphasis on standards and testing and too much pressure on students who may not be able to attain new levels of achievement required for promotion or graduation.
      But there seems no sign that the movement is slackening. If anything, more districts are looking for their own self-confident new superintendent who might, like John Stanford, have wide experience in another profession and know new ways to make schools work.
      "The new emphasis is on results," says Michael Usdan, president of the Washington-based Institute for Educational Leadership, who with Stanford University professor Larry Cuban is compiling a book on the rapid change in school district governance. "That means student achievement. That is what they were brought in to do."
      The insistence on school achievement rather than administrative comfort goes back to an early nontraditional superintendent, Howard Fuller. He was the Milwaukee County health and human services director in 1991 when he switched jobs and became school superintendent.
      "I eliminated the area superintendents and flattened out the bureaucracy, getting rid of a number of associate and assistant superintendents," he says. "My first budget contained no raises for anyone in the district. I did that to keep from cutting programs for kids" in the economic downturn of the early 1990s.
      In each district with a new nontraditional superintendent, the approach has been slightly different, depending on customs, finances and personalities. In most cases, outsider methodology includes some of what Fuller and Stanford did, getting more money to where it would do the most good.
      Arriving in Seattle in 1995 after four years as manager of Fulton County, Ga., Stanford worked with Joseph Olchefske, then his chief financial officer and now his successor as superintendent, on a weighted student funding process. Parents and students were given a chance to choose the school they wanted. When they moved, the money to meet their educational needs went with them. The formula approved by the Seattle school board in December 1996 allotted more money for students who had extra disadvantages, like poor English or low-in-come parents.
      With help from Roger Erskine of the Seattle Education Association, the teachers' bargaining unit, Stanford changed the philosophy of the teacher contract. "Teacher seniority was eliminated as the basis for school selection and replaced with a process that allowed schools, with teachers as their leadership team, to select the staff at their school that would best meet the academic achievement plan the school developed to implement their program," Benzel says.
      Finally, Stanford brought together all the services that had been allowed to develop their own fiefdoms in district offices. A new logistics department took over transportation, maintenance, landscaping, custodial work, warehouses, purchasing, printing and property management. Stanford thought such coordination was essential and "he was tenacious about being mission-driven," Benzel adds.

BETTER ANALYSIS
      Much the same has happened in other big cities that have brought in nontraditional superintendents. Paul Vallas, appointed CEO of the Chicago school system shortly after Stanford took charge in Seattle, was even more drastic in his cleansing and restructuring of his school system's broken administrative structure. "I pretty much replaced every department head and every program director, not only the top spot but I went two or three deep in some places," Vallas says.
      He had been put in charge of the state-ordered overhaul of the Chicago system by Mayor Richard Daley after he had spent five years as the city budget director and director of revenue. He had taught public finance at Sangamon State University and been a revenue analyst in the state senate. Financial accountability was vital to his plans, and in the course of a few weeks he consolidated operations along corporate lines with many budgeting experts like himself in key positions.
      In New York, nontraditional schools chancellor Harold O. Levy's 1 1/2-year reign has been distinguished by similarly strong efforts to reduce fat and improve analysis at his headquarters in Brooklyn. So far, he has left most matters of curricular reform to deputy chancellor for instruction Judith A. Rizzo.
      Levy, an attorney who formerly worked for Citigroup, has cut away a thick outer layer of regulations and hired a half dozen senior executives with business and political backgrounds to get a better handle on how to measure and motivate school progress.
      When I got here there was basically no quality control," Levy says. "When I first convened the senior cabinet there was basically no professional development person, no training person, no management systems person, no quality control person and not much of an internal audit function. Other than that, it was perfect."
      A year later, he says, "we are a much more data-driven institution." Faced with a fractured administrative setup, Levy adds, "I have obliterated the line between the operational and the instructional sectors and established cross-cutting task forces to make the place run in a tighter fashion."
      In San Diego, another lawyer-turned-superintendent, former federal prosecutor Alan D. Bersin, reorganized his central office to achieve a 20 percent reduction in staff, using the savings for teaching and learning. But he put much more emphasis in the first two years of his leadership of the 145,000-student system on raising achievement rather than just restructuring supervision.
      Bersin announced that he planned to improve the quality of principals and vice principals. He looked for people who focused on student achievement and used money wisely. He ordered principals to begin spending at least two hours a day helping teachers improve their techniques.
      Now, having succeeded in raising scores significantly in most of the city schools, Bersin says he is looking at the business side of the district office to seek more ways to reduce expenditures without harming vital services.

CUSTOMERS FIRST
      When Bill Weitzel, a former business professor at University of Oklahoma, was named CEO of the Oklahoma City Public Schools last summer, the managerial consultant put his first emphasis, as Bersin did, on the quality and working styles of principals.
      Weitzel established a site-based management system that gave principals more authority. But he says he could not go as far as he wanted because information systems--the factor Levy complained so much about in New York--were not yet adequate to tell which principals were effective and which were not.
      Weitzel also eagerly pursued the John Stanford approach of giving new life to the idea of customer service. He had been advising companies for 30 years on how to increase profits, and this seemed to him a very meaningful dimension to making schools work.
      "We have had more than 35 meetings throughout the city in each neighborhood to provide citizens with opportunities to tell us what they think about our schools, our service to their children and to the communities in which the schools are located," Weitzel says. "They addressed difficulties related to the aged transportation system and to the buildings that average more than 47 years of age and have not been maintained due to lack of bond money."
      One of the most energetic of the new nontraditional superintendents, former Air Force Maj. Gen. John C. Fryer Jr., has made many of the same moves. He has reached out to parents, worked on the leadership style of principals, tried to reduce inefficiencies and improved the quality of information. But he said he purposely refrained from making severe changes in his senior staff when in June 1998 he took over the schools in Duval County, Fla., which includes Jacksonville.
      "I rarely got to choose what team I had in the Air Force," he says. "It was given to me. Over time, of course, I hired replacements whom I hand picked, and occasionally I fired someone. But I learned that the key to successful leadership is not necessarily in assembling the dream team, but in making a dream team of the one you have."
      Instead, he asked questions that forced headquarters staff to reconsider their way of doing business. At a meeting to discuss a hodge-podge of reading programs, each with its own funding sources, he asked, "Can anyone tell me how many reading programs we have, what they are all intended to do, what they cost per student and what results we have seen?" The blank stares were followed by six weeks of staff review of all district academic programs and the abandonment of those that were duplicative or not working.
      Fryer arranged for his staff and principals to learn the Kepner-Tregoe decision-analysis system in which, he says, "tough work is put into defining the problem, the decision needed, the alternatives, the weights given to those alternatives and the risks associated with any chosen alternative."
      He discontinued the practice of gathering principals monthly for long updates on policies and programs. Instead, he ordered that such information be sent out by memo and turned the monthly meetings into training sessions, led by invited experts, to immerse principals in the latest curricular advances. That way, he says, they could become strong instructional leaders.
      On Florida's new school rating system, Fryer and his principals and teachers managed to increase the number of schools with the top grades of A or B from 18 to 31 and reduced the number of F schools from five to one. SAT scores have gone up, the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs have received national recognition and the chief researcher of the Third International Math and Science Study has called the district's curriculum "world class."

SHARING CONTROL
      That emphasis on getting the best information on schools, making improvements and letting everyone know about them has been adopted by nontraditional superintendents in smaller school districts as well.
      Michael Wank, formerly vice president of enrollment services for St. Francis College in Fort Wayne, Ind., says his career as a college admissions officer "was very customer oriented, customer-driven. I had to get the good news out about my college and make sure contacts made were followed up. I also had to make sure that everyone in my office followed up, not just me."
      Now installed as superintendent of the Seneca East Local Schools in Seneca, Ohio, Wank says he is "looking at students and parents as our customers, people who are actively involved in the product we offer." That attitude, he adds, "is a very positive way of keeping people informed and involved."
      Wank says he is also giving principals and teachers more decision-making power. "I have asked the principals to take more control over the operations of their buildings rather than come to me for answers. It is more of a management model than education typically uses," he says. "I have also opened up the school decision-making process to the community on a much broader scale. When the community is involved, they really support the activities in the schools."
      As a result, Wank says, "the community notices a lot more opportunities to get involved, and the staff notices that they are being held accountable but given authority to utilize their expertise. This makes some of them uncomfortable, but it's crucial if we are to have a well-run system that utilizes everyone's talents."
      James Coolican, a retired Marine colonel who now runs the 9,200-student Peninsula School District in Gig Harbor, Wash., also put the emphasis on student learning, dramatizing his commitment with an unusual allocation of his time. "One third I would devote to the central office, one third to the community and one third to the classroom," he says. "I spend two days of every week in classes."
      There were three assistant superintendents when he took the job in July 1999. He made one of them deputy superintendent for support and operations, effectively the day-to-day leader of the district for the two-thirds of the time Coolican is not in his office. He told principals to contact him directly whenever they liked.
      "In the Marine Corps, the commanding officer has to be out with the troops," Coolican says. "I wanted the teachers and the building administrators to believe that the central office was there to support them and not the other way around."
      Finding the superintendent sitting in the back of their classrooms has been unnerving for some teachers, but Coolican says he thinks they have become more comfortable with his presence and more willing to tell him what needs to be done to help their students. "I have never left a classroom and talked to a principal about anything that would be critical of a teacher, and they know that," he says.

DIFFERING SKILLS
      Once a district has taken on a nontraditional superintendent, can it ever go back to a boss with only educational credentials? There hasn't been enough time for this to happen very often, although the D.C. schools seemed to encounter few problems when veteran educator Arlene Ackerman replaced former Army Gen. Julius W. Becton Jr. as head of the system in 1998.
      Ackerman, however, was a special case. She had worked with Stanford in Seattle and had a keen appreciation of the need for modern business techniques in large urban school districts.
      As New York City's chancellor, Levy says mega-districts like his always are going to need leaders who have been supervisors in other fields. "It is clear to me that the person who sits in this job needs to have experience either running or being intimately involved with large complex organizations that are well run," he says. "The skill set of the superintendent of a large district needs to be radically different from the skill set of someone who runs a high school."
      "That is not to say that instructional knowledge is not important," Levy adds. But it is necessary, he says, to have at least one of the top two people be comfortable with the requirements of results-oriented, quick-reacting corporate management.

PERSONAL ADVENTURE
      In most cases, nontraditional superintendents have not been in office long enough to assess their results in any scientific way. Their managerial experience tells them that premature congratulations can be deadly.
      "Anecdotally, the union president says that morale is higher now than anytime in the last 10 years," says Weitzel, who heads Oklahoma City's schools. "Principals say they feel empowered even though we are not completely finished in moving to a site-based approach.... But we are not far enough into the change process to talk definitively about the positive changes."
      Those few nontraditional superintendents who have been in the job for several years or finished their tours look back with some satisfaction that they helped bring the right changes. They also say they appreciate the freedom they enjoyed from having established their reputations in another field and being willing to risk failure in what was, for them, an adventure and not a job that would define their careers.
      "The basic thing was my willingness to radically change the system," says Fuller, who led the Milwaukee system in the early 1990s. "Because I came in from the outside, I was not married to the system."
      Vallas in Chicago told Illinois Issues magazine in 1999: "I'm in a great position. I don't want to be a lifetime school superintendent. I don't want to be an education consultant when I'm done here. I'm not setting the stage for a political office. If I physically survive this job and accomplish what I hope to accomplish and what the mayor hopes to accomplish, then my ticket is written: I'm going to heaven. I can go back and become a normal person and try to raise my kids and spend time with my family."
      In Seattle, John Stanford's successor, Joseph Olchefske, has continued to make administrative changes. Like his mentor and predecessor, Olchefske also qualifies as a nontraditional superintend-ent. Before going to work for Stanford, he was the organizing executive of the Seattle office of Piper Jaffray, a brokerage and investment firm.
      He helped Stanford shift resources and balance the budget with the weighted student formula system. They also turned the deputy superintendent positions in the district into a chief academic officer to oversee schools and a chief operating officer to deal with their consolidated support services, as well as finance, human resources, technology, capital facilities, communications and government affairs.
      The newest plan in Seattle is to make the administrative system support the goal of altering instruction to fit the new state learning standards. This is just as Stanford intended it, a matter of customer service. The district has developed a logo and a slogan for the effort, "Delivering the Dream." Once the board adopted the standards in 1999, Benzel says, the rollout "took on the look and feel of a comprehensive marketing and change campaign," with administrators worrying not only about what teachers were teaching but what students and parents understood of the nature and purpose of the changes.
      From the Stanford administration to the Olchefske administration, Benzel says, improving each child's performance on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning tests has been the most important objective.
      A school district that adopted modern management techniques and made poor customer service a firing offense has seen the desired result, higher achievement. "Notable in the increases," Benzel says, "is the reality that students of color are improving the fastest. The district still has much growth and learning to achieve, but it is making steady and dramatic progress."

ROSTER OF NONTRADITIONAL SUPERINTENDENTS
      The following is a comprehensive list of nontraditional educators appointed to the superintendency. It includes those who currently serve and those who previously served.

CURRENT:
      Raymond F. Arment III: superintendent, Eatonville, Wash., appointed July 1998; previously U.S. Army colonel
      Alan D. Bersin: superintendent, San Diego Unified School District, appointed July 1998; previously U.S. attorney, San Diego, Calif.
      J.J. Coolican: superintendent, Peninsula School District, Gig Harbor, Wash., appointed July 1999; previously U.S. Marine Corps colonel
      A.G. Davis: chief executive officer, New Orleans Public Schools, appointed July 1999; previously U.S. Marine Corps colonel
      John C. Fryer Jr.: superintendent, Duval County Public Schools, Jacksonville, Fla., appointed June 1998; previously U.S. Air Force major general
      Don Gaetz: superintendent, Okaloosa County Public Schools, Ft. Walton Beach, Fla., elected November 2000; currently, owner of Vitas Health Care Corp. in Miami and president, Caregivers Inc.
      Philip R. Goldsmith: interim chief executive officer, Philadelphia Public Schools, appointed November 2000; previously a bank executive and managing principal, Right Management Consultants, a career development firm
      William Harner: superintendent, Greenville County, S.C., appointed July 2000; previously U.S. Army lieutenant colonel
      Harold O. Levy: chancellor, New York City Public Schools, appointed January 2000; previously an executive with Citigroup
      Adam Miller: superintendent, Madison Plains Local Schools, London, Ohio, appointed July 2000; previously an attorney with the Ohio School Boards Association, Columbus, Ohio
      Joseph Olchefske: superintendent, Seattle, Wash., Public Schools, appointed February 1999; previously investment banker, Piper Jaffray
      John F. O'Sullivan Jr.: superintendent, Savannah-Chatham County, Ga., appointed April 2001; previosuly U.S. Air Force colonel
      Joseph J. Redden: superintendent, Cobb County, Ga., appointed November 2000; previously U.S. Air Force general
      Roy Romer: superintendent, Los Angeles Unified School District, appointed July 2000; previously Colorado governor
      Paul Vallas: chief executive officer, Chicago Public Schools, appointed July 1995; previously budget director, Chicago
      Michael Wank: superintendent, Seneca East Local Schools, Attica, Ohio, appointed August 1998; previously vice president of enrollment services, St. Francis College, Fort Wayne, Ind.
      Bill Weitzel: chief executive officer, Oklahoma City, Okla., appointed July 2000; previously professor of business administration, University of Oklahoma

PAST
      Julius W. Becton Jr.: superintendent, District of Columbia Public Schools, November 1996 to June 1998; previously U.S. Army lieutenant general
      Brian Benzel: superintendent, Edmonds, Wash., July 1988 to July 1997; previously school apportionment manager for the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction and a legislative analyst
      Robert Booker: chief executive officer, Baltimore City Public Schools, July 1998 to June 2000; previously chief financial officer, San Diego County, Calif.
      Benjamin Demps Jr.: superintendent, Kansas City, Mo., August 1999 to April 2001; previously an attorney and director of the Oklahoma Department of Health and Human Services
      Howard Fuller: superintendent, Milwaukee Public Schools, June 1991 to June 1995; previously director, Milwaukee County Health and Human Services Department
      David Hornbeck: superintendent, Philadelphia Public Schools, August 1994 to August 2000; previously attorney, Hogan and Hartson, Washington, D.C.
      Peter Hutchinson: superintendent, Minneapolis Public Schools, December 1993 to June 1997; previously vice president, Dayton Hudson Corp.
      Rod Paige: superintendent, Houston Unified School District, February 1994 to January 2001; previously dean of education school, Texas Southern University
      Thomas G. Seigel: superintendent, Boulder Valley, Colo., July 1997 to June 2000; previously U.S. Navy commander
      John H. Stanford: superintendent, Seattle Public Schools, October 1995 to November 1998; previously U.S. Army major general and manager of Fulton County, Ga.
      Thomas Vander Ark: superintendent, Federal Way, Wash., September 1994 to June 1999; previously vice president, PACE Membership Warehouse

The Outsiders
By Hurwitz, Sol
The American School Board Journal v. 188 no. 6 (June 2001) p. 10-15

Profiles of four results-oriented leaders from outside the ranks of educators who were recruited by urban districts to revitalize ailing schools are provided. The people profiled are Roy Romer, superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District and former governor of Colorado; Alan D. Bersin, superintendent of San Diego Unified School System and former U.S. attorney and member of the Clinton administration; Harold O. Levy, chancellor of New York City Public Schools and former director of global compliance for Citigroup, Inc.; and Paul G. Vallas, chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools and former city budget director.

When Superintendents Become the Generals
By Philip Geiger
School Administrator 59 no2 70-1 F 2002

School boards around the country have been hiring a new breed of superintendent--military generals, a federal prosecutor, a health care executive, an investment banker and former corporate executives. The reason, they say, is that their skills are transferable between the private and public sectors and between the military and schools. They claim these individuals bring a new perspective to school management. They usually hire a No. 2 person who has an educational background who can compensate for what the CEO lacks in pedagogical knowledge and institutional understanding.
      This premise sounds plausible. After all, how difficult could it be to manage a school district? Leadership is leadership.
      Having listened to that logic for several years and now being convinced there must be something to it, I am contemplating joining the Army or the Air Force as a general or landing a job as a federal prosecutor in a big city. Now, admittedly, I do not have any military training nor do I hold a law degree, but I have seen many war movies and have watched "Law and Order" on TV since its inception.
      Furthermore, I am prepared to hire an assistant who understands the military or the law, depending upon which career I pursue. I hold an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of Finance and a doctorate from Columbia University and have more than 30 years of administrative experience, including 13 years as a school superintendent. With these transferable skills, I feel perfectly suited to my new career in the military or law.
      The reality is I am not so presumptuous to even think I could run one of those organizations, yet many retired personnel are looking at school administration as a viable second career--as if there is nothing to know or learn to run a multimillion dollar school operation. Perhaps these retired general and corporate types believe that educators are so poorly trained and incapable that anyone could do better leading a school district.
      Former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado, who is now superintendent in Los Angeles, has stated publicly that the superintendency is the toughest job he has had to date. Bravo for that admission.
      Part of the problem in many school districts is that teachers' unions have assumed an inordinate level of authority, yet not every part of their agenda coincides with the goals and objectives of the public. In fact, by their own charter, unions exist to enhance the terms and conditions of employment for their own members.
      School governance also can be a problem since school boards not only provide local oversight but also insert factional values, particular interests into school district decisions. It is a rare school board that recalls its job is to make sure schools are well run rather than trying to run the schools.
      A new superintendent is surely going to have to be equally capable in financial issues as with educational matters, but that can best be achieved through joint graduate programs in both education and business. Combined M.B.A./Ph.D. programs already exist at Stanford, Columbia, University of Southern California and other fine schools. Unfortunately many of the new breed superintendents have expertise in areas other than education. That results in the primary decision maker of a school system having no knowledge of the field that he or she is trying to manage. When challenged by staff that proposed changes won't work, it is only the experienced and knowledgeable educator who can advocate for these improvements. That person should be the district's CEO, the superintendent.

INDIFFERENT ATTITUDE
      If my fantasy of becoming a general or federal prosecutor came to pass, my new but infinitely more experienced colleagues would be appalled that a school superintendent became an instant military leader or high-profile attorney. Because school personnel seem to accept this latest trend without a whimper, school boards pass over qualified educators and appoint people who are ready to start at the top.
      Because most noneducator superintendents are retired and collecting pensions already, they have little to lose. That perhaps is the key to their success, they appear confident and assured. But indifference to satisfying legitimate interests is a poor prescription for accountability in a democratic institution.
      This is, of course, the way leaders of the public's educational business need to function. Any superintendent doing a good job must remember that friends come and go but enemies accumulate. There will be more hard decisions than easy ones and if you believe there is a sense of urgency about your work, you will make some people unhappy. But if you do your job well, you will have provided excellent leadership for a local school district, regardless of length of tenure.
      Just as in business, educational CEOs come and go, but let's at least be sure that the district's CEO has earned the substantive right to be an educational leader.