This superb article in the Texas Observer by Patrick Michels is one of the most astute and hopeful I have read in months.
It chronicles the idea of the school superintendent as super-hero: the man or woman who can reshape the schools and achieve astonishing goals solely by force of will and personality.
The story is about Mike Miles, the superintendent of Dallas, but it is really about the national scene, about the rise and fall of the myth of the Super-Superintendent, the super star who makes bold promises, sets lofty targets, disrupts the district, then moves on–either to more money or obscurity.
The working premise of the Hero Superintendent is that the system is broken and needs to be turned upside down, with lots of firings and threats.
Michels writes:
The business world’s interest in remaking public education is nothing new—calling school leaders “superintendents” became popular a century ago, when factory efficiency experts took a first pass at redesigning public schools.
America is enjoying another such moment today. Popular business literature is suffused with the idea that strong leadership has the power to improve even the most massive bureaucracy, and the education world has fallen in line. The George W. Bush Institute, the think tank tied to the presidential library at Southern Methodist University, is home to an “Alliance to Reform Education Leadership.” The Broad Superintendents Academy in Los Angeles is one of the most polarizing institutions of the current school-reform movement, grooming “exceptional leaders and managers to help transform America’s education systems, raise student achievement and create a brighter future,” according to its website.
“I think there’s been something of an infatuation with business management in education,” says Young, the University of Virginia scholar. “Schools are not businesses. We don’t necessarily have the same moral obligations to the community and to kids that you have to stakeholders that are investing their money.”
“The reason it works in business is you do have a bottom line,” Brewer says. “In order to do that in education, they had to find one indicator of success. That’s not necessarily compatible with the complexity of education.”
New superintendents who focused on “quick wins” in the “first 90 days”—that’s all straight out of popular business literature. So is the focus on transformational change, the faith that we’re capable of rapid improvement in society if only we’ll shake off the old ways and dismantle the status quo. No business concept has been more contentious in schools than the tech-inspired enthusiasm for “disruption.”
As it happens, after a year of disruptions, firings, and departures, Miles was in deep trouble with his board. He barely survived, on a 5-3 vote.
The article ends with the prediction that the age of the Hero Superintendent is drawing to a close.
Michels writes:
You can’t improve a school district if you only last a couple of years. School chiefs who ride into town with a hero complex, alienate everybody and get dragged out like martyrs don’t get to build a legacy.
Joe Smith of TexasISD.com believes the hero trend is falling out of favor. “We’ve gotten to the peak of that movement, and I think we’ll see the pendulum come back,” Smith says. “If you’re looking at redefining your schools in your community, I would think that someone who knows the community would have a jump on anybody else.”
Fabulous post! Thank you. Let’s hope this hero worship, person with a gun mentality leaves forever. It doesn’t work and destroys school districts. Btw, these so-called heroes also get golden parachutes. Been there, done that too many times.
http://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/news/read/25621606/Charter_School_Capital_Invests_in_Ohio
“Attendees to the 7th Annual Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools Conference will be introduced to a new entrant to the Ohio education scene, one that has the potential to reshape the way charters do business in the state. Portland, OR-based Charter School Capital has a long track record of success when it comes to providing working capital and facilities financing options to charters. The organization – which provides resources and expertise to help schools achieve their goals – is now working with schools in the Buckeye State.
“We are thrilled to be offering our services in Ohio,” explains Stuart Ellis, CEO of Charter School Capital.
Through purchasing a school’s earned revenue, Charter School Capital has funded more than half a billion to 400 schools across the United States, assisting with more than 400,000 students the opportunity for a high-quality charter school education.
Ohio charter schools perform worse than the public schools they replaced, and, incidentally but perhaps not coincidentally, pay their teachers markedly less, which of course leaves more for “earned revenue”.
Ed reform has done nothing to improve existing public schools in Ohio over the last decade, although ed reform was sold to the public as a method to improve existing public schools.
How much Ohio taxpayer money will be headed out of the state when this exciting new investment opportunity arrives?
It would be hard to exaggerate the damage Mike Miles has done to Dallas ISD and the reform movement.
Scandal after scandal leads the 10 pm news here in Dallas.
Thousands of DISD students do not have teachers; they have permanent subs instead (yes, that is an oxymoron, but welcome to DISD). Certified teachers quit in droves over the summer and hundreds more are expected to leave in January. So many subs are now tied up in permanent sub jobs that there aren’t enough subs to handle the sheer volume of teachers trying to use up their personal business days before they quit in January. Most schools report that at least 10% of teachers are absent every Monday and Friday and there are not enough subs to cover classes. Even midweek, teacher absence numbers are sky-high because the pay-for-performance rules and 8 observations (per semester!) stressors are driving teachers out.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this Broad superintendent. At this point, with his wife and child living in Colorado and his Dallas house reportedly sold, no one is even sure where he lives now. What a class act.
It’s as if Miles and the mayor and the school board live in their own fantasy land where there isn’t an unprecedented number of teacher vacancies and a shortage of qualified applicants and there aren’t any blogs to publicize their duplicity. They’re so wrong, but “the beatings will continue until morale improves” seems to be their current plan for attracting replacement teachers. They call it “disruptive change” or something equally nonsensical.
The biggest losers in all of this are 150,000 low-income, high-need kids. The second biggest loser is the reform movement, which is the only silver lining in the whole mess.
An affluent part of Dallas is DONE with Mike Miles and has started the process of trying to break away from DISD and form their own district. That’s waking up and worrying the profiteers.
Mike Miles has certainly not been a hero superintendent here and Eli Broad should have to send his grandchildren to DISD schools if he’s such a big proponent of Mike Miles and “disruptive change.”
WOW…
Why has this not been on the National News..??
Oh yes..I think I know..Education is given only 5 minutes per month on any National News Station…and they always seem to have the Pro-Common-Core People who do not even have a clue as to the decline of the Educational System in this country.
As a dear friend has pointed out to me, movies like Hoosiers are good movies because typically one hero saving folks and delivering them to victory against the odds doesn’t really often happen. That’s why we pay money to see it in a movie. Hoosiers came out in 1986. A Nation At Risk in 1983. The two messages together seem to have led us down the reform garden path. Call it a pendulum, what have you, but yes the walk on the path led us into this place of wanting back to where we have some reverence for education as more than forceful data response, where wisdom and determination in making provision for a realistic and human approach to our public will have a chance to guide us.
It’s funny that you mention movies. Mike Miles has a powerpoint he shows that is basically one hero movie clip after another. It’s like he doesn’t get it that they are movies…fiction…make believe.
Last December, it was movies again when he told the school board that all he wanted for Christmas was for his wife to take him to see Les Miserables because it inspired him (as an educrat, I guess). No need to see the movie, Mike; thanks to you DISD is filled with real-life miserables.
A psych student could write their thesis on Miles’ perception of himself as revealed through movies vs how everyone else sees him.
At his last convocation, he showed a clip from Seabiscuit. Teachers inferred that we are the horse being whipped by the little jockey (Miles is very small in stature).
Here it is…In a nutshell….Are you reading this…Obama’s Duncan????
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“I think there’s been something of an infatuation with business management in education,” says Young, the University of Virginia scholar. “Schools are not businesses. We don’t necessarily have the same moral obligations to the community and to kids that you have to stakeholders that are investing their money.”
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That was the quote that jumped out at me, too!
“Schools are not businesses. We don’t necessarily have the same moral obligations to the community and to kids that you have to stakeholders that are investing their money.”
I sure hope this Texas newspaper has A WIDE CIRCULATION. This article restores my faith in journalism. I have no doubt that many a public school teacher and administrator reading the article is nodding their head after having been through the experience of the “super hero” superintendent being introduced in their district. In my time in my county there have been three and the latest superintendent (now referred to as CEO) is being rolled out. The one prior, folded his red cape up in one suitcase and packed up his agenda in the other as he headed last August to … yup… Philadelphia. This journalist lays clear the top priority of “ed reform” corporate style profit and most often for the big kahunah superintendents and those who are corporate affiliates (like testing companies and curriculum publishers etc… PROFIT FOR THEM AT ALL COSTS. And we know what the costs are … the education profession and the student experience. What a great cost to our nation! Here is a passage from this journalist’s article that speaks volumes:
“Though Miles had experience in the classroom and had worked his way up quickly, critics saw his rapid rise and his enthusiasm for systemic change as evidence that Miles was another Rhee, someone who’d spend a couple years tearing the place apart before moving on to the speaking circuit or some consulting business. Miles, in fact, already had a consulting firm, called Focal Point, which sells what its promotional materials refer to as “Educational Leadership for the 21st Century.”
Klein has Rupert Murdoch money now, Rhee has her billionaire-funded Student’s First, Deasy will get some kick-back from Apple I am sure when he finally leaves LA with huge severance package in hand …
Just wondering what business school case studies in “education reform” are looking like these days… there must be many.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Paul Vallas is the epitome of the current version of Hero Superintendent. He came into Philadelphia, hired his cronies, implemented new expensive programs, set up some charter schools, and when things didn’t go his way he went off to greener pastures in New Orleans. Repeat. Move to Bridgeport. Repeat. An even worse hero superintendent arrived next by the name of Arlene Ackerman. She downsized the district, established more charters, got rid of all the citywide department chais so there was no one in charge downtown that could help you. We called her mean Arlene or Queen Arlene. The school district became an intolerant, dysfunctional place to teach that spent money it didn’t have on projects that didn’t work. She sucked the life out of the public schools. Enter hero superintendent Hite. Close 23 schools, layoff 4000 staff and open schools with no nurses, counselors, assistant principals, or support staff. Disregard class size limits, reestablish split grade classrooms, all while negotiating a contract with teachers. We seem to be going from bad to worse.
So now at the close of 2013, we know that we require no Super Hero Salvation because public schools are not irrevocably broken as they wanted everyone to believe.
And after surviving a deluge of business book propaganda gurus, exactly which businesses are we still in awe of? Would it be Microsoft? The US Auto Industry? Lehman Brothers? Goldman Sachs? Pearson? Amplify? inBloom? ExxonMobil? General Electric?
Absolutely none of it adds up, does it? But we do know the value of a decent, intelligent, gutsy School Superintendent and we’ve heard from or about many on this blog and may there be more because we’ve never needed them as much as we do now.
The heros have always been those teachers,coaches and others who work directly everyday with our children.
Superintendents can lead in seeing that school boards and state leaders provide those folks what they need to get the job done.
Jersey Jazzman has exposed Miles’ meddling in NJ (can’t get the link now). And I know that the standards of NJ’s Regional Achievement Centers (school take-over groups) are based on that guy’s ideas–and they employ or “encourage” the employment of his “Focal Point” consultancy group.
On a more hopeful note, and at the risk of painting with a “Broad” brush, Montclair NJ’s super-super has revealed her feet of clay recently.
Is this the end of the beginning of the end?
In my work I describe the concept of leadership from “strong” mayors and school superintendents in large school districts as a failed initiative in improvement of school learning. The desire for a “kingly” solution is about the same and mayors get involved in education when schools get so bad it becomes a political issue. The “king trend” for superintendents in large cities started with white males, moved on to black males, and then to black females. What they have in common is an “aura of competence” to persuade search consultants and school boards that they had the strong visionary knowledge and personal power to solve the educational problems of the districts. Many had limited education credentials. The average tenure was about two and one-half years, and they usually did not get fired, irrespective of poor results on their objectives. Rather, they would foresee an impossible block to their plan coming up, take credit for a lessor achievement and move on to a better large city job at higher pay. .