Van Schoales is executive director of Education Reform Now, a national advocacy group based in Denver.
Colorado’s next education commissioner will help determine whether the state focuses only on implementing what’s on the books, takes a step back or, ideally, accelerates and deepens reform as states including New York, Indiana, Florida and New Jersey are poised to do. Dwight Jones will be a tough act to follow given his reform orientation, political skill, and rich education accomplishments.
The Colorado State Board of Education will no doubt keep a tight lid on potential and real search candidates to ensure that they end up with the best pool and ultimately the best finalist.
While I know that the state board is generally committed to either staying the course or even accelerating reform, I have some concerns about the decision to hire Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, a very experienced but traditional superintendent search firm.
The firm is highly regarded by many in traditional education circles but has a fairly poor record placing non-traditional and strong reform-minded candidates in district or state leadership roles. There were by my count 268 searches listed on the Hazard website. Of those, 17, or 6 percent, were filled either by noted reformers or people who had not already been district assistant superintendents or superintendents. That’s a pretty low number.
Michael Bennet’s placement in Denver was one of their few exceptions but he was not found or recruited by Hazard. Carl Cohn, a highly accomplished superintendent from Long Beach who was placed in San Diego is another exception (interestingly, he was hired by a San Diego board committed to rolling back the bold effective Alan Bersin reforms which are similar to what Colorado is doing. Cohn did not last long).
I realize that this is as much a product of what the districts wanted as any failings on the part of the firm. But I worry that a firm of this nature does not have the necessary contacts within leading reform organizations like McKinsey, Aspire, Teach for America, New Schools Venture Fund, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, New Leaders for New Schools, the New Teacher Project, the Broad Foundation or other sector leaders in law and business.
Without such contacts, how can the firm provide the kinds of candidates that the state board will want to consider?
The good news is that Rick O’Connell, the former Douglas County superintendent (who did promote a variety of innovative reforms including an early embrace of charters) will lead the Hazard team. But I remain concerned that Hazard’s network will not provide a quality candidate pool. I know Rick will do a great job with the process but a good outcome will depend on a deep search and recruitment effort.
There is an ever-growing number of effective national potential candidates including Commissioner Deborah Gist in Rhode Island (who may not have a job much longer because the new Rhode Island governor is indicating he wants to ditch her reform efforts), another several top-flight state commissioners and another 20 or so leading national reformers.
And lets not forget a few Colorado leaders, like Mike Miles, who would make great Colorado commissioners. While the list of effective system reformers has been growing, it is still small compared to the thousand or so folks that might be qualified under the traditional “old boy” standards for state commissioner.
I’m holding out hope for the best given Colorado State Board Chairman Bob Schaffer and the rest of the state board’s expectations for reform, but they will have to push hard on Hazard to deliver a quality pool of reform minded candidates. If Los Angeles can find a great new reform orientated superintendent given all of that district’s challenges, along with California being on the brink of bankruptcy, Colorado should be able to find a new national leader to take us to the next level.
Popularity: 37% [?]
A couple of questions:
Do we simply look for “refom-minded” candidates or successful reform-minded candidiates? (Was Bruce Randolf given a shout-out by the President because of their increased student achievement or because they were a “reformed school?”)
Did we know Bennet was a reform-minded candidate when he was hired?
I worry about the connotation that the word “reform” brings to our discussions.
A good search consultant gathers names of potential candidates from interested stakeholders in the business, education, advocacy and funding community. A lazy consultant just goes to their pool of recirculated candidates. I assure you that Rick O’Connell has been soliciting and receiving names of both non-traditional and traditional candidates locally and nationally. And, if either the author or a reader has suggested candidates, our search consultants would be interested to receive the names. As a member of the State Board, I have no doubt we will be presented with terrific, progressive candidates for our consideration. If history is indicative of our judgement, we unanimously selected Dwight Jones as the Commissioner of Education.
Reinforcing the authoritarian governance structure is not reform. It’s simply reinforcing the status quo. True reform will come from the bottom up, not from the top down. Furthermore, ignoring the impact of poverty on student achievement will only delay reform. The current batch of “reformers” insist on scapegoating teachers and basing “reform” on personal observation and opinion and anecdotal information, hardly a scholarly approach.
Van,
The state over the last few years has passed a wide variety of reform measures that the education community is now in the process of implementing.
Could you expand on what you mean when you indicate that the state needs a leader that is ready to take us to next level of reform? There has to be some time given to let the reforms currently initiated work their way towards their desired results.
Mark, your point is well taken about reform. The focus has to be on student results. In spite of a fair amount of state policy changes, CO has seen practically no movement on student achievement. I think anyone that knew or talked to Bennet including me knew he would be a strong reformer.
Elaine, I’m glad to hear your confidence and totally agree with you about a quality search firm/consultant. I hope you are right about the resulting pool. I was basing my concern on the history of the Hazard searches. The good news is that there are more high quality candidates than ever, the bad news is that there are more opportunities for effective reform candidates in the non-profit, district, state and national levels. It should help to have Obama give a shout out to a CO school.
Sadly, we’re still talking about reinforcing the authoritarian governance structure (the status quo) rather than replacing it with a democratic governance structure. In other words, true reform is ignored. Once again, this community, state and nation fails to address the impact of poverty on student achievement. The current group of “educational reformers” seem bent on continuing to scapegoat teachers (the lowest hanging fruit) instead of a scholarly approach that analyzes rather than simply regurgitating right wing rhetoric.
Ed – You’re with me in support of universal vouchers then, right? Can’t think of anything that would make education more democratic and less authoritarian. I do agree that too often this sort of true reform is ignored. It seems too radical and frightening.
Along with many other things, poverty does have an impact on student achievement. But at the same time we have seen results that clearly show demography is not destiny. Debating strategies to alleviate poverty (a topic for another forum) should not serve as an excuse to stop seeking ways to improve educational outcomes — especially when research shows us many areas of promise.
A simplistic argument lumping together all “educational reformers” as unscholarly, teacher-scapegoating, right-wing regurgitators offers nothing constructive and is only loosely tied to reality. It’s a caricature, and a poor one, of many reform-minded people who frequent this site and do other important work.
But as long as we’re together on the universal voucher thing….