The ‘rock star’ superintendent
A reader sent me a link to this article from the always-great Christian Science Monitor. I couldn’t figure out a way to shoe-horn it into the Hesperia Star site — at this time, we don’t have blogs there, although when our site finally gets the Pluck community features upgrade, I’m sure we will — so here, for the readers who sneak a peak at what is theoretically my away from the workplace personal blog, are some excerpts.
The list reads more like demands from a Hollywood agent than from a candidate to lead the schools for an antebellum-tinged suburb of Atlanta.
To come to work here in Clayton County, a failing school district in Georgia, former Pittsburgh superintendent John Thompson wants $275,000 in salary, a $2 million consulting budget, a Lincoln Town Car with a driver, and money to pay a personal bodyguard.
Sound a bit hefty for someone likely to pull a power lunch in a junior high cafeteria? Maybe not.
Fewer qualified candidates, rising expectations, and a near-impossible job description are creating a new breed of superintendents: Call them central office rock stars. These candidates say that, for the right price, they’re willing to do an unpopular job that can take a heavy personal and professional toll to whip underperforming districts into shape.
The trend is exacerbated in struggling minority districts – many in the South – the very ones feeling the greatest pinch from new federal and state accountability laws.
The pipeline is drying up even as the number of US school districts, because of consolidation, has dropped from 35,000 in 1965 to 13,000 today. Some 20 percent of school districts are actively looking for a superintendent, according to the American Association of School Administrators (AASA).
That’s because principals and central office staff who would typically fill the superintendent job say accountability standards and politicized school boards mean it’s not worth the hassle.
Minority districts that want to hire a black or Hispanic superintendent are in even worse straits: The number of educators coming out of black colleges has dropped by 70 percent in the past 20 years, according to the National Association of Black Educators in Washington.
“Leadership always is symptomatic, a warning sign of what’s happening at deeper and more fundamental levels,” says Walter Fluker, executive director of the Leadership Center at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
In 1990, a typical opening for a superintendent would bring in about 250 applications, says Richard Greene, a former superintendent leading the search in Clayton County. “Today, if you get 30 or 40 it’s phenomenal,” he says.
As a result, average salaries have increased from about $110,000 10 years ago to more than $200,000 a year today. Total compensation packages for larger districts are in the $325,000 range. Today, big-city superintendents stay an average of 18 months, says Dr. Greene of the search firm Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates in Glenview, Ill. For suburban districts, average tenure hovers around three years, he says.
Superintendents often work 80-hour weeks and routinely have to juggle politics, policy, and management without generating negative headlines. With many capable bureaucrats choosing not to apply, short-term turnaround specialists are finding a niche, experts say.
The parallels to what’s happening in multiple High Desert school districts is pretty obvious, I think.
In the Hesperia Unified School District, the average tenure of a superintendent is four years, incidentally, although that number is obviously skewed by Hank Richardson’s one year term.
