More districts looking at nontraditional candidates to lead schools

When retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata took charge of North Carolina's Wake County School District in January, he faced his share of skeptics.

What did a career military man, even one who did a stint as a Washington schools administrator, know about running a school system?

A few months into the job, Tata is turning some of those doubters around. He's visiting schools and getting to know their staff and students. He's in communication with the community, as he was when he oversaw troop deployments to Afghanistan. He is looking and listening.

"Leadership," he says, "is a skill that translates to whatever endeavor you're doing in life."

Around the nation, there are signs that more school districts are willing to consider nontraditional candidates - from nonprofits, business, government, the military, and other areas - as their top administrators.

"It seems they are looking at other avenues," said Linda Embrey, spokeswoman for the National School Boards Association.

Officials in New Jersey and Pennsylvania are exploring measures that would facilitate hiring nontraditional superintendents.

In Pennsylvania, a bill sponsored by State Sen. Mike Waugh (R., York) would relax education and experience requirements and allow districts to hire those with graduate degrees in business or finance.

Pennsylvania districts now must seek waivers to hire outside the requirements. That's what Philadelphia did when it hired Paul Vallas, said a city schools spokesman. Vallas was Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's budget director before he was appointed to lead the Windy City's schools.

In New Jersey, where there is no waiver process, acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf came to education leadership through an alternative route. The former New York City deputy chancellor of schools and past president of Edison Schools, the largest private manager of public schools, taught history early in his career. He later practiced law and was a U.S. Supreme Court clerk.

The Christie administration hopes to revise education regulations to create an alternative route to superintendent certification in the state's most challenged districts. Under a proposed five-year pilot program, a potential leader may get started on the job with only a bachelor's degree and a review by the commissioner to determine if he or she has an appropriate work history.

The idea is to enlarge the pool of candidates to lead the state's troubled districts, said Andrew Smarick, special assistant to Cerf. "Some of the best superintendents are coming from these nontraditional backgrounds."

Late last year, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg got a state waiver to hire publishing executive Cathie Black as head of city schools. In response to state concerns, he said her second-in-command would have strong academic credentials.

Although the vast majority of superintendents still have education backgrounds, nontraditional leaders first became fixtures in large urban districts in the mid-1990s, according to Michael Casserly, director of the Council of the Great City Schools. Since then, he said, they have accounted for 10 percent to 20 percent of the nation's big-city superintendents.

Their success has varied, Casserly said: They do not appear to last longer on the job, and they have not proved to be a solution to all problems. But "the nontraditionals have added fresh ideas and new blood and a different perspective," he said.

The desire for new ideas and solutions to seemingly intractable problems, as well as management expertise in hard financial times, has generated interest in alternative leaders beyond the big cities.

"We are hearing from school districts all the time," said Erica Lepping, spokeswoman for the Broad Superintendents Academy, a 10-month education executive-training program founded in 2002 by the philanthropic Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.

The academy's nearly 140 graduates - who include Cerf and Tata - have come from a variety of professions.

The supply of qualified candidates may become an even larger issue. In a recent American Association of School Administrators survey, 52 percent of superintendents said they planned to retire within five years, association executive director Daniel Domenech said.

Financial adversity and distasteful tasks, such as cutting staff, have not made the job more attractive, he said, adding that he believed it was usually in a district's best interest to have someone with more than management credentials at the helm.

"It's like being hired to run a hospital and not knowing anything about medicine," Domenech said.

Nontraditional hires may face a challenge establishing credibility with their workforce, said Robert Schwartz, academic dean of Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. The most successful, he said, work with a "topflight" academic officer and a strong leadership team.

Also crucial, he said, is the political skill to handle all interested parties, something that has curtailed the careers of some superintendents.

For Wake County's Tata, these are still the early days.

Teachers were apprehensive when he was hired, said Tama Bouncer, president of the county chapter of the North Carolina Association of Educators. But she noted that his first budget, as proposed, spared money spent in classrooms despite a projected cut in state aid.

Carolyn Morrison, a school board member and retired principal who did not support Tata's getting the job, has been pleasantly surprised.

"He's trying really hard," Morrison said. "He's open, and he's listening."

Tata likes to say he leads from the front. In Afghanistan, he kept a map, marking with pins the field operations he visited to see how his troops were faring. In his office now, he has a map with a pin on each school he has visited - 60 in eight weeks.

To Tata, the Army's job of training and developing soldiers has much in common with the district's mission.

The goal in Wake County, he said, is "training children to be the best they can be."