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School Superintendents: Missing in Action
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CPS CEO Ron Huberman
Arne Duncan, non-educator emeritus, is gonna blow up your local school district because your own superintendent of schools doesn’t have the guts to do it first. Arne and his boss, President Obama are beginning to do to the schools just as he did unto the weak automobile executives and slippery financial wizards; the U.S. Government is taking over. School districts have been coerced to labor under the ominous oversight of No Child Left Behind, a program conceived in the White House by businessmen, because professional educators did not manage, improve, and police their own industry.
School superintendents (supes) are bred by touchie-feelie universities to be passive, politically correct consensus builders. I know; before I was called up for Operation Iraqi Freedom, I acquired the credential before I could finish the superintendent cohort program at the University of Illinois. You cannot win a war by consensus. If you don’t think we are in the midst of an education conflagration, count the 40 Chicago Public School (CPS) students murdered in the last year, usually by other students.
Unions get busted, teachers defamed, parents embarrassed, dogs spaded, students wasted, but nothing happens to school superintendents. Who are these mythical creatures and what is they do? Why should we care? They’re bloody expensive, that’s why! Sure they don’t all make $402,311 as the Homewood-Flossmoor top-gun. Illinois supe salaries vary from $130,000 a year in Dolton to $411,500 in Niles Township. By the way, any publicly posted salary is likely just 60-75% of the actual cost of superintendent livestock. Add in the vehicle allowances, pension contribution, deferred compensation, and district credit cards. Some get housing allowances and financial bonuses. On average though, salary for the 60 urban school districts is $208,000, plus the other stuff.
Mopes, I mean supes have a very difficult job, but they look good doing it, talk really good about it, and are in constant motion in the pursuit of mediocrity. Hostile unions, burnt-out teachers, whining parents, and goofy students are almost as difficult to manage as the bus school drivers and volunteer cheerleader coaches. So supes don’t try.
No wonder the urban superintendent stays on the job an average of 3 years. St. Louis has had 8 supes since 2003, and Kansas City is on its 25th supe in 39 years. Chicago is an exception; we don’t have supes at all. Indeed our last three CPS leaders were, according to height, an ex-cop whose only experience with kids was arresting them, a John Lithgow look-alike accountant, and a professional nice guy and son of a well-connected mother. Between those three CPS CEO’s, their total public school classroom or administrative experience is zero.
Despite the mayoral smoke, circus mirrors and happy talk, we know CPS is awful, but it isn’t any more awful today than it was when real educators with doctorate degrees in scope-and-sequence were in hot pursuit of the best practices for Chicago pupils. So in a way, the erudite Richard M. Daley is right. Why hire a useless and expensive educator too timid to manage personnel, when you can buy a useless and cheaper non-educator who will bust unions and blow up entire schools. Our CPS experience is proof-positive that you get the same results. Nothing! Supe Duncan only cost us $215,000 a year. That’s not much if you are held accountable for over 600 schools, but he wasn’t. Nice Guy Arne is the charter guy, and there are only 60 of those. But don’t be fooled by his salary. The number of CPS administrators paid $100,000 or more, grew to an all time high during the Duncan regime, to 967. I do not begrudge six-figure money to the 582 principals and 195 assistant-principals in that group, but my rabbit antennae goes up upon realization that there are another 190 administrators making that kind of money and CPS is a failed enterprise! What the frog are they doing?
Chicago isn’t the only victim of this educational Ponzi scheme. There are over 14,000 school supes in America and most are pretty much potted plants. Why? (1) The job is nearly impossible to do in a world plagued by political correctness syndrome, (2) school supes are hired in a grueling interview process within which the winner is the least offensive candidate, (3) and they aren’t around long enough to effect change, if indeed, change is required. Highly paid suburban supes are like farmers who get paid not to grow anything. In Winnetka, Barrington, and Lake Forest the supe is there to maintain the status quo. The children of wealthy and successful or wealthy and lucky people are ivy-league bound and don’t need a teacher who makes only a quarter of their family income with her Northern Illinois University degree managing their lives. Look at the parking lots at New Trier and don’t make the same mistake I did when I went there for a parent conference, the Porches, BMW M-3s, and Escalades belong to the students, not the faculty.
If you pay an ex-teacher, promoted to superintendent, $17,000 a month plus perks, their number one priority is the $17K and how to keep it coming in. They ain’t rocking the boat. Just as teachers legitimately complain that $100K principals are afraid to back them up in the classroom, my experience is the $250,000 superintendents are afraid to support principals that make tough decisions. I asked a supe how they juggled all the stakeholders and nutcases they pass through their doorway day-after-day. She said, ‘I don’t.’ Then she added, ‘all I have to do is keep the 7 school board members happy.’ (Oh) If that is the white rabbit paradigm, all CPS CEO Ron Huberman has to do is keep the mayor happy. Where, then does that leave the rest of us?
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