Super Superintendent!

Here is the full text of an email that found its way to my inbox:

TO: All Legislators
FROM: Senator Alberta Darling, Senator Ted Kanavas
DATE: August 10, 2005
RE: Co-Sponsorship of LRB 2442/1 relating to the employment contract and powers of the superintendent of a 1st class city school district

Recent non-partisan news and education reports indicate MPS is showing marked improvement in many areas.  Graduation rates have increased.  Attendance rates, drop out rates, and test scores are slowly creeping up.  Administrative proposals to cut the central office budget, the number of teaching positions and the number of school buildings now better reflect the district's current student population, which continues to shrink after years of declining enrollment and increasing competition.

However, there are many potential future ideas for both budget and inside-the-classroom improvement and reform that must be considered.  we believe the current superintendent has some significant, reform-minded proposals that ultimately will not be implemented, in part because of the outside pressures put on the school board to block them.   Over the years, the constant shifting of the board's leadership and make-up has led to the constant shifting of the board's agenda, goals and reform beliefs.  It remains increasingly frustrating that a school board with an ever-changing political view can derail months if not years of a superintendent's efforts.

As state policy makers, we can and should provide help to the MPS superintendents that are able to demonstrate fiscal accountability to the taxpayers, and a commitment to helping the children and parents they serve.

In many areas, MPS dministration could make immediate improvements that would benefit both the students and the taxpayers if this bill were to become law.

We propose to:

1) Give the MPS superintendent 2/3rds veto power over the annual budget as well as final authority over all financial, purchasing and contractual school board decisions.

We believe the MPS superintendent should have the same power to formulate the district's annual budget as the Milwaukee mayor and the Milwaukee County executive.   Too many times, we have seen problems arise and stalemates occur when the teacher's union or an opposition school board try to "wait out" a reform-minded superintendent.

2) Require the MPS board offer a longer contract to their superintendents (three years instead of two).

The loudest complaints heard by staff and parents is the lack of a consistent, strong, vocal leader for MPS.  Change takes time and it takes political clout.  A longer contract would lead to more stable leadership.  The leader of such a large organization, with a billion dolllar annual budget, should be given more time to implement his ideas, and more time to judge the success or failure of each proposal.

If you are interested in co-sponsoring this bill, please contact Senator Darling (6-5830) by the deadline date of Monday, August 22nd.

Analysis by the Legislative Reference Bureau
Under current law, the term of each employment contract of a school district superintendent may not exceed two years. This bill requires that the employment contract of the superintendent of schools in a first class city school district (currently, only the Milwaukee Public Schools) be for a term of at least three years. The bill also authorizes the first class city school district superintendent to veto any action taken by the school board and requires a two-thirds vote of the members of the school board to override the superintendent's veto.

I am not entirely sure where to start with this. For one, this is a real bill. A contact at the Capitol got me a copy (.pdf form, or I'd post it) of the Legilsative Research Bureau's mark-up of it. Darling's email seems to be an accurate retelling in layman's terms of the legalese presented in the bill. Let me limit comments to three things right now:

1. Once again, we have non-Milwaukeeans (Alberta Darling and Ted Kanavas represent mostly suburban Milwaukee--Darling's district includes like a block-and-a-half on the East Side, which voted heavily against her, 71-29) writing laws that would affect only Milwaukee. I will bet you a nickel that not one single elected official who represents Milwaukee signs on as a co-sponsor. My question is this: Where do they get off doing this? If "the parents" are complaining about things, "the parents" have every right contact their own damned legislators and school board members, demand action, run for elected office themselves. Ms. River Hills and Mr. Brookfield don't have to step in and baby us. If they don't like what's happening in Milwaukee, they don't live there and have no right to complain!
   
2. There is a possibility that Darling is doing this to get back at Jennifer Morales. Morales, if you recall, is the Milwaukee school board member who happens to live in that block-and-a-half on the East Side that is stuck in Darling's district, and who ran against Darling in 2004. Morales, like me, is not a big fan of the current superintendent. This bill would significantly weaken the board in general and, specifically, any minority coallitions on the board. Could this actually be a giant middle finger at the woman who made that race closer than expected?
   
3. "Reform-minded" is quite the misnomer. Our current superintendent used to be a middle school principal, and he's running this 100,000-student, 10,000-employee district as if it were just one big middle school. He has surrounded himself with yes-men and -women who do whatever he asks, however idiotic. He's still pushing his small-school agenda, which I have written about at length and won't repeat here, with uncritical acceptance from virtually everyone in a position to ask pointed questions about the plan's problems. And there's more, which I won't go into, except to point you here, where I ranted about the "reform" label before.
   
   While I agree with the sentiment that MPS superintendents should have significantly longer tenure than they often do, this is not something that should be done by state law, but rather by efforts of the board to hire someone in the first place willing to stick around and do the job. I kind of liked the previous guy, Spence Korté, who had a real plan to address our shrinking enrollment, a plan largely forgotten since the board bought out Korté's contract early. The current guy's plan to address our shrinking enrollment is to pull school closures out of his behind and present them to the board like a kid who found a pretty rock. Oh, and then spend millions on consultants to do the real work for him. That's not actually, you know, leadership. That's childishness.
   
   And the current guy has lacked leadership in almost everything else he has done, largely because he doesn't seem to acknowledge that there's anyone besides his inner circle that he needs to lead. Take the contract dispute: Today is day 780 that I have worked without a contract. The reason I do not have a contract is that the superintendent decided, back at the beginning of the process, that he would not accept anything less than a full dismantling of the district's health care plan. Even when presented with the union offer that has most employees paying more in co-insurance than the district's plan and a "health and productivity management" option that, empirically, has been shown to save more than the district's plan, he petulantly said no, since it was not exactly what he wanted, despite the likely additional savings to the taxpayers of Milwaukee. Is that leadership? No, it's childishness.

I could go on--and believe me, I want to. But I will simply say that yes, the parents, children, taxpayers, teachers, and citizens in general of Milwaukee are, as Darling writes, bemoaning the lack of a strong, vocal leader at the helm of MPS. But it has nothing to do with statutory weakness in the superintendent's job; rather, it has to do with weakness in the superintedent himself.