Over the weekend, the Portland School Board aims to whittle down a pool of 30-plus applicants to three candidates who could be Portland Public Schools’ next superintendent. But unlike the school boards in Boston, Nashville, Minneapolis, Anchorage, Salt Lake City and many other cities, Portland’s board of directors does not think the public has the right to know who they are.
Instead, the Portland board plans to rely on their own interviews and the opinions of a board-selected panel of district and community representatives who will be sworn to secrecy. The panel won’t get any information about the three candidates until the day they meet them, and will ask questions that have already been scripted under the direction of a search firm hired by the school board. From those three people, the board will pick one finalist who will get the job pending some final vetting.
This isn’t the kind of process you run if you deeply care about public involvement or public buy in. And this really isn’t the kind of process you run if your district has spent much of the last year torching the community’s trust with a bumbling and misleading response to lead contamination in schools’ drinking water. No, this is the process that the Portland School Board landed on after a split vote on whether to make the names of the three top choices public. The board should heed the call of the dissenters in their group, reverse course, and alert candidates that they should withdraw if they won’t agree to a public meeting if named one of the final three.
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This shouldn’t be a big deal. As noted above, districts across the country share the names of their top two, three or even six people for the position. Many are superintendents employed elsewhere. Most districts in Oregon operate an open process, according to the Oregon School Boards Association.
Second, the board should be concerned by any finalist who doesn’t have a strong enough relationship with his or her current board of directors to show them the courtesy of notifying them that he or she is a top candidate for another job. Superintendents routinely switch districts and most boards and administrators should be professional enough to understand that.
And third, Portland’s process requires the top three choices to out themselves to their communities anyway. According to board chairman Tom Koehler, the final three are supposed to provide contact information for their board chairperson, teachers’ union president, a key business contact, a key community contact and a high-level school official as references for the board to contact. The idea that those five people would keep quiet about their superintendent being a top candidate for another job defies any reasonable assessment of human nature.
Credit board members Paul Anthony and Steve Buel for continuing to argue that the board needs to involve the public in the superintendent selection. They authored an op-ed to press the point – prompting Koehler and the rest of the board to fire back with its own op-ed supporting their secret process under some misguided notion that better candidates will only apply if guaranteed secrecy until the end.
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Interestingly, Koehler bristled at characterization of the process as “secret.” Rather, he said to The Oregonian/OregonLive Editorial Board, “there’s no secrecy. We are keeping the names of finalists confidential among a broad group of people.”
In reality, the Portland community is the one getting left out of the loop. The overwhelming issue here is that this board would rather go to extraordinary lengths to protect a few administrators than recognize their obligation to be open with the public and welcoming of the community’s feedback. That’s particularly short-sighted considering the school board will need families’ help to pass an expected school construction bond. It’s PPS advocates and families who will be pounding the pavement on the district’s behalf, encouraging their co-workers to vote, personally lobbying people who don’t have kids in the system to agree to pay another $280 a year on top of the approximately $615 they are already paying for the 2012 school construction bond and the 2014 local option levy (based on a home assessed at $200,000.)
The school board should stop looking for reasons to lock out the public and recognize that as complicated or messy as it may be at times, that public involvement is the district’s strength.
– The Oregonian/OregonLive Editorial Board
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