Cindy Cathey Has Been Good School Leader, Will Be Tough To Replace

(Patch columnist Jerry Heverly is a San Leandro public school English teacher.)

The San Leandro Board of Education, if you haven’t heard, is searching for a new superintendent to replace Cindy Cathey, who is retiring.

The Board hired a consultant (HYA Executive Search) to solicit applicants and designing a vetting process.

From what I saw at this week’s Board meeting the HYA folks seem to know their business. They made an impressive presentation of what they’d done so far and what they plan to do in the coming weeks.

HYA reported that ten to fifteen people had made the first cut. The consultants will interview these folks on April 26.

On May 8 the Board will identify semi-finalists.

The following week the Board will interview the semi-finalists and identify three finalists.

Finally, on May 22-24 the Board will talk to those three and, I’m assuming, try to obtain an agreement with one of them.

It sounds like a new superintendent could be on board by early June.

The optimist in me wants to believe that this entire operation will produce an enlightened choice.

The consultants have spent a great deal of time soliciting the opinions of just about every group connected to the schools. They did focus groups of Board members, school administrators, parents, teachers, support staff and community.

From those inquiries HYA came up with two interesting lists. One was called “Strengths of the District”; the other “Challenges/Issues/Concerns”.

There isn’t space here to detail both lists but what I read seemed sensible.

Among over a dozen strengths they listed:

• the high school academies
• the willingness of the community to support bonds and parcel taxes, and
• the diverse school community.

A couple of the “challenges” confused me. According to HYA we have a “lean staff at district level”, something that seemed dubious to me (though I don’t have any real proof that this isn’t so).

They also said we had a big “loss of students at middle school and high school.”

I know that enrollment is down slightly but we’ve also been told that the graduation rate is up (and noticeably higher than the state average) so I’m not sure if this is a fair characterization.

So why am I pessimistic?

I fret because I believe that any selection process that is done in this public way—and done by politicians who can’t afford to offend any constituency—can’t possibly hire someone who thinks outside the box.

My pie-in-the-sky dream is that the Board will select someone who doesn’t think the Common Core State Standards were handed down from god.

But that isn’t going to happen.

Every applicant will swear to slay the dragon of “Achievement Gap”.

Each candidate will say how much he or she loves diversity.

Everyone will promise to have high expectations for all students.

None of this will mean anything. We’ll only know about the person when the hard decisions are called for. And then it might be too late.

My fear is that the process of mollifying all the constituencies in the city will fatally compromise the new person.

My real worry is, of course, that any open and democratic selection process will produce a politically savvy leader not an educationally wise one.

The last time we went through this process the district was recovering from a period of turmoil. To their credit the Board chose well. We’ve had several years of good leadership under Cindy Cathey.

I hope the Board can do it again.

P.S. There's still time to take an online survey on budget priorities at: http://www.sanleandro.k12.ca.us//site/Default.aspx?PageID=451.

You can read more essays like this in the archives of Entirely Secondary.

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