It seemed too good to be true. After six months of talking to search firms, gathering feedback and weighing candidates — a contentious process that brought little satisfaction and much scrutiny — the Metro Nashville Public Schools board miraculously found itself in blissful near-agreement. An ideal candidate for schools director, Williamson County superintendent Mike Looney, had materialized almost overnight, and a whirlwind courtship had ensued, casting aside all other contenders. When the board members heard his answer, they were expecting a "yes" that was almost a formality.
Alas, the relationship ended before it had even begun. Looney decided he no longer wanted the job.
That was in stifling late July. Now that the cool winds of fall are here, the school board will begin anew its quest to hire a director of schools after the summer retirement of former superintendent Jesse Register. But it's the second year the often divided MNPS board will travel this road, scanning the landscape for someone qualified to run a multicultural district with Metro's challenges: middling test scores in a county ranked among the worst for child well-being, fraught with political drama.
"The stakes are much higher. You can have one process that doesn't go well. I think if you have a second process that doesn't go well, you lose complete and total confidence of a community and of candidates," says Shannon Hunt, president and CEO of the Nashville Public Education Foundation. "Everybody gets a do-over; I don't think many people get multiple do-overs. But I also think everyone is very aware of that."
After the bungled first search, board members are hoping this search for the right director of schools fares better than the last. They want to see a list of dynamic applicants; that accomplished, they want a top candidate from that list willing to take the job.
But what it will take to get the search right this time is more complicated — not least of all because of how badly the last one went.
No firm commitment
This year's headhunt has tasked approximately 10 community groups to sniff around the nation for poachable candidates. That's Metro's plan after giving the boot to the traditional search firm that collected some 40 résumés earlier this summer, only to announce an underwhelming slate of four candidates without thoroughly vetting their references.
Although the school board found a candidate or two that they liked on that list, Looney's brush-off was the last straw. The board voted to pay off Chicago-based Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates the remainder of its $45,000 contract and kick them to the curb, despite the firm's vow to keep searching virtually free of charge until MNPS lands a director.
HYA's service may have been a debacle, but MNPS actually dodged a bullet. The board turned down another firm, PROACT Search LLC, in favor of HYA. Months later, PROACT made headlines when the company's CEO, Gary Solomon, allegedly used racial slurs and was accused of inappropriate contact with students. School boards in three states dropped the firm mid-search like a hat full of head lice.
Moving forward, the board hopes its search committee of community leaders will include Mayor Megan Barry, Vice Mayor David Briley, the Metropolitan Nashville Education Association, the Nashville Public Education Foundation, the Nashville branch of the NAACP, Nashville Organized for Action and Hope, the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, Conexión Américas and the Interdenominational Ministers Fellowship, along with a parent group.
But the interests of those groups are just as diverse as those of the often split school board, raising questions as to what the groups will be specifically asked to do.
"You're never going to find someone that everyone agrees with," says Erick Huth, president of the Metropolitan Nashville Education Association, the teachers union. "There's always going to be some voice of dissent out there in the community or in the teaching force, but I think if we can focus on the characteristics that are really important, that's good."
The board will likely hire someone to help guide the search, according to school board Chairwoman Sharon Gentry, whether a recruiter with traditional superintendent search experience or a chief of staff to manage the bulk of the work. But the sense of accountability between the larger committee and the school board can advance the search better than a traditional search firm, says Gentry.
"I think this is more of an on-par relationship," Gentry says. "It's not, 'You paid me to find you to find some résumés, so here they are and what we should do with them is up to you.' Even if we were to get lax on the timeline, the pressure would be on from this group to say, 'Hey, this is important work, we've committed our time to it. Let's make sure we keep the ball moving.' "
Finding Dr. Right
The committee's first major task is to help the board find candidates who understand the needs of a school system of Nashville's size, diversity and troubles.
Music City's 86,000-student district is bursting with success stories, but it still struggles to show more than half of students scoring above grade level on state exams. More than 7 in 10 students are considered economically disadvantaged, and several of the district's schools are essentially segregated, among them schools where more than 90 percent of students are black.
Davidson County ranked among the worst in the state for child well-being, according to the first-ever ranking by the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth's annual Kids Count report. That report examines conditions for children in Tennessee as a companion to the Annie E. Casey Foundation's national data book.
While the national report ranked Tennessee the 36th lowest in the nation for child well-being, Davidson County ranked near the bottom of the Volunteer State's own list, coming in at 87 out of 95 counties. While Davidson scored low numbers of substantiated child abuse and neglect cases and in the middle of the road for youth employment and child deaths, the county ranked poorly for numbers of children lacking health insurance, serving school suspensions and posting low graduation rates and reading scores.
According to Hunt, the public education advocate on the community advisory committee, school systems across America are meeting the same challenges — providing Nashville with areas to search for superintendent candidates. Districts Nashville can turn to include cities like Denver, Austin and Indianapolis, which have broken up their large school systems into smaller districts by geographic area; Boston and Lawrence, Mass., which have increased student performance; Washington, D.C., which has used public/private partnerships to reward teachers; Montgomery County, Md., which is raising the bar for lowest-performing students; Baltimore for focusing on English language learners; Charlotte, N.C., for a massive effort to turn around students in poorest areas of the city; and Memphis for its focus on turnaround schools.
Beyond scouring these districts for key administrators who have played a powerful role in their systems, Hunt says MNPS should seek nontraditional candidates who are unhooked from traditional school systems but have experience in education and other issues dear to Nashville.
"Pull up any article of anybody doing a search, and everybody's supposed to say, 'Must be somebody's who's been a superintendent, somebody's who's run a school system our size, someone who's' — you get all these litmus tests," Hunt says. "Superman does not exist. We've got to look for a person with the right blend of talent. No one will have everything, just like no city has solved everything."
Currently, the board is more interested in candidates who have already served as superintendents. The board recently expanded its search to include top lieutenants for a better chance of finding someone with day-to-day experience in the trenches, but it doesn't want to dip below that level.
The search will also mean looking for candidates from within the district — a touchy subject after the last search rejected Register's chief lieutenant, MNPS chief academic officer Jay Steele. The school board later voted to make Steele interim director, a controversial move that was painstakingly reversed. But search firm HYA argues the brief appointment contributed to several candidates dropping out of contention, fearing the fix was in for an inside candidate.
Always be closing
This year's search will also bring on "closers" to help sell candidates on Nashville — not just to sell them on why they should relocate to Music City, but to convince them they would get needed support at the helm of Metro Nashville's second most powerful position.
"You're not going to be here on your own. This isn't just about you providing leadership to a central office staff, it's about you being a part of the leadership team of Nashville," Gentry says, relaying the message she hopes the so-called "closers" can give.
After running the last search with the mayor's race undecided, school board members expect to see Mayor Megan Barry in this role. And she says she's game, willing to embrace not only making phone calls to candidates, but personally visiting in hopes of clinching the right prospects.
"Let's go find the talent we need and bring them here. And I'll do whatever I can to help you do it," Barry promised the board in a quiet morning pow-wow the day after her inauguration.
The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, a group that has woven its way into the MNPS fabric, says it is looking forward to helping the search. Its best asset, according to Marc Hill, longtime education policy adviser to the chamber turned chief policy officer, is its ability to recruit, make phone calls and visit sites.
"All that is on the table," Hill says. "Any top-flight candidate who is gainfully employed somewhere else who has to be recruited away from a great position is going to size up the community, the prospective community, to whether that community is welcoming and ready for new leadership. So the extent to which the community is a part of the process and extending those hands outward, that's an important signal to any prospective candidate."
Hill sat on the last community group that pinch-hit for a superintendent search firm. In 2001, he served on an advisory committee reading through applications, identifying candidates and interviewing finalists.
But the board at the time was divided. A majority voted for Carol Johnson, then a leader in Minneapolis who later went on to become superintendent of Boston Public Schools. But a minority of the board wanted Pedro Garcia, a chief of schools from California. Not wanting to work for a torn board, Johnson passed on the job. The position went to Garcia, now blamed for bringing the district to the point of a threatened state takeover.
"Ultimately, the board has to decide and has to come together around ultimately their selection," Hill says. "And that can be difficult, even under ideal circumstances."
