Black's exit is no surprise
If you had to pick the next CEO of a Fortune 500 company, would you start your search among school superintendents and retired generals?
Of course you wouldn’t. You’d look for someone with years of experience in business, preferably your own line of business.
So why does anyone think that business executives and generals are qualified to run the nation’s largest school systems, merely because they have run another, very different sort of large organization?
Cathie Black’s precipitous exit from the post of New York City schools chancellor was certainly a surprise. But her failure to succeed isn’t surprising.
When Mayor Michael Bloomberg tapped Black in November to replace Joel Klein, she was a media executive with no experience in education or in government at any level. She hadn’t even encountered the public education system as a parent—her own children went to private schools.
Yet Bloomberg assured New Yorkers that Black, whom he recruited behind closed doors and whose appointment he sprung on the public as a fait accompli, was the ideal candidate to lead a massive education bureaucracy that oversees more than 1 million students and 135,000 teachers and other employees.
Many educators and legislators opposed Black’s appointment, and I suppose some people will argue that the deck was stacked against her from the start. But she also had powerful allies, starting with Bloomberg, and her failure to gain traction has to be laid squarely where it belongs.
Whether in the public or the private sector, leadership transitions are challenging, and the evidence is clear that unless transitions are carefully managed, the organization’s performance suffers, in both the short and long term. Generally, insiders who have been groomed for succession are more likely to succeed than outsiders, and leaders with experience and knowledge in the sector also produce smoother transitions. On both counts, Black failed the test.
The best predictor of effective school and district performance is “relational trust,” the respect between students and teachers, among teachers, parents and principals, and between the central office and the schools.
So, yes, the deck was stacked against Cathie Black—by her own lack of experience in the public sector, and her feeble efforts to build trust with her employees and clients. Without such experience and bridge-building, Black was never able to earn the trust of the people who have the greatest stake in the schools.
James “Torch” Lytle is a Practice Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.