Mayor Bloomberg’s selection of veteran publishing executive Cathie Black to succeed Joel Klein as New York City’s schools chancellor has at least temporarily collided with a state law requiring that school-system heads possess a “superintendent’s certificate.”
State Education Commissioner David Steiner has the authority to waive that requirement — as his predecessor did for Klein eight years ago — if he deems the candidate “exceptionally qualified” on the basis of experience, training, etc. On Friday, as his predecessors have typically done in similar situations, Steiner named an eight-member panel to review Black’s qualifications and advise him regarding Bloomberg’s waiver request.
Whether Black is a solid choice for this key post is surely open to debate, as is the mayor’s appointee to run any crucial city agency. But Black’s strengths and weaknesses — and Bloomberg’s wisdom — are where this debate should focus, not on an antiquated state law and arcane regulatory process that have nothing to do with school effectiveness.
Everyone in this field knows that the Empire State has America’s most heavily regulated education system. Within a vast bureaucracy governed by hundreds of laws and regulations, one large Albany bureau is solely responsible for licensing teachers, principals and everyone else who works in the public schools.
That includes the superintendents who run the state’s 859 school districts. Most of them worked their way up from classroom teacher to assistant principal to school principal, then through various echelons of the district office, accumulating more university credits, years of experience, and state credentials as they proceeded.
This is how colleges of education earn their living, of course, as thousands of educators enroll in courses that yield promotions, salary boosts and more. State regs dictate the content of those courses and degrees, which institutions may deliver them and which ones must be taken by candidates for which licenses.
Panel after panel, study after study and report after report have documented the myriad shortcomings of this system. But two of its failings are profound, and both are relevant to Cathie Black’s candidacy.
First, the lock-step licensure process keeps terrific people out of public education who would readily teach or lead if it didn’t cost so much in time, dollars and hassle to get approved. Certification requirements have, for example, been a nightmare for the Teach for America program across the land.
Second, the entire licensure “raj” has no bearing on a teacher’s classroom effectiveness, an administrator’s leadership prowess or a school system’s academic achievement. None. Tons of research has found no reliable link between educator “qualifications” as conventionally defined and student outcomes.
David Steiner knows this perfectly well and has, at various stages of his career, helped charter schools and other worthy reform ventures find shortcuts through the bureaucratic thicket. He and Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch have declared a “new era” of reduced regulation coupled with more rigorous academic standards.
There could be no better starting point than the rules bearing on school superintendents. School systems should be judged by how well their pupils learn, not the paper credentials of those at the helm.
As mayoral control of those systems gains traction across America, as states devise novel interventions into failing schools and districts, as new and improved grade-by-grade standards in English and math are joined by better testing regimes and results-based accountability systems, it’s time to end the archaic emphasis on licensing.
Sure, people who work with children need to be vetted for criminal records. Character references are absolutely justified, as are assessments of whether they know the curricular content that they’ll be responsible for conveying to pupils. But who cares what courses they took in an ed school? (Answer: The ed school, which craves the tuition, and the state bureaucrats whose jobs consist of enforcing such rules.)
Many of the most impressive leaders and reformers of big-city school systems in recent years have not possessed “superintendent’s certificates”: Michelle Rhee (DC), Paul Vallas (Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans), Roy Romer (Los Angeles), Alan Bersin (San Diego), Rod Paige (Houston, then US education secretary), Arne Duncan (Chicago, now US education secretary) — and of course New York’s own Joel Klein.
There’s ample proof in this pudding. Cathie Black may or may not be a fantastic education-reformer-in-waiting. Michael Bloomberg may or may not have made an inspired selection. But he’s the guy responsible for New York schools these days, and it would be tragic if his choice to run them were derailed by a creaky and dysfunctional regulatory process that ought itself be reformed out of existence.
Chester E. Finn Jr. is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.