When They Don’t Get Their Way, Ed Reformers Rage
I don’t know as much about BIZPAC chairman John R. Smith a well as my Palm Beach colleagues do. Nor do I know anything about his political action committee and whom he’s supported in the past. And it wouldn’t be fair for me – at least not now – to categorize Smith as a privatization zealot. But Smith has left quite a bit of stuff that’s easy to dissect in this opinion he posted in BIZPAC Review. He wasn’t pleased with the Palm Beach School Board’s search for a new superintendent. Smith doth protests too much, methinks.
Part of the problem with the search process is that voters have elected a board with a super-majority of members having no business sense or experience. Most of these board members have few skills and no knowledge about how to hire a person with the executive competence it takes to run a huge, sprawling, complex organization with a multibillion-dollar budget. It’s a recipe for disastrous decisions, because they can’t comprehend the proper and effective criteria needed for hiring a superintendent.
This board does know how to micro-manage, doing so with abandon, but it knows very little about