Restoring The SUPER In Tendent – redqueeninla

Restoring The SUPER In Tendent – redqueeninla:



Restoring The SUPER In Tendent

Written by redqueeninla in LAUSD

 When my home town built a new school in the early ’70′s, a whole era vanished in concert with the disappearance of gilded letters proclaiming the “Superintendent’s Office” within. I never did figure out what a “Superintendent” was and I was always vaguely disappointed that wing, located near the “big kid” 6th graders’ realm and understood as an entity, would forevermore be inaccessible for future deciphering.

Only now does it come to me that ambiguity is and perhaps always has been, an essential component of the concept. The term “Superintendent” incorporates both a job and a person, the embodiment of supremacy. Vaguely menacing and redolent with Authority, I never have received a satisfying explanation of the post. But I could hear in its reference by adults, a bewildering mixture of fear, contempt, disdain and obeisance. It seems the curiosity of the concept remains even today, quite independent of its iconography.

I do not believe I am alone in my confusion about what a “superintendent” is or does. Earlier in his term our Superintendent Deasy, appointed leader of the second largest unified school district in the country, lectured his own school board about their purpose. Delimiting his own nominal bosses’ role as setting policy, he made it abundantly clear that in his view any attempt at scrutiny of operations amounted to “micromanagement”, or encroachment on the turf of superintendency.

This concept of an eclipsing administrative hierarchy induces the same ambivalence then as now. Why do administrators need administering? When there are too many Chiefs and not enough Indians (an idiom decoupled from, and intended with no disrespect for, Native Americans), at some point their service inclines from support, toward service in justification of self.

And therein lies the problem. A big, complicated system does need organizing. But once the organizing is tended to, excess among the managerial tier starts Restoring The SUPER In Tendent – redqueeninla: