He has quite the résumé — just not for the powerful schools job he has won - The Washington Post

He has quite the résumé — just not for the powerful schools job he has won - The Washington Post

He has quite the résumé — just not for the powerful schools job he has won

He’s got quite the résumé.

Austin Beutner, the new superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, has been, among other things:

— Clinton administration appointee assigned with helping Russia transform from a centralized to free-market economy
— Successful investment banker
— First deputy mayor of Los Angeles, overseeing 12 city agencies
— Publisher and chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune
— Major philanthropist

Now he is chief of the second-largest school district in the country. Experience in the classroom? Zilch.  Operational experience in education systems? Nada.

The L.A. school board made its choice — in relative secrecy and without what some critics said was sufficient vetting — believing that educational experience isn’t required to fix problems that have festered for decades and that seem intractable. Educators have been in charge in the past, after all, and they didn’t fix the problems, so why not try a new approach?

Well, that would be a reasonable question if it hadn’t been tried before and failed. Numerous districts — either schools boards or mayors with power to make the decision — have tapped business executives, or retired generals, or, in New York’s case, a former federal prosecutor (Joel Klein) to run schools. (Can you think of another profession in which a leader would be selected with no internal experience, except, possibly, politics?) If you don’t remember ever hearing of a brilliant turnaround of a district, that’s because there wasn’t one.

Why? Because no matter who has been in charge, the keys of education restructuring — standardized test-based accountability and school choice — aren’t designed to fundamentally address the drastic problems facing many school systems. Testing is based on a notion that it’s an effective evaluation tool for high-stakes decisions — but assessment experts say it isn’t. School choice — in the form of charter schools and voucherlike programs — has not proved to be a systematic solution.

Charter schools — publicly funded but privately operated, often by private companies — are a good example of the problems school choice has created in the state. California has more than 1,200 charter schools enrolling some 630,000 students — about 10 percent of students in the state — and L.A. Unified has the most.

Charters have been a controversial topic in Los Angeles ever since a plan by housing and insurance Continue reading: He has quite the résumé — just not for the powerful schools job he has won - The Washington Post

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