Chief Academic Officers - hiring of professional educators as deputy school superintendents

School Administrator, June, 2001 by Jay Mathews

Natural Succession

In many cases the new superintendent or CEO has opted for an experienced educator who knows the local area well. When Marine Col. A.G. Davis ended a 27-year military career to become CEO of the New Orleans public schools in 1999, he found a veteran Louisiana administrator, Ollie Tyler, to become chief academic officer. She helped complete the five-year strategic plan created by the business-backed Greater New Orleans Education Foundation.

Tyler had served 31 years in the Caddo Parish school system, where she was second-in-command when Davis called her.

Often unmentioned in commentaries about the new powers of the CAO is the job's potential benefits as an insurance policy for a school board that finds its nontraditional superintendent unsatisfactory or, as happened in the District of Columbia schools, suddenly gone.

The D.C. financial control board, which had taken over the school system under a congressional initiative in 1996, appointed former U.S. Army Gen. Julius W. Becton Jr. to be the first-ever CEO of its 71,000-student system. A year later it endorsed Becton's decision to name Arlene Ackerman, who had been CAO to one of the first major nontraditional superintendents, John Stanford in Seattle, as his new chief academic officer.

Becton had indicated he would not stay in the job forever, but the control board members were stunned when less than a year after Ackerman's arrival, the general resigned without warning. The April 14, 1998, resignation letter said he was unhappy about a control board member criticizing him in The Washington Post and about the board's failure to provide enough money for a teacher pay raise. "I have had it!" the letter concluded. "30 April will be my last official day of duty as CEO."

With Ackerman on board, the D.C. authorities had a proven leader who stepped quickly into the gap and soon was named superintendent herself. However, there was no equally strong second-in-command in place two years later when more boardroom strife led Ackerman to resign and become superintendent in San Francisco.

Some routes to the CAO job have been unique and often influenced by local politics. Art Johnson, for instance, newly named superintendent in Palm Beach County, Fla., had a long career as an administrator in the district. But he was forced to resign as an area superintendent over a controversy involving a teacher who kept a "slackers box" for misbehaving students at a school where Johnson had been principal.

Johnson proceeded to win election to a seat on the school board and then voted to fire the superintendent who had ousted him. The interim superintendent appointed him CAO, at which time he vowed to revamp the district's reading program.

Whose Agenda?

The more CAO positions that are created, the more varied each job's duties are likely to be. Some are nearly independent operators, given free rein to make policy. Some are mere mouthpieces for the superintendent's directives. But some experts wonder if No. 2 positions in school districts ever can stray far from the traditional need to execute the day-to-day details of the top executive's agenda. How different do the new CAOs think their lives are from those of deputy superintendents for instruction?