An investment banker. A federal prosecutor. An elementary school principal. A Federal Aviation Administration official. The number of superintendents from nontraditional backgrounds has been growing across the country recently.

		Superintendent comparison chart

As the Pittsburgh Public Schools begins its search for a new superintendent, the public debate has begun on the questions of what kind of person should fill the job and how the district can attract the best candidates.

In an effort to shed light on that process, the Post-Gazette has surveyed the central urban school districts of the other 14 PG Benchmarks regions and gathered information on those superintendents.

But the real trick in picking a top administrator, experts say, is finding the right fit -- for the district, for the community, for the superintendent.

"It’s the match between the individual’s strengths and that person’s ability to work within the culture of the community. We have to find that match," said Gloria Frazier, managing senior partner with the International Center on Collaboration. The Naples, Fla.-based consulting firm is coordinating the search for Pittsburgh’s superintendent for a fee of $98,000.

"Each search is different," agreed Nancy Noeske, a partner with Overton Consulting, a search firm based in Mequon, Wis., which is working with Frazier on the Pittsburgh contract.

Two years ago, Noeske’s firm helped the Milwaukee school district find Alan Brown, who had been superintendent in another city, for Milwaukee’s top administrative post.

Board president Bruce Thompson said Overton did a good job with the search, and district test scores started to come up during Brown’s tenure.

But when five new board members were elected this spring, the new majority decided they wanted a leader who could create innovative schools that would attract and keep students in a district known as "ground zero" for the school voucher movement.

No one wanted to go through a search process again. Thompson said he had noticed in a newspaper article that some of the same candidates his board had considered were finalists for a St. Paul, Minn., superintendent post. Overton had also conducted that search.

So, the new Milwaukee board bought out the remaining two years of Brown’s contract and recruited Spence Korte, the maverick principal of the city’s Hi-Mount Community School.

Korte had managed to persuade school officials to allow him to run the district elementary school like a charter school with its own budget and its own board, which had the authority to hire and fire staff.

Test scores at the school were about average, but parental involvement was considerable, Thompson said.

In 1997, Minneapolis school board members also decided to take the search process into their own hands and recruited Carol Johnson. A superintendent in a nearby suburban district, Johnson had worked more than 25 years in the Minneapolis system, climbing the ladder from teacher to assistant superintendent.

The Minneapolis schools had been run for the previous three years by Peter Hutchinson, head of an education consulting firm that had a contract to operate the city’s schools. School officials say Hutchinson’s departure was by mutual agreement.

Hutchinson and the school board decided that he had established the framework for improving academic achievement but that a more traditional educator was needed to implement the programs.

When Seattle’s frustration with the quality of its schools led the board to seek radical change, school officials looked to a search firm to help them find a new leader.

John Stanford, a two-star general and county executive for Futon County, Ga., was recruited to apply.

After Stanford was selected, he tapped Joseph Olchefske, a Seattle investment banker, to be the district’s chief financial officer.

Stanford and Olchefske had met by chance in the elevator of the apartment building where Olchefske had a condominium and Stanford had set up temporary residence when he first moved to Seattle. The two later became friends, working out in the same health club.

Stanford was credited with turning the Seattle schools around by combining high expectations and accountability with giving schools freedom in how they accomplished results, and his death from leukemia last November was a blow to district.

Other districts such as Cincinnati, San Diego and Kansas City, Mo., conducted national searches and contracted with outside firms to select their current superintendents.

Cincinnati and San Diego school officials also made a point of including the community in the search process.

In Cincinnati, residents were surveyed about the qualities they wanted in their district’s top administrator. Steven Adamowski, whose background included serving as state associate education secretary in Delaware and previously as superintendent in three other districts, was the board’s eventual choice.

In San Diego, a citizens committee developed the criteria for the position. Another community group screened candidates provided by a search firm and made recommendations to the school board.

The search firm asked Alan Bersin, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California and Attorney General Janet Reno’s designated "border czar," to apply for the post. The board chose him from among the finalists.

Because Kansas City is under a federal court desegregation order, a court-appointed monitoring committee exercised its authority to screen the applicants submitted by the search firm.

Pittsburgh’s superintendent search history is also varied.

In 1980, when searches were both low-key and low-profile, the school board handled the process by placing national ads and sought assistance only from the district personnel department.

Richard Wallace was hired and went on to be credited with putting Pittsburgh on the map as a quality urban school district.

Twelve years later, the board decided to follow the trend of using search firms and conducting national searches. School officials hired Washington, D.C.- based consultant Floretta McKenzie.

Community focus groups were formed to determine the type of person residents were looking for in a superintendent. Board members visited the cities where candidates worked. Three finalists made public presentations. A community search committee made recommendations.

When deputy superintendent Louise Brennen was chosen, a number of black residents objected to her selection over a black candidate, while others questioned whether the search firm provide the board with the best options.

Board President Ron Suber said because Brennen announced her retirement more than a year before her departure in 1997, the board had time to be more thorough with the next search.

Board members asked local consultants they were familiar with, Ron Porter and Joe Werlinich, to handle the process and appointed a citizens review committee that would have more authority in screening applications and making recommendations.

"We felt the search firms were more interested in placing people rather than helping the board get the best people," Suber said.

Even these efforts met with criticism when the board chose Dale Frederick over finalists that the citizens group had ranked as more highly qualified. Frederick stayed in Pittsburgh only two years before moving to the Mesa, Ariz., school district.

While defending Frederick’s selection, Suber said some school officials believed the last superintendent search did not tap into the network that would have yielded the highest quality of superintendent candidates available.

That’s why the district turned to Gloria Frazier, a leadership development consultant school officials had worked with on several occasions and one who had demonstrated that she had national education contacts, Suber said.

Frazier, in turn, brought in her husband, Roger, a senior partner with the International Center on Collaboration. The Fraziers helped the board recruit Helen Faison as interim superintendent.

After the board approved the center’s contract to find a permanent superintendent, the Fraziers hired Noeske’s firm, Overton Consulting, to work with them.

Roger Frazier characterizes the current search process as a new model that unites a consulting firm acquainted with the school district and its goals and a national search firm with experience in placing school administrators.

In addition to conducting superintendent searches in Milwaukee and St. Paul, Noeske found candidates that were hired as superintendents in New Orleans, Denver and Providence and as a chief academic officer to work with Olchefske in Seattle.

Gloria Frazier said she and her husband have easily interviewed more than 100 people in the city, including business, religious and community leaders, union members and district administrators, to determine what Pittsburgh is looking for in a superintendent and to collect the names of potential candidates.

Noeske and Gloria Frazier said nontraditional candidates as well as seasoned educators are being considered for the Pittsburgh superintendent post. Noeske added that she is guaranteeing a diverse pool with candidates of both genders and different ethnic backgrounds.

And national observers say school boards across the country have been more open to and conscious of the need for diversity of all kinds.

As more veteran educators begin to shy away from superintendent posts because of the growing political and personal demands of the job, more non-traditional candidates such as retired military officers and business people are being added to the pool, observers say.

But their selection is no "silver bullet," said Barbara McCloud, director of Superintendents Prepared, a Washington, D.C.-based leadership training program for aspiring superintendents.

"Nontraditional superintendents who have found success have surrounded themselves with trained people," she said. "Usually the No. 2 person [on the administrative staff] is a traditional educator."

That’s case with Bersin who recruited Anthony Alvarado, regarded as an exceptional education reformer, from a New York City school district to be San Diego’s chancellor of instruction.

In districts with large minority student populations, school boards often recognize that finding minority leadership would be the optimal situation, and more minority candidates are being considered, said Kathy Christie, senior policy analyst with the Education Commission of the States in Denver.

In about half of the PG Benchmarks districts -- most of which have majority minority student populations -- the superintendents are black or Hispanic.

But school officials in several districts said their superintendents were selected because they had the skills to accomplish what the districts needed.

In Cincinnati, for example, where four of the seven school board members are black and more than 70 percent of the student body is African-American, the board selected Adamowski, who is white, from among candidates that included black applicants.

Board president Lynwood Battle, who is black, said board members were most concerned with finding someone who could implement the district’s five-year strategic plan. They felt Adamowski had the skills to accomplish the task.

"He has been able to embrace our strategic plan and bring in his national reputation and research-based professionalism that has helped us with our reform," Battle said. He added that while the race of candidates was considered, the board "wanted the best of the best."

In Kansas City and Minneapolis, where black superintendents oversee districts with large minority student populations, school officials also emphasize the administrators’ abilities rather than their race.

Minneapolis school officials commend Johnson’s expertise as an educator. Kansas City board president John Rios said Demps’ organizational skills were just what that district needed to straighten out a central administration mired in patronage and confusion.

"He’s bringing in qualified people and getting things in order," Rios said. "He has worked out very well."

In fact, Hal Seamon, deputy executive director of the National School Boards Association, says it is a superintendent’s strength as leader in the face of performance expectations and political pressures that tends to capture the attention and admiration of the public, along with much-desired academic improvements.