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start for school chief By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer In the year since Dale Frederick became superintendent of Pittsburgh's 40,000-student school district, he has become, in his own words, ''the world's greatest expert on AstroTurf.'' And that is not necessarily a good thing. In May, Frederick found himself spending almost a week boning up on the arcane world of fake grass after Pittsburgh school board director Darlene Harris questioned a $1 million contract the district had signed with a Texas company to install new turf at South Vo-Tech High School's stadium. Only after dozens of phone calls and research into different grades of blades was Frederick able to convince Harris that the district had made the right choice. Today, he keeps a 6-by-12-inch sample of artificial turf under his desk as a reminder never to do that again. This year, he vows, he will spend more time focusing on improving educational achievement than trying to placate nine squabbling bosses -- the directors of the Pittsburgh Board of Public Education. It won't be a moment too soon. Frederick's first year as the city's school chief has been notable mainly for his near-invisibility. He has visited schools, and he speaks at churches and before community groups, but he remains largely unknown to the public. Even his strongest supporters, such as school board President Alex Matthews, say it's time for Frederick to assert himself. ''He needs to have a news conference and say, 'Here's our educational mission, and here's what we're going to establish.' Of course,'' Matthews adds, a tinge of exasperation in his voice, ''I believe he's afraid to make a public statement like that because this board may just change it and do something completely opposite.'' Such are the perils of leading a school system whose own board members describe themselves as dysfunctional and obsessed with politics, and who have been keeping Frederick busy with one crisis after another since his arrival Sept. 1. There was the budget deficit heading into 1998 (he handled it, although there will be another one this fall); the school redistricting plan that created more neighborhood schools (he was privately against it, and modified it, but wasn't able to kill it); plus the still-simmering controversy over allegations of misconduct in the school safety department (Frederick won't comment on personnel matters, but insiders say the board ignored his initial recommendation to fire two top officials in the department). Frederick is well aware of the criticisms of his performance. Sitting in his sunny first-floor office decorated with cactus plants and American Indian artifacts -- a nod to his youth and early career in Arizona -- he acknowledges that he may have spent too much time catering to a fractious group he refers to repeatedly as ''my board.'' Bailing water ''Oh man,'' he sighs, in his soft, earnest voice, ''there are probably many things I would do differently if I had to do it over again. I'd be far more engaged with the community than I've been. But what I've been doing is like, well,'' and he pauses for a minute, struggling for the right words. ''What I was doing was bailing water out of the ship to keep it afloat. I needed to be bailing the water, but I wasn't sailing the ship.'' That preoccupation with internal matters may have cost Frederick something precious: the support and enthusiasm of busy community leaders -- CEOs, charitable foundation leaders, politicians -- many of whom wanted to hear about his vision for the Pittsburgh Public Schools. ''He was invited to speak at a meeting of the Youth Crime Prevention Council, whose members include some heavy hitters -- the mayor, Bishop (Donald W.) Wuerl, the county commissioners, the U.S. attorney,'' recalled one council member. ''And he stood up and gave a rehashed version of the same speech he's been giving since he got here. ''Instead of laying out his vision and rallying us behind it, all he gave us was generalities. There was nothing to grab hold of. He had a chance to come in and say, 'Look, guys, here's what I'm dealing with, here's what I need to do, and I need your help.' These people know what kind of board he's up against, and they wanted to help him. He blew it.'' Not everyone agrees with that assessment. Mayor Murphy, who was present at the meeting, bristled at the notion that Frederick had somehow failed to seize the moment. ''You're asking a guy who's come in here, who's brand new to the system, to articulate a broad vision of an enormous system, and that's unfair,'' Murphy said. ''I think coming into a job as complex as a superintendent, the expectation that you would set the world on fire (during the first year) is absolutely wrong.'' Frederick shrugs when asked about that speech. He didn't provide his audience with specifics, he says, because he wasn't ready to. And he seems generally wary of asking for help from outsiders, even if they are powerful politicians or business or foundation leaders. ''Look, during this past year I've found myself trying to work in a very dysfunctional system. And I've worked like hell to start building an infrastructure that will support the reforms that we're trying to achieve. The support of the board is vital for that. ''Also, Pittsburgh is a very political place, and I don't know all the players yet. I'm beginning to, but I also know that when people say they'll help, their rhetoric and their actions don't always match.'' Board likes him Recently, school board members began a confidential evaluation of Frederick's first year. He is expected to get a good rating, particularly for his handling of the budget deficit, and won't be held accountable for any measurable increases in test scores or decreases in school suspensions until next year. ''I have 100 percent confidence in him,'' said board member Randall Taylor. Harris, who disagrees with Taylor on just about everything, echoes that sentiment. ''I think we have a very honest, sincere person here who is looking out for the needs of children,'' Harris said. ''He hasn't made any big decisions yet because he wants to see how everything works here. I figure I need to give him about a year and a half to feel out the system.'' He's just about done that, Frederick says, and seems to derive confidence from some new data he's received recently from audits that he and his predecessors commissioned. That, along with the promise of continuing guidance from researchers at the Pennsylvania Economy League and the University of Pittsburgh, will help Frederick make some key decisions over the next year, he said -- on issues ranging from curriculum to testing to technology capability to teacher training. ''I am more optimistic today about what our potential is as a school system than I was three months ago,'' he said. Citing accomplishments He also insists that he hasn't just been treading water, waiting for the numbers to come in, and points to a series of short-term accomplishments in his first year, including: Reorganizing the district into three regions to improve efficiency. Now, instead of dealing with a centralized bureaucracy, schools can obtain assistance on disciplinary issues, alternative education programs and other services by dealing with one of three regional assistant superintendents who report directly to Frederick. Establishing a curriculum division, called Teaching, Learning and Assessment, that will not only focus on overhauling a badly outdated instructional program (some texts date back to 1981), but also send experts in math, reading and science to the schools to provide support for teachers, a badly needed service that had been scaled back in recent years because of budget constraints. Starting to implement the district's ambitious but somewhat nebulous six-year strategic plan, which lays out standards for what students should know, instead of just requiring that certain courses be taken in order to graduate. Many teachers and parents are still clueless about what the standards mean, and the district is far from reaching its goal of having nine out of 10 students proficient in math and communications by 1999. Frederick says he's recruited teachers for ''implementation teams'' to come up with concrete plans that connect the standards to what is taught in the classroom, and to establish more realistic deadlines. Overseeing the first year of the district's change to a new, decentralized school-based budget process, in which each school sets its own budget and submits it by May 15. Did he disappear? Aside from all the short-term accomplishments, however, critics say Frederick has punted when faced with more daunting, politically explosive issues. He was silent, for example, on the redistricting plan, which was enacted by the school board in June. While many parents are happy because the plan will create more neighborhood schools, primarily in the South Hills, others complain that the plan isn't economical and will only further isolate the city's poorest students. Frederick doesn't take credit for passage of the most closely watched measure before the school board this year, and doesn't really want to. But he points out that he made it more palatable to those who believe in integration. Under the original proposal, 47 percent of the district's students would have been in desegregated schools, down from a high of 61 percent in 1986 and 52 percent last year. According to the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, a desegregated school is one in which the proportion of black students is roughly within 15 percentage points of the district's overall black enrollment percentage. ''I looked at that, and thought it wasn't acceptable as presented. I wanted to make sure we don't completely isolate kids in the school system,'' he said. He persuaded the board to go along with a new proposal that would move the compliance figure to 51 percent -- 1 percentage point below the current compliance rate. Still, it was not pleasant for Frederick to preside over a change that critics said would move the clock back on integration, even as its supporters said it would keep the middle class in the city's schools. As an American Indian who experienced discrimination while growing up in Arizona, Frederick said he had ''tremendous empathy for the battles that African-Americans have gone through.'' But he appears to have a hard time publicly expressing anger or frustration. Indeed, he described the whole redistricting debate as ''a numbing experience for me.'' ''I've always been in systems where the issues of diversity had been celebrated,'' he said, ''so this took some adjusting to. ''I have this concept of Pittsburgh as a city that has been made of all the peoples that came together, and yet there is still a lot of separatism here. And that makes my job extremely difficult with respect to developing an education program that will benefit all kids.'' His public silence on the issue, however, was puzzling to some parents, who believe he should have spoken out one way or the other. ''We needed to know whether he was for it or against it, but it wasn't at all clear where the superintendent stood, or what part he played in putting it together,'' said Adele Husnik, a parent representative from Minadeo Elementary School who meets with Frederick regularly. ''To put it very bluntly, I haven't sensed either vision or assertiveness on his part,'' she added. With the redistricting issue put aside, at least for now, Frederick faces another major test of his leadership this fall, when the board will sit down to discuss ways to handle a projected $17 million deficit for the 1998-99 fiscal year. It's been six years since the last tax increase, and this year it may be inevitable, he said. ''We've performed triage. We took care of the big life-threatening issues last year. But now, we have to cure the patient. This organization has sustained major blows, as it were. If we make more cuts, you can forget implementation of the strategic plan.'' Proposing a possible tax increase, however, may just give the board members something new to fight over. ''They are not working together,'' he admitted. ''It's tough to keep them focused on common issues. When we do get focused, we make really great decisions. But I can't make the school board members like one another any better. I can't force them to have common vision.'' Breaking up fights At one point this year, Frederick had to physically separate board members Ron Suber and Randall Taylor when a fight erupted at one private meeting. Jean Fink is openly hostile to Evelyn Neiser, and each woman accuses the other of rampant cronyism. Suber and Jean Wood -- who is widely considered the least politically ambitious of the group -- often join with Fink and Harris to disparage Neiser, who they say betrayed them when she voted for Alex Matthews instead of their candidate, Suber, for board president. Harris refers sarcastically to Matthews as ''our dear president'' and suggests that he cut a deal to give Neiser chairmanship of the personnel committee -- the ''patronage'' job -- if she would vote for him instead of for Suber. Neiser and Matthews deny that there was any deal. ''Why would I vote for Ron Suber again?'' Neiser asked heatedly. ''I did that twice before, and he then sits there at a meeting and m.f.'s me. No way.'' All the verbal brawling between members appears to have stunned Frederick into silence. He said he confronted them privately; he will not do it in public. Fink puts it another way. ''Unless it gets physical, he tends not to get into spats between board members. ''He is learning,'' she added. ''But Pittsburgh is very different from where he came from. They don't have neighborhoods in Arizona like we do, they don't have our history, of how deeply rooted people are in this community. Just the fact that we are elected by district frustrates Dale. He feels we have too parochial ownership in districts we represent. He cringes when you talk about 'my district.' ''I think he's real sorry he came here,'' Fink said. ''You can kind of sense his disgust with us.'' Frederick denies that he is disgusted, but clearly he is discouraged. A low point, perhaps, was when he asked nationally known education expert Philip Schlechty to meet with board members this spring to focus them on common issues. It was a resounding flop, especially when Schlechty asked members to tell him what different words meant to them -- ''equity,'' ''community'' and ''diversity.'' ''I guess when we looked at things, we looked at them a lot differently,'' Harris said. ''I see the word 'community' as a neighborhood, and some see it as something different. If I cross the line out of my community of Spring Hill, I can see that it is different than, say, Homewood.'' ''We fight all the time,'' Fink said simply. ''That guy Schlechty tried, but I don't think we were receptive to being buddies with each other. You have to want to make it work, but we don't.' Avoiding confrontation With such a divided school board, it might seem like a good move for Frederick to make his case directly to the public. But don't look for Frederick to distance himself from the group of people who voted unanimously to name him superintendent, even though the former superintendent of the Warren, Ohio, school district hadn't been among the top recommended candidates. While insisting that he won't spend as much time trying to make peace, ''I still need to get to know my board,'' he said. ''And I don't want to give the district more of a black eye than it already has'' by criticizing the board. ''I'm not convinced that is the way to go, because ultimately, the board does what it wants to.'' ''His style is such that he feels he needs to bring this board together first ... before he can effectively lead in the larger community, and that would be a challenge for any superintendent,'' said state Rep. Ronald Cowell, a Wilkins Democrat who served for many years as chairman of the House Education Committee. And Frederick may be right in deciding to keep a low profile, Murphy argued. ''He is very technically oriented, a manager more than a strategist. He's understated. He's more focused on managing than the big picture, and I think the school system needs to be managed, first and foremost. I don't want the superintendent to manipulate the board, and maybe Dale has figured out ... that he has to define his role not to be the public figure.'' Murphy also dismisses complaints that the board is too political. ''This is democracy, and we should applaud it,'' he said. But that may be a minority view, at least compared with what others in the city's business, academic and philanthropic community say about Frederick. They feel that after one year in office, he has yet to show success as a leader in three key areas: galvanizing the public, focusing a myopic and contentious school board on common issues and producing measurable gains in achievement that would keep parents from choosing to leave the city school system. ''Has he shown himself to be a leader with the kind of forceful personality that can rally people behind a common goal? Not yet,'' said Robert Nelkin, who runs an early literacy program at the University of Pittsburgh and served on a committee that screened the superintendent candidates. ''Has he shown himself to be an effective counterweight to this school board? Not yet. Can he point to measurable gains in achievement and success in marketing the district to parents who can choose to go elsewhere? Not yet.'' Frederick, in turn, counters that things will be very different this year. ''Just wait,'' he said. End of series
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