No experience necessary.

No matter where you work, your school district probably has a Big Boss who sets the tone and helps establish priorities. In theory, they should know something about education besides what they learned at the Aspen Institute, business school, or in their work for "a foundation dedicated to school reform." If you're lucky, you have a good superintendent. If you work in a big district and have a good superintendent, it's Thanksgiving time. You know what to do.

Here in L.A. we're sort of between bosses, and once again the Los Angeles Unified School District has an opportunity to nominate a genuine educator with genuine teaching experience to lead the district forward. How do you think they'll do?

Well, according to this from the L.A. Times, it's coming down to the wire as candidates are considered.

What qualities are most important in the person tapped to lead sprawling LAUSD, the country's second largest district? I'm glad you asked, because the district surveyed thousands of stakeholders to give the appearance of finding out. Parents, students, and district employees were asked to prioritize various characteristics for the prospective boss. And here's where we pick up the trail.

In their results, published on the LAUSD website and downloadable here, we discover that the number one choice among stakeholders who responded was: "it is either very important or critical the next superintendent has experience working in public schools as a teacher and/or administrator," which came in at a cool 90 percent. Sounds logical, right? Except...

There in the midst of this apparently logical prerequisite is some pretty crafty language. "Wiggle words," or Doublespeak--descended from the marriage of Orwellians Newspeak and doublethink--is deliberately ambiguous language and allows a reader to think words mean one thing while the writer can claim they meant something different. 

Hence, you can think the next superintendent should have actual teaching experience, but the survey offers only one way to express that preference: check the box that also includes chief financial officers, regional administrators, and big shots at "public school transformation organizations." 

You have no other choice, no way to distinguish teachers and former teachers who have worked with students from the myriad functionaries and climbers who have spent practically their entire careers boxed in an office browbeating teachers about a job the "and/or administrators" themselves have never learned to do.

See? Presto! Input! Feedback! Stamp of approval! Once again the board gets to select a bureaucrat with "education experience" without regard for teaching experience, and do it all under the cover of community support and endorsement.

This comes as no surprise to anyone who has served time in LAUSD and paid attention. Although nearly 50 percent of parents, guardians, and caregivers took the time to submit their preferences, less than 20 percent of "Teachers/Educators" did so, and that figure is likely inflated through the use of wiggle word "Educators," which allows the district to include all kinds of "and/or" out-of-classroom personnel in the tally. 

Why was the level of response so low? Because if you are teacher you are freakin' busy, and filling out a survey designed to be ignored is not the best use of your time. Parents get wise pretty quickly, too, but I'm guessing they probably fill it out anyway--you know, because they love their children. 

So based on the results of the survey (or not), the school board has put together a list of potential next superintendents. But let's imagine that we all had a say in who is actually chosen for Big Boss, and let's suppose that we wanted to advocate for one particular candidate. (This is weird. I'm a big supporter of the union, but I can't find UTLA's position on the issue.) Anyway, just try and find out how many years any of these candidates has spent in an actual classroom carrying a roster of actual students. 

404 Page Not Found. I didn't spend hours on it, but I did try to find out how much time some of the leading candidates (according to The Times) had spent teaching as opposed to deaning or counseling or principaling or coaching or consulting. I could not. I did find "business officer" and "CEO" and politicians and lots of "superintendent--or former superintendent of--fill in the blank." The closest I got to actual work in the classroom was a few vague references to "worked in K-12 education," "been an educator for 25 years," and "____ years of experience as a teacher/principal" (what is a teacher/principal, anyway?). 

Wiggle words. It's almost as if they think school happens in an office building at Beaudry, not in classrooms. 

    Just a side note: As a teacher, it took me three years to start to figure things out in the classroom, five years to get pretty good, and I'm still learning now--almost a year after I retired.

In my years in LAUSD, we had superintendents who were actual former teachers, pretend former teachers, professional administrators who moved from district to district like they were being chased (which may be true), a governor, an admiral, a serial resigner who started as a hitman for the foundation class and resides under a cloud of perpetual investigation, and an investment banker and dabbler who thought the job was one thing but found out it was something else. To be fair, and maybe it was partly the strike and certainly the pandemic, this last winner of the Big Boss sweepstakes grew into a fairly humane, adaptable leader. I hope I don't lose my union card for saying it.

Like I said, the Los Angeles Unified School District is again searching for a superintendent to run the joint. The person they choose will depend on what they think schools are and what they want them to be. It will also depend on what they think a student's life and a teacher's job look like. It would be nice if they chose someone who knows because they've been there.

Time will tell.