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Monday, June 9, 2008
Is a national search worth the cost for Dayton?
Kay Royster and Greg Thornton
A couple years ago, I read a fascinating book called Good to Great, a study of companies that made extraordinary growth and emerged as worldwide leaders in their industries.
It’s an interesting book on many fronts. The routes to success these companies took were sometimes unorthodox and counterintuitive. One chapter discusses the position of CEO. Here’s what author Jim Collins and his team of Stanford University researchers found — the companies they studied were often run by people who were promoted internally from jobs like chief operating officer or finance manager and often had long tenures with the company.
They were not usually hot shots hired away from other companies (in fact, there was some evidence in the book that those sorts of CEOs had a negative effect on company performance).
Not long after I read the book, I heard Dayton Deputy Superintendent Debra Brathwaite mention it during a presentation to the school board. I asked her about it afterward and she raved about the book, saying she had given a copy to Superintendent Percy Mack.
Coincidentally, Brathwaite now stand in the position of candidate for the school district equivalent of CEO as an internal candidate with a COO-type job. So perhaps it is no surprise that she is somewhat irked that the school board wants to conduct a national search for Mack’s replacement.
But getting beyond the personalities and the politics there are bigger questions here. Among them:
—Can Dayton afford a superintendent search?
—More importantly, can the district afford a national candidate for superintendent?
—Can the board expect a better candidate from a national search?
Dayton has had some success using consultants to search for talent. Mack, in fact, was brought in as deputy superintendent by a consultant, as was Brathwaite. But there have been less successful consultant-led searches, too, like the one that nearly put a convicted criminal in the deputy superintendent’s chair.
But let’s go back to the last national search Dayton conducted for a superintendent. This was in 2000. Back then the district brought in a well-known national firm called Hazard, Young and Attea out of Chicago, which proceeded to persuade the board to violate Ohio’s open records law, among other missteps.
While ignoring potentially good candidates, esepcially local ones, the firm trotted out two finalists for Dayton — Kay Royster, then superintendent in Kalamzoo, Mich., and Greg Thornton then an assistant superintendent in Winston Salem, N.C.
The lack of a local candidate outraged Daytonians, turning the next board meeting into a circus as speakers lined up to rip the board until it finally relented and promoted interim superintendent Jerrie Bascome McGill.
But whatever happened to those other candidates the consultant brought in?
We reported at the time that the Kalamazoo board was desperate to get rid of Royster after her relationship with the community soured. She eventually landed in Peoria, Ill., where she made more enemies and was again forced out. Now it looks like she has just lost her job again, this time in Missouri.
Thornton has had more success, but not as a superintendent. He struck out not long after Dayton for a superintendent job in Connecticut. I can’t find the story, but at the time a newspaper reported Thornton’s strange behavior at an interview led the board to question his honesty and they ultimately picked someone else. Still, he went on to success as an administrator in Maryland and now has ascended to chief academic officer in Philadelphia. In fact, last year he was a finalist for superintendent in Seattle.
Now imagine one of those two had gotten the job here. How would that have turned out?
I’ve been told Royster had the inside track during Dayton’s 2000 search. Based on her troubled history in Michigan, Illinois and Missouri, it’s hard to see how she would have been a success here. Dayton was the fifth or sixth district to make Royster a finalist but none picked her after researching her work in Kalamazoo. However, I was told she put on an impressive show during interviews when talking about how to raise test scores.
Thornton might have been a different story. He is not much different from Mack — a southern administrator who had never been a superintendent before. Like Mack, he was mild mannered and hard working. But his resume today suggest something else — the Philadelphia native likely was not looking to settle down here and has often had his eye on the next opportunity.
And then there is the matter of cost. The 2000 search run by Hazard, Young & Attea cost Dayton about $30,000 plus the expense of flying the candidates in to interview. Today, I think a national search firm could cost as much as $50,000. Consider Memphis, where the recent superintendent search run by Ray and Associates cost $42,000 and yielded a field with James Williams in it. Not much return on investment there.
After funding the search, the next problem for the Dayton school board is paying the new superintendent. The attributes the board is looking for — a good leader with a proven track record of success in urban school reform — are rare. Getting a sitting superintendent with that resume would likely cost more than the $140,000 the board was paying Percy Mack.
Mack, in fact, is a good case in point. He went to Columbia, S.C., where the school district is slightly larger but the cost of living also is only slightly higher than Dayton. Mack’s new contract will pay him $195,000 annually.
I don’t know if Dayton, in the midst of a financial crisis, can justify to the public spending almost $200,000 for a superintendent and maybe as much as $50,000 to conduct a search.
The board could perhaps get cheaper candidates by asking its search consultant to aim for someone with a resume like Mack and Thornton had in 2000 — up and comers with potential and track records of success in a responsible supporting roles who are shooting for their first superintendent jobs.
Wait, that sounds a lot like Debra Brathwaite …
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