At a public event last night, the master of ceremonies recognized Vicki Phillips, the Portland Public Schools superintendent, who was sitting at a table in the audience. The crowd gave her a vigorous round of applause. Today the newspapers report that she’s hiring friends from Pennsylvania to help her with PPS’s communications with schools, teachers, parents, and the public. I detect a subtext with a very small frisson of criticism, implying that she’s a practitioner of cronyism.
My sense is that the public will give her a free pass, for a while, on hiring cronies to do this work. Her job at PPS is akin to that of Hercules in cleaning the Augean stables, and her eventual solution (if she finds one) is not to grab a shovel and move the detritus a scoop at a time, but (like Hercules) to divert a river through the PPS stable to clean it out wholesale. The public’s going to excuse her hiring her friends to divert the river, as long as the stable’s clean when they finish.
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Actually when introduced, the Superintendant was greeted with a standing ovation. And richly deserved.
I think the public is willing to give her credit for actually doing something instead of convening endless focus groups to discuss whether to convene more focus groups. Gus Solomon used to say that the job of a judge is to decide cases — to push cases through to a resolution — and his aphorism holds true for the school superintendent: her job is to run the school district, not to follow it around.