Grad Work for The War Zone

By Sam Allis/Boston

You're the superintendent of schools in San Diego. You get a telephone call at 6 a.m. one Sunday with the news that a black male assistant superintendent has murdered a white female director of program evaluation and committed suicide. The police are at your house by 7 a.m., and the media are about to spread like an oil slick all over this one. What do you do?

That's the kind of question students at Harvard's graduate school of education are confronting in the first course in the U.S. designed specifically to train urban superintendents. No conceptual brainteaser here, to be discussed over Brie and Chablis. This grisly event actually happened earlier this year, and it helps explain why the big-city superintendent's job is one of the purest forms of crisis management this side of the Oval Office, and one of the most discouraging. "Within the ground rules of the system, it's just about impossible to succeed today at that job," concludes Chester Finn, director of the Educational Excellence Network, which tracks educational issues.

It is not surprising then that at one point last spring more than a dozen urban school systems were looking for new leaders. More than half of the 45 members of the Council of the Great City Schools, a consortium of urban school districts, have superintendents in their first or second year on the job. "No private industry could effectively survive this kind of turnover," says former Boston superintendent Laval Wilson, who left his position earlier this year. Says Joan Raymond, superintendent of Houston's schools: "The shortage is critical. I must hear 10 times a day, 'I wouldn't want your job for anything.' "

The challenge is scary: to educate tens of thousands of kids at risk from poverty or neglect while trying to deal with the impact of crack, AIDS, homelessness and middle-class flight to the suburbs. Superintendents must dance with school boards consumed by racial politics, serve on a dozen community boards and learn how to handle the press. In addition to her other duties, Philadelphia superintendent Constance Clayton distributes books to the city's homeless shelters, where 2,500 of her students sleep on any given night. "If I weren't divorced when I took the job," says Floretta McKenzie, former superintendent of the Washington system, "I certainly would have been afterward." From 1981 to 1988, McKenzie often worked seven days a week, speaking at churches on Sundays.

The Harvard effort to fill the imposing gap has got off to a modest start, boosted by the announcement last week that Milwaukee superintendent Robert Peterkin had resigned his embattled post to direct the program. Ten students, seven of them minority-group members, have begun a three-year doctoral exercise that includes a six-month internship in an urban superintendent's office. The effort is mercifully short on theory and long on experience and real life. Students -- most with more than a decade in public education -- role-play different sides in past labor negotiations, face local television reporters and ponder administrative dilemmas involving everything from what to do about asbestos in schools to AIDS education. The students are forced to hone political skills that have little to do with education but are necessities for the jobs they seek.

Predictably, all 10 students are inveterate risk takers who still believe that one person can make a difference. "We all have the fire in our belly," says Sarah Ann Gonzales, a San Diego elementary school principal. "That's what drives us." The choice has exacted a toll. Most are divorced and have long since accepted what one calls "a somewhat monastic" personal life.

The program will hardly ease a national crisis, but it is a start. Says John Porter, Detroit's retiring superintendent: "Harvard needs to tell these people there is no answer unless someone comes up with a vaccine. The fundamental issue is that the right conditions in cities to educate children don't exist." But the very existence of the Harvard course proclaims that simply throwing up one's hands will not do.