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	How do you hire 'the best'? (Published June 14, 2004) By MATT WENNERSTEN

As I write this, the D.C. Board of Education is trying to find "the right superintendent." Simultaneously, our mayor has been asking the D.C. City Council to give him the power to appoint a new superintendent. In fact, the mayor thinks the superintendency is so important that he’s lining up $600,000 to pay the next leader of D.C. Public Schools (DCPS). Is super-superintendent the answer?

The idea that the way to fix a school system is to hire a superstar is hopelessly flawed. Organizations, public and private, are terrible at identifying talent. All of the last candidates (Paul Vance, Arlene Ackerman, Julius Becton, et. al.) picked to run DCPS have been competent and successful prior to heading DCPS, yet none has made a significant positive change in achievement of D.C. students. This isn’t just DCPS -- Lincoln picked a series of highly qualified incompetents to lead the Union Army in the Civil War before finding a failed farmer and alcoholic who could actually win the war in Ulysses S. Grant.

Unfortunately, the inability to identify talent is endemic to all organizations, including most businesses. Anyone probably can name a candidate who "looked good on paper" but made a lousy employee and, vice versa, a non-traditional hire who is a tremendous asset. Much of this is due to the way we hire people: Does a read-through of a brief resume and application, plus a single interview, give you insight into how someone will act when in office? Do the credentials we require guarantee quality? Absolutely not – earning an MBA doesn’t make you a leader, nor does studying for a master's in teaching make you an outstanding teacher. These qualifications might be useful minimums, but mainly they serve to exclude a few bright sparks and not filter enough bad choices. I’d comment on the DCPS superintendent job search, but the process has been swathed in so much secrecy that it’s hard to get any idea how they are selecting candidates.

So let’s check the classifieds. A casual scan of job advertisements shows almost random requirements: Why is a bachelor’s degree required for a financial adviser? Would a bachelor’s in theology count? The real reason why a college degree is required is not because this is the best measure of applicant prerequisites, but because we haven’t yet figured out how to describe what we want, and a college degree as a minimum ensures that whoever applies was able to function well enough to graduate from somewhere. How do you find the superstar when you don’t know what it is?

Not only is the "if only we can find a savior" idea chronic at the top (with the resultant excessive compensation, in DCPS and among Fortune 500 CEOs), it also filters down to the local schools. Recently, I had conversations with two people interested in how to reform public education. One is an associate professor of economics at NYU, the other a former DCPS teacher who left the system to teach at a private school. Both of them put forward the idea that if we simply hired great people, gave them monetary incentives and got out of the way, we’d get great teaching. Similarly, our schools would be well run if we hired great principals and gave them lots of leeway in budgeting, hiring and management.

This business model is completely wrong for DCPS. Why would great people want to teach? DCPS has done an awful lot to discourage people from joining, including random job cuts, chronic shortages of materials, decrepit work conditions and high certification requirements. Giving "great teacher" candidates more resources and more leeway in the classroom might mitigate this, but not eliminate it. DCPS is funded through taxation; it’s unlikely that DCPS will grant funding competitive with the private sector. Note that when I say private sector, I’m not talking private schools (in fact, it’s scandalous -- private school teachers are typically paid less than public school teachers, since private schools can hire uncertified teachers.) That said, I’d like to propose as one solution that we simply double teachers' salaries!

Aiming to hire only the best is a wrong strategy for any large organization. As described above, we don’t do a good job of identifying what "best" is. This is especially true in teacher certification – teaching is still at the art-and-craft stage, not science. Not only that, since the "best" people are in high demand, they have lots of opportunities available to them; you can either pay them unreasonably large amounts of money or watch them hop to greener pastures. As an example, imagine a hospital that hired only the best nurses. Either all of their revenue would soon go into nursing salaries, or turnover would be tremendous. Furthermore, many of the best and the brightest people who want to go into health care will probably go to medical school and skip nursing completely. Finally, as an organization grows, inevitably the number of average people grows – the minute you hire two people to do the same job, automatically one of those two persons is not the best at that job.

This is not to say that hiring the best is bad. It’s great if you can, but it’s really only a good fit for small, flexible, high-paying and low-turnover organizations. DCPS is none of these; it's low pay, difficult working conditions, inflexibility and high turnover.

A rational approach to producing quality results in a high-turnover environment would be to have strong quality-control systems, which means lots of training, measurement, standardization and intensive collaboration between new trainees and experienced staff. The opposite is true. Teacher induction in DCPS is an after-thought. Teacher evaluations are random and few. I taught for two and a half years before receiving a scheduled observation from a principal. Teaching is anything but standard – in most schools, on any given day different algebra teachers could be teaching completely different units, and the resources that they incorporate into their curriculum are pretty much whatever they can find, from textbooks to homework assignments. DCPS doesn’t seem to value experienced staff, nor tap their expertise; there is no systematic program to pair or collaborate between new and senior teachers.

The actual approach seems more like hire naïve, idealistic, hard-working fools and push out experienced (and better paid) teachers through systematic demoralization and frequent job cuts. It is no wonder the results have been poor. The same can be said for superintendents. Isn’t it time we changed what we are looking for?

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Wennersten is a third-year mathematics teacher at Bell Multicultural Senior High School and a graduate of the D.C. Teaching Fellows program. Contact him at mwenners@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2004, The Common Denominator