City leaders interview 3 candidates for school district CEO

The three candidates for chief executive of the School District of Philadelphia last night presented their cases behind closed doors to a cross section of the city's community, business and education leaders.

Afterwards, they pledged to reporters to do what is necessary to continue reforming the nation's eighth-largest school district - under state control for six years due to academic and financial problems.

Arlene Ackerman, former superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District, said that teachers who do extra work should be paid more.

C. Kent McGuire, dean of Temple University's College of Education, said the vast majority of the city's high schools are broken and need their own "Marshall Plan." He was referring to the U.S. plan to foster the recovery of numerous European nations after World War 11.

And Leroy D. Nunery II, a businessman and former executive with Edison Schools Inc., said the district must run like an efficient business while educating children.

The four-member School Reform Commission will use feedback from the 40-member CEO Search Advisory Committee to make its choice within the next two weeks, SRC members have said.

Ackerman, the only candidate to have run a school district, told reporters that if hired she'd reform the 70 poorest-performing schools - as defined by the federal No Child Left Behind law - by first determining what resources they need, and by listening to parents and the community.

"It's easy to blame the schools if you don't first take a look at what can we change in the system to better support them," she said.

Ackerman, who ran San Francisco's schools from 2000 to 2006 and the schools in Washington, D.C., from 1998 to 2000, said that before asking lawmakers for more money, she'd prove to them that she handles money well.

That approach worked so well in San Francisco, she said, that the city's voters approved two school-funding bonds totaling $600 million on her watch.

Ackerman, 61, now a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, said she also would seek higher pay for teachers who have the credentials and who step forward to use them in the neediest schools.

She said she would work to forge strong relationships with other city leaders to combat issues such as violence in the schools.

She noted that during her time in Washington she lived in the same building as Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey. He was then that city's police chief.

"We used to see each other at one o'clock in the morning getting home. We could see what type of day we both had in D.C. by the way we looked on the elevator," she laughed.

McGuire, 52, said his three top priorities would be to make changes in how classroom instruction is supported, possibly by moving top people from the school level to the central administration; to reinvigorate services to students learning English as a second language; and to help the district's human-resources department find better teachers.

McGuire, who from 1998 to early 2001 was an assistant secretary of education in the U.S. Department of Education, said he believes that the district's standardized curriculum in grades K-8 has gotten off to a good start.

But if progress is to continue, he said, teachers will need more support. "In some ways, it's easy to put a new curriculum or new test in place. It's often harder to help the humans in the system to learn it well enough to execute it in a sustained way," he observed.

McGuire, who lives in Moorestown, N.J., said that high schools need the most attention. He estimated that only about 10 of the 67 are working well.

"That is a problem [needing] something akin to the Marshall Plan. It takes big, bold action," he said. Nunery, 52, of Wyndmoor, Montgomery County, said his business background makes him ideal to run an organization the size of the 167,000-student school district.

The district's business model needs work, added Nunery, who last year founded PlusUltre LLC, a consulting firm that focuses on improving the academic, operational and financial results of charter schools and other independent schools.

"If we spend $2.2 billion a year educating students but are dissatisfied with the product, that means we let a lot of taxpayers down," he observed.

He noted also that he, like Mayor Nutter, has a keen interest in curbing the dropout rate.

From 1999 to 2005, he was vice president of business services at Penn, overseeing revenue of $200 million and more than 600 employees. Then, until early 2007, he was an official for New York-based Edison Schools. The company manages 20 low-performing district schools.

Nunery said that if hired, he would evaluate Edison and all other management companies before deciding to keep them or get rid of them. *