In Search of the Best

Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Paul Reville recently published "How to get world-class leaders for world-class schools" in The Boston Globe. An excerpt follows.

Massachusetts’ residents justifiably take pride in our reputation for educational excellence. We host some of the leading educational institutions in the country and our public schools routinely post the nation’s top scores. However, our public universities and schools are comparatively disadvantaged when it comes to selecting leaders.

Our well-intentioned Open Meeting Law, with its strict provisions for conducting public business with the greatest possible transparency, generally serves us well in the public sector. However, it does, unintentionally, create problems when its provisions apply to searches for educational leaders like superintendents of schools and presidents of universities.

Current and recent searches for a Boston Public Schools superintendent or a new president of the University of Massachusetts have already or will soon illustrate the difficulty in attracting top candidates to a process in which they are required to make their candidacies public. A major portion of the pool of desirable candidates for top leadership positions like these should be people currently occupying similar positions, leaders already doing the work in comparable organizations, proven executives with successful track records. However, such leaders are typically serving at the pleasure of boards who are never pleased to learn that their successful CEOs are taking an interest in a new job. Consequently, many potential top candidates who might otherwise be interested in being considered for a position will refuse to participate in a Massachusetts process which discloses their candidacy.

Read the full article here.

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