Candid Candidates Why can't the Portland School Board find a new superintendent? In part, because it can't keep a secret. BY NIGEL JAQUISS
njaquiss@wweek.com After seven Portlanders visited Atlanta last week, Portland Teachers Association President Richard Garrett emerged as Ben Canada's staunchest critic. Garrett says he was told that Canada was a poor manager and unpopular with Atlanta teachers. Filling the school superintendent's job in Portland has become a task nearly as time-consuming and controversial as the hunt for JonBenet Ramsey's killer. As the process has dragged on, critics have questioned why Ben Canada, the current school chief in Atlanta, is being presented as the only applicant, rather than one of many. One problem, says school board member Marc Abrams, is there simply aren't many qualified candidates. The board wants someone who has experience in a comparable district, of which there are fewer than 100 nationally. Of those who meet the board's criteria, many aren't looking for work--and local schools have a particularly tough time getting them to even consider a post here. It's not that Portland-area schools have a bad reputation, though the lack of state funding is not exactly a strong selling point. Rather, according to the headhunter who's in charge of finding Portland's next superintendent, the single biggest obstacle is Oregon's law allowing press access to virtually all public deliberations. "It's impossible to recruit a quality slate with an open-meeting-law state," says Bill Attea of Hazard, Young and Attea, the firm conducting the search. Attea's Illinois-based firm conducts searches nationwide, and he says Oregon is one of just four states (Florida, Michigan and Minnesota are others) that allow reporters to learn the names of candidates for public jobs. Oregon's rules require that all school board meetings, except those involving labor negotiations or certain legal and disciplinary matters, must be open to the press. The board, like other public bodies, may close its doors to the public and hold an "executive session" to discuss sensitive issues such as hiring, but they must allow the press to attend. Journalists, in turn, are prohibited from reporting the details of those sessions. The idea is to keep public officials honest while allowing them to speak freely. As the school board learned, this openness has a cost. Although reporters can't disclose specifics of what they learn at executive sessions, they can use the information for further investigation. At an executive session earlier in the search, someone mentioned Michael Caston of Santa Barbara, Calif., who was then a leading candidate. Oregonian education reporter Betsy Hammond, who attended the meeting, did not print that information, but immediately began checking into Caston's background. Word of Hammond's inquiries quickly spread in Santa Barbara. Caston received a call from a reporter at the Santa Barbara News-Press asking him what his plans were about Portland. "I was shocked," Caston told WW, saying he was informed that the early stages of interviewing would be kept confidential. Caston, who has headed Santa Barbara's schools for nearly five years, withdrew his name from contention rather than jeopardize his relationship with his school board and community. Within hours, Attea says, several other serious candidates dropped out as well, fearing that their names might also be made public. The search process was shoved back to square one. Peter Cogswell, spokesman for the Oregon Attorney General's Office, says The Oregonian did not violate the state law, as it did not report directly anything it learned exclusively from an executive session. Still, some observers say such practices violate the intent of allowing reporters behind closed doors. "As an ex-journalist, I'm firmly in favor of open-meeting laws," Abrams says. "However, sometimes they have a real impact on your ability to do your job." Attea, who was a school superintendent for 24 years before becoming a headhunter, agrees. In other states, he says, recruiters identify a range of candidates and bring them in so the entire board can meet and compare them. That's not possible when each candidate risks losing his credibility, or perhaps his job, if word leaks that he's interviewing out of town. Caston, whose plans became the subject of two front-page articles in the Santa Barbara News-Press, says publicity is particularly unappealing for candidates who aren't actively seeking new positions. "If you could work with superintendents in a more confidential setting, you could attract a higher quality candidate," Caston says, "because the best candidates are not the ones out there looking for a job." Board members say the superintendent's position is analogous to a corporate chief executive's role, and nobody would expect a company to interview prospective CEOs in public. "We're being asked to run like a business," says Abrams, "without being able to." The board is struggling to find ways not to let the law hinder the hiring process. "I'm not sure there is an answer, except for the good will of the news organizations involved," says board member Sue Hagmeier. She adds that reporters could find basic background information of the type The Oregonian sought about Caston via the Internet without blowing the candidate's cover. |
