Is it a good idea for HISD to keep its superintendent search on the secretive side? Richard Connelly isn’t so sure:
Picking a new superintendent for the Houston school district is an important job — too important for mere mortals like district parents or residents.
Citing new rules, HISD is abandoning its own past practices — and the usual methods used elsewhere in the nation — and will not disclose the finalists to replace recently retired superintendent Kaye Stripling.
Announcing the finalists would only bring with it a lot of annoying public input, as reporters and citizens did their own background checks and then actually contacted school board members, who’d rather not be bothered, the officials leading the search didn’t say.
Instead they said that “confidentiality enhances the applicant pool,” which apparently is superintendent-search bureaucratese for “mind your own business.”
The Chronicle, a couple of weeks later, takes a more pro-HISD stance:
If everything goes according to the Houston school board’s plan, the public will never know the names of the candidates they interview for the superintendent’s job.
Instead, the next glimpse of the search process anyone outside the nine Houston Independent School District trustees gets will come Nov. 17, when the board plans to name its choice. It’s a standard practice in Texas and other states with laws protecting the secrecy of superintendent searches.
It’s that secrecy that guarantees the best candidates will interview for the job, said the man leading HISD’s search, Don Killough of the Texas Association of School Boards.
“If we can tell them it’s going to be confidential, that really helps us,” he said. “We’re looking at high-caliber people.”
Sure wish the Chronicle would give us a scorecard so we could keep track of which entities should be transparent, i.e. Halliburton, and which ones don’t need to be transparent, i.e. Metro and, apparently, HISD.
