John Stanford,the superintendent of Seattle schools, sweeps into the parents' meeting at Washington Middle School like a movie star. He's half an hour late. A wave of excitement runs through the crowd as the former general takes a seat and fixes a steely Eastwood gaze on the speaker at the podium. Elegant in a crisp black suit and white shirt, he brings panache to a drab lunchroom filled with cracked plastic chairs.
See
end of story for related links
When it's
Stanford's turn to speak, he switches in a flash from tough Eastwood to earnest Clinton. "I'm so glad to see you here tonight," he says, as though from the depths of his heart. Stanford is here tonight to talk about the new high-stakes standards being phased in for fifth, eighth, and 11th grades. Anxious parents, wondering whether their kids will progress to the next grades, have many questions: When do the standards go into effect? What criteria will be used? What will happen to the kids who fail?
The superintendent bypasses such nitty-gritty matters and riffs on the need for standards in the first place. Echoing the Persian Gulf War, in which he served as a transportation director, Stanford proclaims repeatedly, "We need to draw a line in the sand over standards." He segues unexpectedly into a catalog of societal problems: "When are we going to stop child abuse, spousal abuse, and hunger? Are we powerless to stop these things? No. We just need to come together. That's what we need to do, to come together over standards." After thanking this "great city" for letting him be superintendent, Stanford says he's "got to dash" to his next meeting. And he is gone.
There is no denying Stanford's charisma. "He certainly is a PR man," says one mom in the crowd. "Lots of gloss, little substance." Then she reflects, and adds, "Still, I think the substance is there." Though Stanford leans toward superficial slogans in public, in other words, his administration is shaking up the system.
That's an apt description of Stanford's record—to a point. The substance of his administration is impressive when you consider that the man never had an education job before; he spent 30 years in the military and did a brief stint as a county manager in Georgia. But his accomplishments can't help but fall short of his incredible hype, which casts his two-and-a-half-year tenure as an inspirational turnaround story.
When pressed, Stanford acknowledges that "we have a long way to go." A different message, however, comes across in a public relations packet disseminated by the district. It credits no fewer than 42 initiatives to Stanford, and a number of awesome accomplishments: raising test scores, starting to close the gap between white and minority students, slashing the dropout rate by almost half, reducing security incidents by a third, and considerably increasing the "market share" of public schools. The packet even includes "John Stanford's 13 Steps to Success," for other districts wishing to follow his example.
In person, Stanford naturally tries to convey this message with humility, though he can't help comparing himself to great leaders. "I don't feel like I have turned [the district] around," he said in his office one morning last month, in an almost-hypnotic cadence. "I think that we have turned it around. I'm on a team of teachers, principals, staff members, and the board. You know what is really powerful? The citizens. I mean the citizens and the business community. It is so powerful. The team that we have. It hasn't been me. My job is to be the catalytic agent. My job is to be the person that paints the vision and helps people to get there. Great leaders live backwards. They have a vision of the world as they believe it ought to be and as they believe the people want it to be. And then they return to the present and work inexhaustibly to achieve that vision."
A mostly enchanted press has swallowed Stanford's claims whole, and he is fast turning into a national celebrity— recognizable enough to shill for Windermere Real Estate in TV ads. At a time when education reform tops the political agenda, Stanford represents a new, trendy kind of educator: an outsider with fresh ideas from the military and business worlds, who promises to infuse ailing public schools with discipline and
efficiency.
School Board vice president Don Nielsen hails Stanford, in typical fashion, as a "transformational leader." After Stanford let it be known that he was receiving lucrative job offers last month, two nameless associates from the business-supported Alliance for Education offered him a half-million-dollar bonus to stay. Stanford eventually turned the offer down, after it began to look bad. Not to worry. He'll net a reported $500,000 advance from Bantam for a "how-to" volume on improving schools. And Stanford seems to have caught the eye of federal Secretary of Education Richard Riley, who hailed this city and state as educational models and recently chose Seattle as the site of his annual state of education address.
It's said that turning around a school district is like turning around a battleship—it takes time. Stanford's intimation that he has somehow fixed our district in a very short time bears close examination, not only to judge his tenure but to understand how Seattle's schools are doing. Predictably, Stanford's rhetoric turns out to be steeped in exaggeration and, in a few cases, plain misinformation. The irony is that by claiming the world, Stanford has de-emphasized his most important initiatives—the introduction of meaningful standards and a restructuring of the system along the lines of charter schools—which are turning Seattle schools into a laboratory for ideas that have been talked about in education reform for years.
