Clock ticking for new BPS superintendent
Wu expects a replacement for Cassellius this June
Mayor Michelle Wu is sticking to her deadline for having a new Boston Public Schools superintendent in place by June, a goal that will be difficult to meet, given that the school committee hired a search firm less than three weeks ago.
“We anticipate the new superintendent will be in place by June,” a spokesman for Wu said, describing the task ahead as one that will have to be a “thorough and urgent search.”
The superintendent will be a permanent one, the spokesman added, rather than an interim one, as was the case in the eleven months it took to find current superintendent Brenda Cassellius. Cassellius came to a “mutual agreement” with Wu to step down on this coming June 30 after three years in the job and two years before an extension of her contract was scheduled to end.
“A school superintendent is such an important job, and stability and leadership are very important for any school district,” said Elaine Dandurand Beattie, senior strategic adviser at the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, a nonpartisan think
tank. “That’s key for selecting the next superintendent, so you don’t want to rush into it.”
The school committee hired One-Fourth/JG Consulting of Austin, Texas, less than three weeks ago for $75,000 to find candidates for the job.
But even if the search firm finds someone the committee feels is the perfect fit, the question is: Will that person want to come to Boston, a notoriously political city where school superintendents tend to not last for more than a few years?
In addition, voters last fall overwhelmingly said they wanted an elected school committee, not one appointed by the mayor, as is now the case.
That could mean that whoever the current school committee selects as the next superintendent ultimately may have to answer to a different committee than the one who hired her or him.
BPS also faces a possible takeover by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, which began a review of the district in March to see if it had made any progress since a 2019 assessment found a “significant” number of low-performing schools in the district and inadequate services for both special education students and English language learners, DESE Commissioner Jeffrey Riley said.
In a March 9 letter to Cassellius, Riley said under her leadership, BPS had improved by adopting a MassCore policy, a staterecommended program of study intended to align high school coursework with college and workforce expectations.
“At the same time,” Riley said, “the district has not significantly reduced the disproportionate placement of students of color in substantially separate programs. Moreover, several new and concerning items have come to our attention, including questions about the accuracy of the high school enrollment data used to calculate BPS’s graduation rate.”
Wu said that she welcomed DESE’s review but that a receivership, under which the state essentially would take control of the district, would be “counterproductive” in light of the transition BPS will make to a new superintendent and leadership team as of July 1.
“Given the very short timeline for Boston’s superintendent search, the urgency to attract high-quality applicants with proven records of fixing large urban districts, not to mention the hard realities of the second state audit in two years,” said Jamie Gass, director of education policy at Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based think tank, “the state and the mayor need to provide greater clarity about how dramatic governance changes and basic accountability will reform a school system that’s obviously in crisis.”