Hopson a steady leader

There is a reason why the average tenure for superintendents of large urban school districts is only three years.

It is a formidable job that requires a host of skills to manage the politics, budget pressures, and administrative and staffing issues to effectively and efficiency run these mammoth institutions.

If that is not daunting enough, all of this has to be accomplished while working with their school boards to make sure children are achieving academically.

That task, in many cases, is made more difficult because so many kindergartners and first-graders enter school from family situations that leave them ill prepared to succeed in the classroom.

The Shelby County Board of Education last week issued a mostly positive review of Superintendent Dorsey Hopson for the 2015-16 school year, naming community relationships as one of his strengths and staff relationships as an area for improvement.

Hopson scored a 3.51 on a 5-point scale overall, putting him right on the border between "meets expectations" and "above expectations."

In the area of community relationships, Hopson scored a 4.2. Comments from the board, which are anonymous in the report released by the district Tuesday night, praise Hopson as an effective spokesman for the district and in building public support.

For staff relationships, Hopson scored a 3.1, his lowest average rating for the evaluation, but still within meeting expectations.

"The main issues appear to be staff morale and recruiting and assigning top talent," the report states. Has Hopson been perfect? No. But since he took the helm of the new unified school district in August 2013, it is fair to say he has been a steady, realistic leader.

Working with the School Board, Hopson manages a district that has a nearly $1 billion budget; 116,000 students, of which 87,000 are considered economically disadvantaged, and 14,500 employees, including 6,800 teachers.

Hopson seems to have the confidence of the School Board. He rightly has stuck to his guns, despite angst for neighborhood school advocates, in closing underutilized and failing schools.

Yet, he has shown flexibility in process, recently proposing closing seven schools and consolidating them, some into brand-new schools that would be built over a period of three years.

Responding to the state’s Achievement School District taking over more of the district’s worst performing schools, Hopson and his staff created iZone schools that, in some cases, are making larger gains in student achievement than ASD schools.

It would be hard for the superintendent to earn a perfect score, especially since so many students are not performing academically at grade-level. But incremental progress is being made.

Students succeeding academically will continue to be a problem until the entire community says enough is enough, and fully marshals the will and resources needed to alleviate the barriers that prevent young children from entering school ready to lead.

Overall, though, for a man who is not a career educator and who joined the legacy Memphis City Schools as general counsel and continued in that role when the MCS and legacy SCS schools merged, Hopson has performed well.

There are those who would disagree with that assessment, but after a succession of career educators, Memphis still was left with scores of failing schools -despite those educators’ best efforts.