Kansas City Star
By Joe Robertson
June 17, 2008

Silver bullets, superheroes and the Titanic: A conversation with John Martin, KC’s interim superintendent

The Kansas City school board too often has members who see themselves as “superheroes” who must single-handedly rescue the district.

That’s the candid view of interim superintendent John Martin, who is filling the district’s top job while the board searches for its 25th superintendent in 39 years.

“Boards can’t save school districts,” Martin said in a Q&A with The Kansas City Star. “Boards of education with single superheroes trying to save the district create more chaos than they create growth.”

Two reasons to take notice when Martin talks:

•No. 1: He’s uniquely experienced.

He’s from the Kansas City area. He has watched the school district from the outside as Grandview’s superintendent, tangled with the challenges of urban schools as the top deputy in St. Louis and seen Kansas City from the inside as its current interim chief. He succeeded Anthony Amato, who was superintendent for 18 months.

•No. 2: He’s a short-timer. With the safety of retirement at hand, he doesn’t have to step gingerly through the politics.

Ask him about a school board that is promising to cooperate, the wisdom of sending off superintendents, or the chances that the community can rally together for schools, and he’ll give his answer.

(Some of Martin’s answers have been edited for length.)

Kansas City has tried many times to save its schools. Is the current wave any different?

I don’t know if it’s any different or not. I think what the board and community are trying to do this time is to try to come together with a single focus instead of a multi-pronged attempt.

What’s happened in the past is that we’ve been trying to do too much. It’s the downfall of the schools. Kansas City can’t be everything to everybody. No school district can. It has to be about educating the children. It has to be that focus.

If in the process of doing that you get distracted by issues like who gets a job, which company gets the work, and if you spend all your time focused on that, you lose focus on what’s important.

Whenever we get down to it, the kids will be well-educated whether Joe White Guy or Joe Black Guy or Joe Asian Guy designs the room. The point is, get the room designed. That’s the focus. Get the kids educated. We need to focus on that above everything else.

We get distracted by service providers instead of focusing on the education of the child and making that the focus and letting the rest of the stuff be what it is. It’s background.

The citizens of the task force more than once have turned to you and asked, “What do you think we should do?”

What I’ve said over and over again basically is two issues. One: Get the community behind the schools with a single focus. And No. 2: Stability in the district. With the community divided with what they want from the schools, you wind up with a board that’s divided as to what it wants from the schools. Ergo, you wind up with a school district’s that’s divided as to what its mission is. (pause) No good.

Again, we can’t be everything to everybody. You can’t keep changing administrations or leadership for the same reason. Every time you put in a new leader, you wind up with a new direction. It may not be a 180-degree change. It may not even be a 90-degree change. But a 15-degree variance from the primary course of the district is enough to disrupt the district.

Teachers here and administrators here, in my opinion, have learned to hold out. Because this month’s mission, if I don’t like it, all I have to do is hold my breath for six to nine months. It’s going to change. Or the joker that’s pushing it is going to be changed and I’ll get another chance. It’s not that we change administrations that fast, but they know that the administration is going to be changed.

How long was it before with Mr. Amato the news was out in the community that (he) was in trouble? It only took about nine months.

They know when things are changing. It’s sort of like this K-8 we’re doing now. We’re doing the K-8, but it’s already on the street that it’s subject to change. If you’re teaching in the classroom and you’re uncomfortable with it, how much commitment do you have to it? It’s going to change.

Which is more important, anchoring around individuals and leadership, or solidifying missions and goals?

Given that you could only do one of them, do the leadership. Because if you get consistency in leadership, in most cases leadership has a mission. He or she will have a mission and will be consistent and faithful to their mission regardless of what happens elsewhere. They’ll be faithful.

If you think about the example that I often use with the board, it’s the Bernard Taylor issue. Bernard was here for five years. If you remember those five years, some of the times the board was very calm, some of the times the board was very stormy. But because you had a consistent superintendent, the district consistently moved forward. Did it make leaps and bounds? No. But it didn’t come down by leaps and bounds. It came down by the inch. It’s going to go up by the inch, unless you can get everybody united pushing in the same direction.

If you want greater progress, you’ve got to have both facets. But if you’ve got to choose just one of them, choose the leadership. Consistent leadership will get you in a better position than you are now.

Kansas City and St. Louis have a history of changing leadership in pursuit of elusive goals …

Yes. Chasing the silver bullet. Chasing the magic answer. If we do this (snap), we’re going to be saved.

Well, by golly, it took us 30 years to get here. It’s going to take you close to 10 years to get this Titanic turned around so that you have enough time to turn it and repair the damage from the iceberg you just ran into. It’s not going to be overnight.

You’ve got so many things to repair. First off, you have to repair the administrative structure. The infrastructure in this district has got to be repaired. You’ve got to get processes and stuff in place that are consistently used across the district. You have a whole bunch of training to do. Not because people aren’t trained. But you’ve got to train them in the same direction.

You’ve got to create a single vocabulary across the district so that when people talk about outcomes they’re talking about the same thing. They aren’t using variant definitions.

You’ve got to work on morale so that people tie morale to performance. Morale isn’t a function of my giving you stuff, or this being a jovial place. Good morale is built around good performance. When people do a good job, they feel good about their job. We have to be able to support them to think that. And we’re not in a position to do that now because we don’t consistently define a good job across the district.

We have a couple of islands where there’s really good performance or generally good performance. We fight like heck to save those and to guard them. What we haven’t done a good job of is spreading whatever is happening on those islands to the balance of the district.

Why do Kansas City and St. Louis go through this?

Communities. They go through this because the community is impatient. The community wants instant gratification in terms of schools. They want schools to be good now. So does everybody else.

The reality is it’s not going to happen. So you bring in a board who come to the board with the goal of instant gratification. We’re going to make this right, now. And so each of those board members is elected with the anticipation that they are going to be able to do something individually, working with the board, to save the district.

That doesn’t happen. Boards can’t save school districts. Boards of education with single superheroes trying to save the district create more chaos than they create growth.

School districts are typically saved and brought along by good administrations, by administrations that are allowed to work and work with a board to save a district, to bring about change in a district. That’s a long-term process. But it is a cooperative process where a board sets goals, empowers a superintendent to do the work to save the district.

Boards of education are governance bodies. They were never meant to administer or to do the direct work necessary to save a district. That’s not their function. Their function is to hire a good superintendent, support them and empower him or her to do the job that is necessary.

Did Bernard Taylor need to go?

I can’t answer that. I wasn’t close enough. I know that they did better with Bernard here than they’ve done since then. Was it time for Bernard to go? In the five years he was here, they were better off than they were before and they’ve been since.

Did Anthony Amato need to go?

I can’t answer that. All I can tell you is that while Anthony Amato was here, with a strong superintendent, things began to fall in place. Whether they liked it or not, his style or anything like that, things were happening under Amato.

Was it good? Was it bad? I don’t know. I can tell you what I see on the other side in a forensics kind of examination. I can’t tell you whether he needed to go. I can tell you that this district desperately needs a superintendent that will work with the board and the community to create a good school district, and that he or she needs to be given eight to 10 years to accomplish that, and they need to be excused for certain little quirks.

I don’t know of any leader that’s going to be universally liked by everyone. It just doesn’t happen. If you’re doing leadership, one of the things you’re doing is making decisions. If this thing needs to be corrected — and it does — some of the people are doing things they shouldn’t be doing. Which means when the decision is made to no longer do that, you’re going to tick some folk off.

Is it a deliberate action? Is it something you’re doing because you’re evil, lowdown and no good? I don’t think so. You’re doing it because you don’t see it as being functional.

There are certain leadership styles that create more cooperation than others. In a district this size and a district in this kind of community you need one of cooperation. You need a person who can work with others. But you also need a personality that is sufficiently strong not to be pushed off the mark easily.

How much of a chance do you see a superintendent being here eight to 10 years?

The chance depends entirely on the board. The board has to see the value in that continuity, and they have to see the value in having a good superintendent above — above — the value of their individual contributions. They are going to have to defer to whomever they put in that position, above their own ego. That’s hard to do, especially when you’ve been elected as a superhero.

They’ve got to be able to defer to this person as being the expert on running a school district and the expert on educational processes. That’s going to be difficult. Because board members make commitments to communities that they often have no way of bringing into fruition except through coercion, working through a superintendent.

You said in one of the meetings that we don’t need another revolution — that the next revolution is going to kill us …

Yes. We need evolution.

We need to grow a good school district. It means you do some careful weeding and pruning. You cut out things that aren’t working, carefully. You feed and nurture what you want to keep. You provide the training, support, education and guidance, leadership, so that those that remain know when, where and how to make progress happen.

That’s a process that belongs to administrative leadership. It’s not done by boards.

You were going to go out and recruit a deputy to grow into this job. Why didn’t that work out?

It didn’t work because the gentleman I had in mind had an emergency in his own district. He just couldn’t leave. Then we had an election. And when the election was done there was a new set of sheriffs in town.

Is the perception and the history of the school district making this job you’re holding a hard sell?

Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. If you recall, when Ben Demps was hired as superintendent (in 1999), they had gone out on a nationwide search. I believe they got 15, 16 applications. When Demps left (in 2001), they got fewer, which was the reason Bernard got the job, at least in part. There were so few applications that they wanted to give the district time to appear to be more stable, a more desirable place to work. And Bernard lasted five years.

When they went back out for a nationwide search, they got close to 30 applications. The reputation did affect the interest in the job. Mr. Amato was here 18 months. I’ll be here for looks like nine months. Starting soon, they’re going to start a search. The frequency of change of leadership in this office is going to affect who will apply in that search.

Superintendents are like anybody else, they’re looking for a job, looking for someplace they can go, do a good job and stay. They’re looking for stability. They have families. They have a desire to be successful, a desire to settle somewhere and have a life. They’re not interested in being continually on the interview circuit in one pool after another pool after another pool.

Superintendents are human beings. They want a life like anybody else. Floating from job to job every two years is not a hell of a life. Mr. Amato, I’m sure when he came here, wanted a job. He wanted stability. He’s got a family, got kids. They’re in school. He wants some place where he can go and raise his kids and do his job and be appreciated for the job he does, be reasonably successful and have some stability in his life.

Most people want that. But urban superintendents haven’t been able to find it mainly because of that phenomenon of the superhero board.

St. Louis has an appointed special administrative board. Would that model work for Kansas City? The first question might be has it worked for St. Louis?

That’s a better question. Take a look at St. Louis. St. Louis had a 14-month superintendent when Dr. (Diana) Bourisaw took over. Dr. Bourisaw will have been there two years when she leaves (at the end of July), and it will be roughly 13 months after the (appointed) board took over … June 15, 2007.

Is it better? If the new board was put in place because the old board was unstable or couldn’t keep a stable administration in the district, and their goal was to create stability, have they done that? I’d say no.

Appointed boards in my experience are no different than elected boards. They have all the same kinds of problems and they lose one strength and that is they are not representing particularly anybody except the person that appointed them, or the entity that appointed them.

Describe an effective school board.

An effective school board is one that focuses on what school boards are supposed to do — ones that focus on governance and policy, setting direction for the district, hiring a good superintendent, empowering him or her to meet the mission that the board has set out.

The board’s job is to set the mission, set direction, and hire a superintendent and empower him or her to achieve that goal. They shouldn’t be involved in the everyday operations of the district. They shouldn’t be micromanaging. They shouldn’t burden the central administration with so many reports and obligations to the board that that administration doesn’t have time to do its primary job.

Do they need to keep a check? Yes. But they need to work out a method for doing that in cooperation with their administration so that their keeping check on what’s going on continues to empower the administration to do the job without it becoming burdensome.

How well is Kansas City positioning itself now?

We’re in better position now in terms of the verbiage I hear from the board than what I heard when I first got here. There is more talk about empowering a superintendent and administration to move forward. The board will tell you they have one employee — the superintendent. The board will tell you that their job is governance and policy.

The reality is …?

With the long history of distrust between the board and its administrations, the tendency to micromanage still exists. The current board structures encourage that. All these committees? It’s a form of micromanagement.

How hopeful are you that the verbiage is going to become the reality?

I’d say about 50-60 percent.

Going forward, a large influence on whether or not the verbiage will become reality is the wisdom with which the next superintendent is selected. If the board does what they verbalize, and that is hire someone who can make a commitment to the current programs and plans going forward, and if the board can make a commitment to those same programs and plans going forward, then the possibility of this functioning well is high. But if either deviates, the chances aren’t very great.

And the board right now, in my opinion, still has some difficulty with its own commitments. K-8 is one. The board voted for it. The commitment is eroding. Which leaves an administration hanging.

How hopeful are you that the board can get a superintendent hired so you can retire on schedule?

It’s not an issue. I will retire on schedule. I’m out of here not later than the end of October. My hope is that they’ll have someone identified and on their way in time to come in so they’ll be here by the end of September. I wouldn’t be opposed to some minor role in transitioning. My full-time work will end Oct. 31.

Other thoughts you want to add?

There are a lot of good people here, a lot of bright people who are perfectly capable of doing their job. Success will depend on stability in definition of the job. What is it that people want done and how do they want to accomplish it? You can’t keep changing things. I don’t care whether it’s uncomfortable or not, whether you particularly like the particular goal that has been set. Once you’ve set it, you’ve got to stick with it.

If the political winds change and you change it, the only thing you can be sure of is that you won’t succeed.