Mayor Marty Walsh and the Boston School Committee have chosen an interim district superintendent to replace Tommy Chang, who resigned last week.
Former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville joined Boston Public Radio today to talk about the choice, Lauren Perille, who is the head of an educational nonprofit.
“It’s an unusual choice, I’ll say that,” Reville said. “School districts typically find a senior administrator who isn't interested in the permanent post, but has long experience within the system.”
Perille is the head of EdVestors, and has worked to expand arts and math programming in the Boston Public Schools.
Reville said while Perille has “great skills,” the Mayor’s office has created an expectation for her to lead changes within the district, even with her ostensibly short tenure.
She will have to address teacher contract negotiations, a lack of diversity at Boston Latin School and an overhaul of school start times, among other subjects.
Reville said Perille’s lack of in-system experience might leave her at a disadvantage as she tries to tackle a daunting to-do list.
“She's an outsider,” Reville said. “She’s a short termer, and she doesn’t have that kind of deep system experience, so both to her internal audience and to her external audience it’s going to be challenging.”
Reville said BPS will also continue the search process for a permanent person to fill the role. He criticized the open meeting process that requires finalists to be disclosed, saying qualified candidates “tend to be shy of coming forward for fear of alienating their own school boards or their own boards if they don’t get the job.”
He stressed that the search for a candidate should also include some soul searching about the state of the district and the factors that led to the resignation of Tommy Chang.
“As we speculate on her performance, we need to be thinking about what are we looking for— what are the lessons that have been learned for what has to be perceived, not just as a failure or a problem with Tommy Chang, but as a system failure,” said Reville.
Paul Reville is the former secretary of education and a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education where he also runs the Education Redesign Lab.
