Chicago Public Schools new CEO?

by Collin Hitt The unsurprising word has leaked that Chicago schools chief Ron Huberman – a Daley appointee – will leave his post before the beginning of a new administration. Greg Hinz… With Chicago Public Schools officials confirming a Chicago Sun-Times story that schools chief Ron Huberman will leave along with Mayor Richard M. Daley, who else...

by Collin Hitt

The unsurprising word has leaked that Chicago schools chief Ron Huberman – a Daley appointee – will leave his post before the beginning of a new administration. Greg Hinz…

With Chicago Public Schools officials confirming a Chicago Sun-Times story that schools chief Ron Huberman will leave along with Mayor Richard M. Daley, who else is headed toward the door?

Interesting question. Another one is, who will take Huberman’s job? Big city school districts are attracting folks from outside the education bureaucracy with intriguing resumes. Los Angeles had a former governor as its superintendent. Rod Paige was a businessman before taking the helm in Houston. A former White House chief of staff is the head of New York City schools. And, of course, education reform professional Michelle Rhee has been Chancellor of D.C. schools for the last three years.

Many out there will argue that the obsession with Superintendents and heroic figures is the wrong approach to school reform.  Maybe. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re talking about Chicago, and nobody loves a free agent search more than the Chicago media.

So let me take a page out of the “just-sayin” book of Chicago journalism and throw out a couple names that it would be interesting to hear mentioned.

• Michelle Rhee, the catalyzing figure hated by the American Federation for Teachers, whose first charter belongs to the Chicago Teachers Union. She’ll be the biggest name on the market, and someone will scoop her up.
• Paul Vallas, the former Chicago schools superintendent who began many of the reforms under Mayor Daley and nearly won the Democratic nomination for Governor in 2002 as a result.  He’s in New Orleans now, head of the relatively small Recovery School District, and yet finds his way back to Chicago quite often. He’s helping the Gary Chico mayoral campaign, by the way.
• Blondean Davis, a remarkably successful Southland superintendent and longtime area superintendent in Chicago under Vallas, is a more traditional candidate and is well-known by the Rev. James Meeks.
• And perhaps some of Chicago’s successful school reformers should be included.  Tim Kingand Juan Rangel each run successful charter school networks and have shown strong organizational and political skills in other endeavors.  Each has enough cred to have been whispered as mayoral candidates, though victory for either would be phenomenally difficult.

Usually, these kind of guessing games are useless, and after the Washington D.C. mayor’s race you can bet that the CTU and the AFT are going to work hard to get their man in office – meaning that, at the very least, there will be incentive for reform-minded candidates to remain mum about their preferred personality to head the city’s schools. But it’s hard to pass up the opportunity to speculate. This is Illinois, and Chicago is Hot Stove City, especially for Cubs fans like me.