The city's search to replace former Boston Public Schools Superintendent Tommy Chang — who left his post nine months ago — has a transparency problem, said former State Education Secretary Paul Reville.
"I think the mayor has a problem here in terms of the community's perception of what's going on," Reville told Boston Public Radio Thursday. Reville is a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, where he also runs the Education Redesign Lab.
"This is a very important appointment in our community and people want to know what's happening," he continued. "There hasn't been the kind of transparency you'd like to see."
Since Chang's departure, the city has released few details about the search. The last update, from January, listed the number of applicants as 'zero'; however, officials say they are on track to release a list of finalists in April, according to The Boston Globe.
Reville said he thinks interim superintendent Laura Perille "knows a lot about schools and communicates well." But he believes the way Chang's departure and Perille's appointment was handled by the mayor has not engendered trust with the community.
"The slow pace of it, coupled with the way it started — with the mayor basically firing the superintendent without the input from the School Committee and suddenly putting a new person in place almost overnight, again with modest involvement, if any, from the School Committee — [means] the community is feeling excluded from what's going on in this important domain of schools," Reville said.
