What Skills Would Each Finalist Bring As Boston's Superintendent?

superintendent finalists.jpg — (L-R) Marie Izquierdo, Oscar Santos and Brenda Cassellius, final candidates for superintendent of the Boston Public Schools.

Bianca Vázquez Toness is the Managing Editor and Correspondent for K-12 Education at WGBH Radio. She has covered everything from technology to immigration to presidential elections, but keeps coming back to stories about kids and schools. She's worked for Minnesota Public Radio, WBUR and Bloomberg News. She was a 2016-2017 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.

Molly Boigon is a former associate producer and reporter for Learning Curve, WGBH’s K-12 education desk. She has also worked for Boston Public Radio and WGBH’s higher education desk, On Campus. Her interests include jazz, yoga and public records requests. Before joining WGBH, she worked at SiriusXM, WZBC and WAAF. She has a degree in Applied Psychology and Human Development from Boston College’s Lynch School of Education.

April 19, 2019

Updated July 31, 2023

Not one of the Boston superintendent finalists is a sitting superintendent, disappointing some observers.

“Running the Boston Public Schools should not be a training ground for new superintendents,” Keri Rodrigues, leader of Massachusetts Parents United, wrote to her members. “It’s concerning that we are not able to attract a seasoned superintendent with a track record of success in running another large urban district — especially given the enormous challenges regarding the achievement gap facing the district.”

Paul Reville, Harvard education professor, called this year’s candidates “slightly better” than the group of finalists when Tommy Chang was chosen superintendent in 2015. ”In my view, it's still not an A-level pool, but it's a strong pool,” he said.

It’s a scenario WGBH News predicted in July, owing in part to the open nature of the interview process. Sitting superintendents won’t subject themselves to a public search for fear of upsetting their current employers, the logic goes.

So, what do we know about the finalists and what they might do? Based on the experience they do have, how might they approach Boston Public Schools, with its achievement gap, declining enrollment, and mayoral control of schools?

The group offers three distinct choices — a former education commissioner from a state admired for its academic achievement, a technology-loving chief academic officer from the fourth-largest district in the country, and the one candidate who has been a superintendent in a traditional school district and is a local.

Brenda Cassellius
As the head of Minnesota’s education department, Brenda Cassellius expanded pre-kindergarten in the state. That might appeal to the school committee, as Mayor Marty Walsh plans to spend $15 million creating 750 additional preschool seats in the city. During Cassellius’ eight-year tenure as the state’s commissioner of education, she built up voluntary school-based preschool seats, scholarships and other early learning initiatives for 30,000 students.

She also developed an alternative adult diploma program for students there, experience that could help her shore up Boston’s adult education programs.

While former superintendent Tommy Chang failed to navigate the political machine that runs Boston's schools, Cassellius showed enough skill in Minnesota to pull off an adjustment to the state’s per pupil funding formula four years ago, a 2 percent yearly increase that received bipartisan support.

She also spent nearly a year as a superintendent, although not in a typical district. She ran the East Metro Integration District, a special system that serves as a collaboration between St. Paul Public Schools and schools in surrounding suburbs. The nontraditional district had only two schools and 850 children from kindergarten through tenth grade.

In 2016, Cassellius signaled her interest in again running a district. She was still serving as state commissioner when she applied to run Minneapolis Public Schools. Even with the backing of then-governor Mark Dayton, she lost in a 6-3 vote. One member of that city’s school board said academic results had declined under her tenure as education commissioner.

But what she said in an interview for the Minneapolis job might tell us how she would approach Boston and why she would want the job. Minneapolis is a smaller school district, with around 34,000 students. More than half of students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. The majority of students are black, Hispanic or Asian.

Cassellius said she wanted to head Minneapolis schools because she believed Minneapolis could be a national model for how urban school districts can close achievement gaps.

“I really want to be a part of making this city great and making our schools great,” Cassellius told parents during the interview.

As a teacher, school administrator and as commissioner, Cassellius said she has focused on giving all students access to the same resources, such as rigorous coursework and quality teachers.

As superintendent, Cassellius said, she would continue to focus on closing gaps, but she told community members in Minneapolis that they would need to get involved as well.

“There is no one superintendent who can do it, no one board,” Cassellius said.

Marie Izquierdo
Izquierdo is the chief academic officer of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, a district with 348,000 students. Her job includes overseeing all academic programs, pre-kindergarden, magnet schools, information technology, innovation and school turnaround, among other things.

Since she took over in 2013, she has said the number of low-performing schools in the district has declined from 20 percent of schools to 2 percent, a data point that no doubt got the attention of Boston’s hiring committee. Izquierdo attributes this achievement, in part, to a culture of using data to understand students’ weaknesses. The district built data systems to make it easy for teachers to access and understand the data.

“We need teachers to be the artists of their craft. We don’t want them to be spending their days disaggregating data,” Izquierdo said in a case study about Miami-Dade County Public Schools. “We want them to use their time to meet their kids where they are. We want to create systems that provide more freedom for them to practice their art.”

Because technology has been a big focus for Izquierdo, she might clash with traditionalists. She’s brought more Wi-Fi to schools in her district, distributed over 172,000 mobile devices to students and incorporated more digital content into instruction. She describes several dozen schools in her district where there’s no traditional schedule, with students learning at their own pace online.

“We have some subjects and some topics that we teach that are led by the teacher or the facilitator, and then half the day is spent virtual learning,” she told the Sun Sentinel in nearby Fort Lauderdale.

Izquierdo might teach Boston something about raising taxes for schools, should the city ever try to pass an override. She led a successful 2018 campaign for a local tax increase to raise an annual $232 million to increase teacher compensation and improve school safety.

Oscar Santos
Of the three candidates, Santos is the one with the most directly relevant experience running a traditional school district. From 2010 to 2013, Santos ran Randolph Public Schools, a 3,000-student district where the majority of students identify as African-American, Asian or Hispanic.

When Santos took over the district, Randolph was a Level Four turnaround under the old accountability system. That means the state considered it an under-performing district and asked officials to make changes. According to Andrew Azer, the school committee chairman at the time, Santos extended the school day in elementary schools by 45 minutes, focused on boosting literacy in elementary school and embedded coaching for teachers into the school day.

“He laid the foundation for where we are now,” Azer said.

In his professional biography, Santos says he increased MCAS proficiency for every elementary grade. But digging into the data gives a more complicated picture. While each elementary grade did perform better on the MCAS his first year, when Santos left Randolph in 2013, third-grade reading and fifth-grade science performance had actually declined.

Meanwhile, performance on the MCAS in every middle and high school grade and subject area except for tenth grade English and science had declined in Randolph in Santos' first year on the job.

Santos announced he wouldn’t renew his contract in 2013, departing the district after three years. According to news coverage, he submitted a statement saying, “It is clear that my priorities are not aligned with the priorities of the majority of the Randolph School Committee. As a result, I’ll be moving on.”

His allies in the district say Santos was moving too fast for some members of the school committee and teachers.

“He created a sense of urgency that can make adults uncomfortable,” said Dave Murphy, Randolph’s city manager at the time.

“Some people thought he was not as collaborative as he could have been,” said Azer.

After leaving Randolph, Santos took a job as head of school for Cathedral High School, a Catholic school in Boston with over 300 students, many of them low-income. While there, he’s headed an $8 million campaign to build a center for students to learn robotics, coding and engineering and give students more project-based learning opportunities, according to financial disclosures.

Our coverage of K through 12 education is made possible with support from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation.