The Takeaways From Nashville’s Superintendent Interviews, So Far

WPLN sat through a marathon session of back-to-back interviews with all six finalists to be Nashville’s next school superintendent. 

Here’s what we learned about the candidates:

Shawn Joseph

Currently a Deputy Superintendent in Prince George’s County, Maryland, Joseph was given the first interview. He would move to the district not just as an educator, but also as a father — his children, 10 and 13, would be students in Nashville’s schools.

Joseph says he would focus on giving students more personal attention. That, he says, is the first step in creating high achievement within high-poverty schools, even if it comes at the cost of testing.

“Weighing a pig over and over again doesn’t necessarily make it fatter,” Joseph said. Instead, he’d like to focus resources on student and faculty development.

Joseph has spent much of his career focusing on principal pipelines — moving employees between schools to develop their capacities and give them new skills. He says he’d continue to prioritize those programs in Nashville.

When asked about Nashville’s tendency to lose students to private schools and suburban districts, Joseph said it could be “a quality-control issue.”

Nashville’s public statistics don’t adequately capture the issues that face the city’s students, Joseph says.

“I didn’t see any of the data broken down by race. That’s important to me,” he said.

Joseph says a conversation about those statistics could create a greater sense of urgency around Nashville’s most pressing needs. Members of the board, especially Jill Speering and Sharon Dixon Gentry, appeared receptive to that message.

Key Takeaways:

• Joseph is youthful and energetic, and board members were excited about his sense of urgency. He talked about a desire to promote literacy and de-emphasize testing.
• For Joseph, personal connections between educators and students are very important. That’s partially because he has school-age children—he admits they often need a guiding hand. He also credits several childhood mentors with making him the first member of his family to graduate high school.
• On Wednesday, WPLN reported that Joseph is under consideration for another top position in North Carolina. But he says the job in Nashville would be his first choice.

Brad Leon

Brad Leon works for Shelby County Schools, a large urban district that includes Memphis. He’s familiar with Nashville’s school system because of his time with Teach For America, when he coordinated the group’s efforts across the state.

He says his work in Memphis gives him an in-depth understanding of the struggles between Tennessee’s legislature and its urban school districts. And board member Will Pinkston seems receptive to Leon’s ideas about seeking outside funding sources to fill in the gaps in state funding.

But some of Leon’s ideas received pushback from other board members, who have studied pilot projects led by Leon. Jill Speering said when she visited a “blended learning site” in Memphis, she was surprised by the amount of technology used in instruction. Speering seemed leery of the instructional methods involved in blended learning.

Leon made an effort to shift the conversation to more personal topics. He cited Denver Public Schools—the former home of finalist Allen Smith—as a model for letting teachers define a school system’s culture. By emphasizing teachers’ roles, Leon says Nashville might be able to improve its teacher-retention numbers.

Leon discussed what would draw him to enroll his own children in a school system.

He says his approach to recruitment would be data-driven. Still, he wants to highlight Nashville’s top performers not just on standardized tests, but also in terms of programs that feed “the life of the spirit.” Those, says Leon, include physical education and art classes.

Key Takeaways:

• Leon takes a data-driven approach to many issues, which lends itself to his current position as the Chief of Strategy and Innovation for Shelby County Schools.
• Jill Speering, a board member from Madison, raised questions about the use of technology in Shelby County’s “i-zone schools.” Those are the struggling schools where Leon’s department has introduced innovative teaching methods.
• Unlike most of the other candidates for the top job, Leon has little formal training as an educator: his highest degree is a BA in Public Policy. When board members broached the subject, Leon emphasized his years of experience as an educator.

Allen Smith

In the past three years, Allen Smith has made two major moves: his career has taken him from Denver to Charlotte to Oakland. Now, he’s being considered for a job in Nashville.

Smith says he struggled in school early on, and that his experience helps give him empathy for many students. He praises Nashville’s “community school” approach, saying it can align resources directly with children in need. But he says the district needs to change the way it educates low-income students, holding them to the same standards as any other students and helping them aspire to college education.

Smith says school choice is the best way to retain and recruit students who might look at alternatives outside of Nashville’s school system. That’s why he supports taking a second look at the city’s portfolio of schools and increasing autonomy for schools.

He also supports exit interviews, which he calls “organizational diagnostics,” with parents who are pulling their students out of the city’s public school system. That topic prompted questions from school board member Mary Pierce, who was curious about the best way to apply that strategy throughout a large district.

He says that kind of community involvement will help the school board create more clear and direct guidelines in long-term strategic planning.

And although Smith says he believes standardized tests are a necessary part of the education process, he agrees with Joseph: the tests should be eliminated if their results aren’t driving action in local schools.

Smith has worked with charter schools including a Big Picture School. But he says he shares council member Will Pinkston’s concerns about the fast pace of growth in charter schools.

Key Takeaways:

• Smith took a different tone with the members of the school board. His soft-spoken and deliberative style resulted in a casual, respectful interview.
• School board member Amy Frogge raised concerns about Smith’s role in turnaround projects. She worried about mass firings, but Smith assured her that he had not used mass firings to create a change in culture.
• Smith submitted 63 pages of supporting documentation with his application for this position. That was far more than any of his competitors handed in—some of them left that section blank.
• School board members seemed to appreciate the additional material. Sharon Dixon Gentry was particularly interested in his efforts to replace disciplinary action with restorative justice processes.
• Smith says his school-age children will likely attend Metro schools.

Joel Boyd

Joel Boyd says he started out as a middle school teacher, working with students at the age group where he’d had the most difficulty. Then he became a middle school principal in Philadelphia, near where he grew up. After working in larger and larger districts, he says he moved to Santa Fe so he could have a more hands-on role as the superintendent of a smaller district, where he simultaneously works as a principal.

Nashville needs “a more forceful debate” about how its programs compare to those of its competitors nationwide, Boyd says, especially when it comes to hot-button topics like charter schools and early childhood education. He would hope to tackle those issues early in his tenure in Nashville.

During his interview, Boyd presented the “Entry and Learning Plan” generated for his first 100 days as Santa Fe’s superintendent. He also brought a report of findings from the transition team, written after his first 100 days were complete.

After taking over in Santa Fe, Boyd says he went door-to-door, generating support to issue bonds to fund his district. He says he would bring a similar amount of enthusiasm to Nashville, though the funding mechanisms would be different.

Key Takeaways:

• Boyd spoke about his current role in Santa Fe, shying away from more specific statements about his potential work in Nashville. When asked to talk about Nashville specifically, he made frequent comparative references to Santa Fe.
• The debate between charter and non-charter schools isn’t the right debate, says Boyd. He believes the right debate is about providing equitable options to all families. That doesn’t have to include charter options, but it can, he says.
• He believes power should be given to those in influential positions closest to children. That’s why he wants to give schools more autonomy.
• Boyd has varied experiences with English language learners in Philadelphia, Miami, and Santa Fe. That would be a helpful skill given Nashville’s large immigrant community. Boyd says some of those communities are ideal for a dual language education program.

Jesus Jara

Jara says non-academic programs like physical education and art classes can be “the hook” that initially gets students excited about school. That’s why he thinks they’re so important — they open the door to further academic success. 

Jara isn’t from a normal academic mold either — his undergraduate degree is in sports medicine and exercise science. He started out as an athletic trainer at a high school in Florida, then slowly moved into administration.

He spent a few years away from Florida, working in a Massachusetts high school and then taking a leadership role at the College Board. Then he returned to Florida. In the past six years, he has held leadership roles in two Florida school districts.

Jara agrees with the larger trend among candidates who say they support some measure of decentralization. He says principals have the most important roles in their districts. Part of that feeling comes from time he spent as a principal himself.

As a parent and an educator, he emphasizes the importance of creating dialogue between schools and parents. He says it’s important not to allow teenagers to make decisions that can negatively impact their lives without all the facts. That’s why he says it’s important to test kids and notify their parents about their capabilities.

Key Takeaways:

• In his interview, Jara
  answered school board members quickly and efficiently, declining to dwell on any single answer.
• School board member Amy Frogge picked apart Jara’s discussion of his “sense of urgency,” forcing him to define his concept of himself as “a change agent.” Jara struggled to give a clear response.
• “Rigor, relevance, and relationships” are Jara’s modern-day “three Rs.” That’s what he believes is most important in education.
• Council member Tyese Hunter grilled Jara on the overall emphasis on charter schools in his districts. She implied that he was more interested in “charterizing” the district than in creating school choice. But Jara says that work narrowed the achievement gap and improved school performance.

Kenneth Zeff

Kenneth Zeff is the Interim Superintendent in Fulton County, GA, where he has worked since 2012. His urban district makes up most of Atlanta, and it’s demographically similar to Metro Nashville.

He earned an MBA and started his career in consulting, so he pays close attention to the business side of education. He says he thinks a lot about the needs of the community and the best ways for school systems to meet public demand.

Zeff says the community has to decide what it wants. That, he says, is how Fulton County ended up with a decentralized system and charter expansion. But those models only worked in Fulton County because the community got behind them.

Zeff is a consistent advocate of the charter system, along with other initiatives to offer a larger range of programs like International Baccalaureate, dual-enrollment, language programs, and more. He says those programs have greater cachet with parents. As those programs are phased in over time, he says Nashville’s public school system will become better equipped for competition with other schools.

Principals should be hired through systems much like the superintendent search process, Zeff says. He thinks community input should be sought at the beginning of the process, then a larger search process should be conducted based upon those priorities.

Zeff always comes back to community action, and school board officials like Sharon Gentry seem to agree with him about its importance. Gentry says Nashville’s schools need to build stronger partnerships with the private sector and the philanthropic community.

Key Takeaways:

• Zeff is a strong advocate of the charter system. If he were hired, Nashville residents might see an increased prioritization of charter schools.
• In Fulton County, Zeff has gained experiences with major capital campaigns that could benefit Davidson County in the next few years.
• School board members questioned Zeff about disciplinary issues in Fulton County, similar to ones in Davidson County. He says every school employee needs to get on board with one set of policies, so that all authority figures are modeling the same behavior.