A big frustration with policy is that it can feel far removed from the real work of schooling. Why is that? What can we do about it? Such questions seem well worth digging into today, and I can’t think of anyone better to dig with than Andy Rotherham, the author of the Eduwonk blog, a big-time education consultant, and a former special assistant for education to President Bill Clinton. Andy and I occasionally try to make sense of the twists in education politics and policy. Today, we discuss the recent superintendent fiasco in Des Moines, Iowa.
–Rick
Rick: Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a cautionary tale play out in Des Moines, Iowa. It turns out that Ian Roberts, their charismatic superintendent of schools, had lied about his qualifications, fabricated accomplishments, faced charges of conflict of interest and unlawful possession of firearms, and was in the country illegally. In September, Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported that Roberts had been issued a “final order of removal” back in May 2024. All this, even though Roberts had an extended career and had been vetted by a head-hunting firm.
After being detained by ICE in late September, Roberts resigned his superintendency and had his educator license revoked by the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners. While Roberts claimed to have degrees from Morgan State University and MIT, Morgan State said he never graduated, and MIT reported that there are no records that he’d attended in the first place. Roberts even claimed that George Washington University had named him “Principal of the Year”—an award that GW says has never existed.
This is pretty much a perfect debacle for any school system. Andy, for me, some of the big takeaways here have to do with the misguided fascination with charismatic school system leaders and the allure of chasing the “new new thing.” After all, my understanding is that part of Roberts’ appeal is that he was looped into the Chiefs for Change network and billed as a “reform-minded” champion of equity. It makes me wonder, as ever, whether education leaders are afflicted with a tendency to go weak in the knees when offered impressive-sounding talk ambitions—and whether this comes at the cost of prosaic things like scrutiny and due diligence. I’ve a few thoughts to share, but I’m mostly curious to hear what you make of all this.
Andy: Whoo, boy. Where to start on this one? When it comes to superintendent searches, it has long seemed like firms can either do them really well or they can make real money from a business standpoint. It’s hard to do both. In general, there is a turn-and-burn quality to them. So, this might be an instance of that. (I should note that until the middle of the last decade, Bellwether did search. We no longer do this, and we only did superintendent searches in exceptional circumstances.) Sometimes, journalists say a story is too good to check. This guy’s “story” might have just been too irresistible, as you allude to—maybe for everyone. It was hard to miss the fact that, even after the falsified resume and allegations of conflict of interest came to light, the education media stayed fixed on the ICE angle. While they eventually caught up, they did so only after other media had advanced the story and the flurry of allegations and problems. And let’s face it, school district human resources need some work. We have a system porous enough that dangerous people get through at an alarming rate, so what happened in Des Moines is not that surprising.
The question here is what to do? That probably takes a couple of forms, most notably, what does the school industry have to do to demand quality? You’re hearing calls to regulate search firms, but we should be careful of unintended consequences. How would you address it, Rick? Should schools just not hire charismatic people?
Rick: I sometimes wonder if that wouldn’t be a good place to start! Because K–12 schooling is so personal, so infused with high hopes, and yet also so opaque, there’s a huge temptation to entrust ourselves to the arms of an inspiring leader. Heck, I penned a whole book about this problem a quarter-century ago. As I suspect you’ll recall, the central thesis of Spinning Wheels was that the constant pursuit of the next new thing contributes mightily to the disappointing track record of school improvement. Forcing ourselves to instead focus on nuts-and-bolts could be one good way to escape that cycle.
On a prosaic level, I worry about our ability to talk ourselves into celebrating faddishness. The Des Moines board was apparently taken with Roberts’ promise to prioritize the hiring of more minority teachers and to infuse “equity” into the curriculum. Regular readers know I’ve concerns with such measures. But more telling here is the extent to which Roberts’ shtick reflected education groupthink circa 2022. I worry that school boards and headhunters get their heads turned by salesmen who’ve learned to mouth the pieties of the moment, at the expense of attention to competence, coherence, rigorous instruction, and tight management.
Andy: You may well be right. In fairness, we should note that Roberts cut a path through a variety of ventures, not only other celebrated districts, and edu-celebrity leaders, but also highly regarded charter schools. So, yes, a piece of this puzzle is probably how, in executive searches, sometimes a good story is all it takes. One place to start could be increasing the reliance on quantifiable gains for students and data on outcomes during the search process. You and I have been in rooms where there is a blizzard of slickly packaged data, but it’s not actually very compelling when you scratch below the surface. Attention to quality evidence might also help get to more serious discussions about change relative to different candidates. It would also be good to have broader and more dynamic pools of candidates. In a lot of states, it’s the same pool again and again. I often advise people to use a search firm to help with all the logistics of a big search, but don’t outsource the basic tire kicking of candidates—do that yourself. While there are various ideas out there for better regulating searches, this seems like a hard problem to legislate one’s way out of. Fundamentally, there is no substitute for high-quality boards just doing their due diligence, rather than doing rinse and repeat searches or falling for a narrative.
That’s a simple truth, too, I guess. Someone reading this might be wondering why the takeaway from two longtime professionals in the sector boils down to “be intentional” and “focus on quality.” In different ways, that’s what we’ve both been saying and working on in various places for a quarter-century. And as obvious as it is, it remains something this sector struggles with.