By John Martin

When I heard that former Colorado Governor Roy Romer wanted the job of Los Angeles school superintendent, you could have knocked me over with a school voucher. The job may be the toughest in public administration. L.A.’s mammoth school system suffers from all of the intractable woes that afflict public education everywhere — and then some.

But maybe that’s why Romer wanted the job. He’s known as a consensus-builder from his days in Colorado, and L.A.’s school system is as fractured and fragmented as any. After the comparatively straightforward job of running a state, Romer may see the L.A. schools as the ultimate management challenge. The L.A. school board apparently thinks it’s a challenge that Romer is up to. On Tuesday, the board chose Romer from a short list of finalists.

If there's another underemployed ex-governor out there looking for turnaround work, he might want to look east. Washington, D.C., is looking for a new school superintendent, having just run off a perfectly good one. By all accounts, Arlene Ackerman had made measurable progress with the capital’s neglected and dysfunctional schools, even managing to push student test scores up a bit. But as she announced her departure for the top school job in San Francisco, she vented about the bureaucratic and political impediments that had left her frustrated to the point of exasperation.

Accompanying a recent assessment of Ackerman’s tenure, the Washington Post published a graphic that attempted to show how D.C.’s system of school governance works. The image resembled a hydra-headed beast, depicting a tangled web of power and authority relationships encompassing the city council, the school board, the city’s chief procurement officer and chief financial officer, the schools’ own CFO, Congress, the president, the presidentially appointed financial control board, and the board of school trustees created by the financial control board to bypass the elected school board. The lines connecting all of these entities were variously labeled “reports to,” “needs budget approval from,” “oversees” and “advises.” The chart portrays a public-administration nightmare that cries for a solution much like the one Alexander the Great applied to the Gordian Knot.

And yet, as bad as the District’s school-governance system is (much of it imposed by the federal government, by the way), it’s not that different from the way things work in many places around the country, where school superintendents must please not only the school boards that hire them but also city councils, county commissions, mayors, legislatures, state education departments and governors (not to mention teachers’ unions). When everyone is in charge, no one is accountable. Several years ago, when the District’s schools opened weeks late because of long-unaddressed fire-code violations, the entire local power structure could — and did — plausibly deny responsibility.

One day a few years ago, before Ackerman’s time, I walked into my son’s D.C. public school kindergarten class to find a brand-new computer sitting in the corner. It was an obsolete three-year-old IBM model. But it was unused, fresh from the box. Apparently, it had been sitting in a D.C. school warehouse for years, at the same time that teachers were begging for computers for their classes and either doing without or making do with hand-me-downs from their students’ families.

Arlene Ackerman made some genuine headway against that kind of shameful institutionalized ineptitude. How much progress might she have made with a clear mandate, straightforward lines of authority and unquestioned accountability? How about it, Governor? Want to take a run at it?

John Martin is editor of Governing.com.

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