Fran Millar is pitching Brad Bryant for Superintendent - what do you think?

Heard the news? Fran Millar stood up at a recent board meeting and pitched Brad Bryant for Superintendent.

According to the AJC --

New name pitched for DeKalb's school boss job

To which I say, why the heck not? We have watched in disbelief as the board sabotaged the last two highly qualified candidates who bubbled to the surface and two other finalists decided to simply drop out, so why not just go out and get someone who can jump into the fire and start opening extinguishers (if Bryant would do so!) I am personally quite tired of the status quo (aka Ramona Tyson) and as long as we remain 'as is', our test scores and student achievement as well as teacher morale will decline. (You've all read about our pitiful test scores under Tyson's leadership. She's great at closing schools and cutting budgets -- not so great at ensuring that children learn.)

Although Brad could run the school system, I’m certain that Gene Walker, Jay Cunningham and Sarah Copelin Wood (now joined by Donna Edler) wouldn’t let him. They have sabotaged every decent candidate that has bubbled to the surface so far… Funnily enough, "someone" leaked highly confidential information about the qualified candidates in order to sabotage their progress, and now, "someone" has raised a stink about the open email newsletter written in response to the leaks by Nancy Jester, Don McChesney, Paul Womack and Pam Speaks.

There is a war going on on this board - a war between a group seeking to place a qualified candidate and a group seeking to keep the status quo - and willing to do whatever it takes to maintain that status quo – even so far as secretly leaking Executive Session personnel documents to the media, knowing full well that we have a very weak chair who will not call out this bad, unethical behavior, but will instead, call out the resulting responders. (This is Wonderland after all!)

However — since the entire school board will have to run again for office due to the change in the law reducing their size to 7 members (thank you legislators!) as well as the new Census data driving a re-drawing of districts, then perhaps Brad could serve as “Interim 2″… ? Tyson certainly does not want the job. Not only that, but the system cannot tolerate another 1-2 years of “status quo”, which is what we get with Tyson. She will never clean house and DCSS will never make progress until someone does. Would Brad? Hard to know. But at least he would be a different captain and (I’m hoping) would do what’s right for the students in our classrooms. They are the only ones who have paid a price thus far — and some of them have paid dearly. (Have you seen some of the test scores?)

At any rate, Brad Bryant could do a good job of righting this ship (unlike Tyson, who has simply steered the ship) — if he does the right thing and cleans house, placing the right people in the right jobs and weeding out the bloat — clearing the way for the next board to choose a well-suited superintendent who will bring the schools into the 21st century and focus on learning.

It's a shot at some kind of change anyway.