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Wilcox brings in winds of change

By TIM NICKENS
Published January 30, 2005

There is a fresh wind blowing through the Pinellas County schools, and its name is Clayton Wilcox.

Wilcox has been on the job as the superintendent only a few months, but he has a pretty good sense of the state of public education in Pinellas. The school choice system, shoved down the throats of parents and teachers as part of a court settlement, is flawed and needs work. Test scores are too low, and the achievement gap between black and white students is too wide. The administration is bloated, difficult for parents to navigate and too often arrogant and unresponsive. The School Board is dysfunctional and obsessed with minutiae.

"This is not the district that some would think that it is," Wilcox told the St. Petersburg Times editorial board last week. "This district has a real hard time saying, "We have problems.' "

That's not quite right. Many students, parents, teachers and principals readily acknowledge there are problems even as we praise the high performers and creative thinkers. But many teachers and principals would only whisper about trouble spots or nod in agreement. The entrenched former superintendent, Howard Hinesley, was not a fan of candor or of sharing unflattering information with the public.

So Wilcox's comments to the editorial board caused a bit of a stir last week after they were reported on the front page. Some teachers and administrators probably didn't like the new guy telling them what they could do better. But his frankness and fresh approach are a welcome change from the old guard, and they match what many parents have said around their kitchen tables.

As Wilcox said, the mechanics of school choice need an overhaul. He also recognizes there are broader choice issues. Magnets and attractor programs need to be really special to lure students away from schools in their neighborhoods, and the school district needs to spend more money on them. The trends in choice applications confirm that some schools will be resegregated after racial ratios are lifted. That deserves some thoughtful consideration about what could be done to prevent that from happening or whether there is no reason to try to stop it.

"I want to be a voice in the conversation, but I'm not the guy," Wilcox said. "This is a bad thing to say. I don't know the best way to do it."

It's smart for new leaders to acknowledge they don't know everything even as they try to bring change to a huge bureaucracy. Wilcox sent another good signal last week when he withdrew his initial recommendation to fire a longtime Lakewood High football coach for making a racial slur and proposed an unpaid suspension and a transfer instead. He won't tolerate racial slurs, but he listened to African-American leaders who knew the white coach and defended his record. Altering the proposed discipline was smart politics, but it also demonstrated Wilcox is not inflexible.

The Pinellas School Board was smart to hire an outsider as new superintendent, and Wilcox is shaking things up. He wants to make school district reports and policies, as well as his schedule and e-mail, available on the Internet. He has distanced himself from School Board attorney John Bowen, who was glued to Hinesley. He wants to talk directly to teachers and principals instead of dealing through layers of bureaucracy. He wants to bring in an outside consultant to help reorganize and streamline the administration. As an editor here likes to remind me, a little broken crockery for a good cause is not a bad thing.

Yet Wilcox faces the same challenges as any new leader of a large organization that is naturally resistant to change. Setting new priorities and raising expectations makes some who were comfortable with the old ways nervous. Staying in touch with principals and teachers without alienating mid-level managers who need to buy into the program is a tough balancing act. Management techniques that worked well at a smaller school district in Louisiana may have to be adjusted for a much larger district like Pinellas.

Wilcox is just settling in, and there will be plenty of time to judge him on his performance rather than on his initial observations. There is a difference between thoughtful candor and careless pronouncements, and he should be mindful that the superintendent's words carry great weight whether they are spoken in public or in private. But Wilcox should keep talking straight about the challenges facing the Pinellas schools, and we all should be listening.

Tim Nickens' e-mail address is nickens@sptimes.com

[Last modified January 30, 2005, 00:10:19]