In his latest opinion piece, Business Report Publisher Rolfe McCollister takes on how the Baton Rouge school board is going about selecting the new East Baton Rouge public school superintendent.
The position is one of the most critical for our future, McCollister writes, and in this instance, a highly qualified candidate from a larger urban school district, who has been supported and praised by those in education on both sides of the political aisle, and who should have been one of the finalists for the position, has now been excluded from the process.
Marshall Tuck, who seemed to be the favorite of the business community, is a graduate of UCLA and the Harvard Business School and was endorsed by Arne Duncan, former U.S. Secretary of Education.
He has been a CEO and an innovator in a world that is changing rapidly, but he was left off the list of finalists for the Baton Rouge superintendent job because of the actions of four school board members, three of whom only cast two of their three available votes and one of whom reneged on a previous commitment to vote for Tuck.
Each board member could cast a vote for up to three of the seven candidates, McCollister explains. Any applicant receiving five votes would visit Baton Rouge for a final face-to-face interview. The board said it would choose two or three finalists, but because of these four members only two were selected.
Lots of personal politics were going on behind the scenes—and the future of children was not in the mix, McCollister writes. He describes the vote as an embarrassment to our city, the business community and the mayor, and asks the four board members to explain why they cast their votes the way they did. Those four were: David Tatman, Connie Bernard, Tramelle Howard and Evelyn Ware-Jackson.
Read McCollister’s full column for their responses. Also in his column McCollister thanks those who helped launch and support the Back to Business BR campaign. Send comments to editor@businessreport.com.
