Deasy’s leadership deficit led to his downfall

L.A. Unified Supt. John Deasy has left a blueprint for the next superintendent. It’s a pretty good map of what a school boss should and shouldn’t do.

A superintendent should have a sense of urgency, and Deasy, now on his way out after a wild 3½-year roller coaster ride, certainly had that.

He wasn’t just determined to push more students — especially under-served and minority students — to new heights. He wanted it to happen as quickly as possible, and there have been gains for which he is at least partly responsible.

Deasy was also impatiently determined to reduce suspensions, serve breakfast to hungry students, prepare kids for the wired world, and hold teachers and principals to higher standards and more scrutiny.

All laudable, and the next superintendent, whoever that might be, should push many of those same initiatives.

But do so in an entirely different way.

As I’ve said before, Deasy’s report card has one F. He flunked politics, an essential ingredient for anyone running a multibillion-dollar, politicized bureaucracy responsible for enriching the lives of more than 600,000 children whose success or failure is the community’s success or failure.

Deasy was at war with board members and alienated teachers — the very people whose support he needed to do his job effectively. Sure, there’s something to be said for calling out the teachers union for inflexibility or board members for bullheaded obstruction, but it has to be done with greater finesse than Deasy could muster.

The job is probably half politics, former LAUSD Superintendent and three-time Colorado Gov. Roy Romer told me in a recent conversation. You’ve got to try to win over even your fiercest critics, or at least find enough common ground to maintain a working relationship.

Deasy was less a superintendent than an emissary of the wealthy and powerful forces driving changes in public education across the country. He was a fierce agitator with a vision rather than a clever administrator with a workable plan, and was so convinced of his strengths that he was blind to his weaknesses.

And so we had him feuding with board members and teachers, and heading a district in which it hasn’t always been clear who’s in charge day to day. We had the rollout of a hugely expensive student tracking system despite warnings that it wasn’t ready. And we had the questionable extraction of bond money for the disastrous, terribly planned and ultimately scrapped $1-billion iPad plan — the perfect snapshot of Deasy forging ahead and elbowing critics aside, only to expose his own failings.

Running the schools in Los Angeles is a spectacularly difficult job, no question, and funding has often been part of the problem. So here are a few pointers for the next superintendent:

—Urgency is to be commended, but don’t run so fast that you trip over your own feet.

—Surround yourself with smart administrators who challenge you rather than applaud your every edict.

—No so-called education “reform” or tech tool is as critical as giving teachers the support to do their jobs and the training to get better at it.

—You can’t do this job alone, or let ego get in the way of the mission. In fact, you can’t accomplish much of anything without earning buy-ins from the union, the board, parents and the community, all of them working in the service of students.