Even as we express our wish that the newly-named superintendent of the Oklahoma City school district receive all the support he will need to succeed, we cannot help but declare that the school board’s use of a faulty selection process almost predictably would lead to a flawed array of mediocre finalists for the job.Only time will tell if Karl R. Springer will work out, but we are convinced that the school board has shown itself to still be burdened with shortcomings that have contributed to the decades-long and unacceptable turnover in top administrators in our public school system, and, more importantly, in the consequent poor education of our children over the years. Those same, seemingly, ingrained school board shortcomings (and the board’s propensity to micro-manage, as led by the exceptionally narrow-minded and ego-maniacal Clifford Hudson as chairman) clearly led to the mistreatment of Supt. John Q. Porter.
A major part of the board shortcomings to which we refer is the continued presence on the board of four remnants of the Cliff Hudson regime (Albert Basey, who has, sadly, by a process of attrition, become vice chairman of the board; Thelma Parks, whose aggressive irrational behavior and veritable stupidity are well-known within her own community; and Gail Vines and David Castillo, both of whom having the dubious distinction of having been Cliff Hudson’s most unabashed sycophants). All four of them need to be gotten rid of before the board will be properly equipped to lead the district.
Supt. Springer, from all indications, is a good man, who deserves our and everyone else’s support, but the process used to select him necessarily limited the quality of applicants.
The result is that the school district will be led for at least a year by a gentleman who will need at least most of that time to get up to speed for the job, having come from a rural district that is substantially smaller than Oklahoma City’s multi-cultural urban district (about 40 percent of the district’s students are minorities), and that comes with all the complexities that such districts have.
Kirk Humphreys, the former mayor who will shortly take on the duties of board chairman, has said the board decided on three criteria in the person the board would name as superintendent: be an Oklahoman, be an educator and possess leadership qualities. The board also consciously decided to not use an executive search team as it sought applicants.
From our perspective, that narrow scope of criteria reflects what appears to us the root cause of all the turnover problems with superintendents we have experienced: narrow-mindedness and an unwillingness to be broad-minded enough to do what is necessary to provide the leadership for our schools that is essential if our city is to truly join “the big leagues.”
Since it is true that we are at fault for the short-lived, tumultuous tenure of at least the last superintendent selected through the services of a national executive search organization who sent us precisely what we needed to move our school district forward, it’s absolutely irrational and sort of silly to avoid such establishments and to limit candidates to those who are available in our own state.
Supt. Porter did not file a probably-to-be-successful lawsuit against the school board and against Cliff Hudson because there was some sort of cultural divide, as some would have us believe. He did not stand up to our silliness because of some deficiency of his own.
If all of that is true (and it is), then it is we who should be changing. Not becoming more insular and narrow and silly.
Now that we are anticipating a professional basketball team in our city and with a Black man (it would seem) headed to become president of the nation, it’s long past time for Oklahoma City to get beyond the truncated thought processes that led to the abject destruction of and mistreatment of our previous superintendent. It is long past time for Oklahoma City to join the rest of the world in the 21st Century. (We are fearful that, if we do not, that world will just walk away and leave us.)
We still have not gotten there, and that became evident with how the board approached its responsibilities to select a new school district chief executive.
While we don’t believe that Supt. Porter’s problems were necessarily race-based, as such, we are convinced that one thing that lay at the root of his problems was, with his strong personality and leadership style, some sub-administrators and school board members just couldn’t stand the prospect of a Black man doing what was necessary to get the job done.
What was noteworthy, too, was how city leaders responded to the way Cliff Hudson & Company mistreated Supt. Porter, and then chose to act as if, somehow, this victim of the Hudson idiocy shared the blame.
Once it became clear that Cliff Hudson was definitely the culprit in all the controversy, our leaders decided that both of them must resign, even though Supt. Porter clearly was without fault. (After all, the victim being besieged with a series of butt kicks cannot be faulted for reaching back and grabbing the foot of his assailant.)
After the settlement was reached (and after both Cliff Hudson and Supt. Porter resigned, and private money was raised for Supt. Porter as part of the deal, the Good Ole Boy Network got together to praise Cliff Hudson, choosing to ignore his evildoings and to emphasize his so-called “contributions” before what should have been an embarrassing, disgraceful exit from the public eye.
So that, we in Oklahoma City, tried doing what some re-writers of history are trying to do with Richard M. Nixon; an unquestioned great president by most standards, but a flawed character who will always be remembered, not for his foreign policy successes, for example, but for the disgrace he brought to the nation and his office by the excesses of the Watergate scandal.
Cliff Hudson may well have made contributions before his own scandalous ruinous mistreatment of Supt. John Q. Porter, but, as far as we’re concerned, he should always be remembered for his ignominy and evil.
