To me, the most interesting part of this school leadership scuffle is the way in which it has been characterized.
Some people have described this dispute as a case of Gov. Beverly Perdue taking power away from elected Superintendent June Atkinson. That interpretation doesn’t seem to line up well with the facts.
Those who follow this stuff pretty closely have known for years that the elected superintendent doesn’t really have any more power over the public schools than the State Board of Education is willing to grant her.
Constitutional experts can make the case that the constitution grants real power to the superintendent. They might be right. I don’t know and don’t pretend to know the answer to the question. The fact is that June Atkinson never has exercised power over day-to-day operations of the public school establishment, and she’s not challenged her powerlessness in her previous four years as superintendent.
The primary change in the Perdue administration seems to be that the new governor is not hiding her authority over the education establishment.
When former Gov. Mike Easley’s top education adviser finished third in a three-person Democratic primary in the 2004 superintendent’s race, Easley responded by giving that adviser the real day-to-day power over the Department of Public Instruction. In other words, the voters said no to Easley’s man, then Easley said yes.
By installing that new de facto CEO as “deputy state superintendent” and by keeping a separate Easley-appointed State Board of Education chairman in place, the impact on the elected superintendent was not as transparent as Perdue’s new arrangement.
You can argue whether the superintendent or the governor should have power over the public schools (or you can argue that more parents ought to have the power to choose public, private, or home-school options, but that’s another story), but it doesn’t seem appropriate to characterize Perdue’s changes as doing anything more than attempting to clarify a bizarre Byzantine arrangement.
