The wrong school superintendent could cost Miami-Dade | Opinion

Its Public Schools

The Miami-Dade County School Board is about to hand someone the future of one of this community’s most important institutions, and some finalists have spent their careers shrinking that kind of institution, not leading it. That trust should not go to someone who treats public education as something to be broken up and replaced.

Look at the finalist pool. Some candidates rose through Miami-Dade’s own classrooms and administration. Others built careers running charter networks or leading state-ordered district takeovers, part of a national network of “reform” superintendents bankrolled by billionaire foundations that fund charter expansion nationwide.

One record is about building traditional public education, the other about dismantling it, in the name of “reform.” The Board cannot treat these as equivalent, and the threat behind that second record is not just a resume line.

For Miami-Dade Public Schools, that threat isn’t abstract. It’s already here. Under Florida’s expanded “Schools of Hope” law, the district was recently required to hand over classroom space inside five high schools to Success Academy, a New York charter chain, one of several outside operators now eyeing Miami-Dade buildings under that same law. The board approved the arrangement, feeling it had no real choice.

“We’re required to make a vote with a gun to our head,” board member Danny Espino said, as reported by WLRN. That is not how school decisions should be made, and it is only a preview of what the next superintendent will face.

Whoever takes this job needs to resist that pressure, not have a career spent riding along with it.

Before anything else, every finalist owes this community a direct answer to one question: If you have spent your career shrinking or taking over traditional public-school systems, why should Miami-Dade now hand you the keys to one of the largest in the country? That is not an unfair question. It is the only one that matters.

Public schools do more than chase enrollment numbers and test scores. They strengthen communities, prepare citizens and change children’s lives. They open their doors to every child, regardless of ability, language, income or circumstance, a duty charter and private schools don’t share. They anchor neighborhoods together.

Miami-Dade has already proven educational choice doesn’t require abandoning that model. The district offers magnet programs, IB, Cambridge, AP, dual enrollment, career academies and dozens of other pathways. The next superintendent’s job is to strengthen what works, not compete against it.

The Board owes the public straight answers on two more fronts.

State advocacy

Tallahassee’s decisions on funding, charter expansion and local control land directly on this district. The next superintendent must fight those battles publicly. A leader who benefited from that pressure elsewhere has no credibility here.

Measuring success

Budgets and test scores aren’t the whole story, no matter how the district’s challenges look from a boardroom. Public trust and real community partnership matter just as much, and a candidate measured by how fast they could privatize a public system shouldn’t be trusted here.

These are not political questions. They are questions of loyalty to the students who depend on this district to stay public and staying theirs.

Great superintendents do not manage decline. They inspire educators, build real partnerships with families and fight for students when it costs them something.

That is the standard Miami-Dade must demand, not the standard outside interests have already tried to write for it. The Board should choose a superintendent who genuinely believes in public education, not one who has spent a career shrinking or replacing it, and who will keep Miami- Dade’s public schools strong for years to come. Anything less is a betrayal of this community’s trust, and that trust is not the Board’s to spend alone.

Every parent or family with a child in a Miami-Dade public school should make their voice heard before this choice is made, not after.

Crystal Etienne is president of EDUVOTER Action Network and a Miami-Dade public school teacher, though she is not currently in the classroom.