Jonathan Zimmerman: Urban Schools Search Amiss for the Next 'Savior' Superintendent

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”

Who will lead America's ailing city schools out of the wilderness, and into the promised land?

Across the urban landscape, that’s the question on everyone’s lips. From Atlanta and Philadelphia to Kansas City and Seattle, over a dozen major cities are searching for a new school superintendent to solve their perennial woes: poor attendance, chronic violence, and low academic achievement.

But the quest for a savior is a fool’s errand, born of desperation rather than hope. Although leadership is obviously important, no single individual can redeem our failed big-city schools. By pretending otherwise, we set our educational leaders up for failure as well. Then the cycle starts again, as we search for the next prophet whom we can anoint and – eventually – destroy.

That’s why the average length of service for an urban superintendent in the United States is just 3.6 years. If you include all of the country’s 15,000 school districts, the average superintendent serves about seven years. But the bigger the district, the shorter the term....