The Washington Post - USA (2022-04-25)

B2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, APRIL 25 , 2022

education

districts have the most data on possible inside candidates and are better able to preserve their culture if they promote them. The preference for outside candidates hurts morale, he said, because “you can never get to the top unless you move to a new place.” Scott Brabrand understands how that works. He is the Fairfax County schools superintendent whose decision to leave at the end of his contract June 30 led to the appointment of Reid. He started in the district as a social studies teacher in 1994 and had several jobs there as an administrator. I met him then. He was smart and energetic. But he wasn’t appointed Fairfax schools superintendent until 2017, after he had served five years as head of Lynchburg City Schools in Virginia. He may have tried to tell school board members of the people they already had who would make great leaders. But if he did, the board members sadly weren’t convinced that a candidate who knows their county would be better than one who doesn’t.

a new schools chancellor. I begged her first to have a long conversation with the retiring chancellor, Kaya Henderson, over what person already working in the district would make a good replacement. Henderson had been the rare case of an inside appointment. She became one of the longest serving leaders in the district’s history. She knew who would be ready to run those schools, full of challenges. The mayor, as I expected, still picked an outside candidate. I suspect she feared doing otherwise would have seemed gauche. So many people around her, as happens with most big districts, assumed a national search was the smart move. The most successful public charter school systems usually don’t do that. They know what works for their kids. They appoint leaders from inside their systems who understand their methods and know how to make even more progress. Doug Lemov, the best-selling author of the “Teach Like a Champion” books and a leader in the Uncommon Schools charter network, noted that school

detailed commentary on the hiring decision in The Washington Post last week titled “We walked out over Fairfax County’s new superintendent. Here’s why.” Those students, and others with doubts about Reid, could not have made the argument that the new hire doesn’t understand the district if the school board had promoted to superintendent one of the many excellent Fairfax County administrators who have made the district so popular with families moving into the area. People like Reid, shining stars from distant places, look great on paper. But they arrive lacking allies. Some of the most successful administrators in a district are likely to resent their presence, particularly if they celebrate their arrival with a barrage of new ideas. Sometimes in such situations, schools are forced to kill programs that a savvy inside candidate would have known were just beginning to work. In 2016, I wrote a column in the form of a letter to D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser. She was about to exercise her power to appoint

the Year by AASA. The announcement said she was “known regionally and nationally for instructional leadership and crafting sustainable systems for district support of the instructional core.” That’s wonderful. But it doesn’t change the fact that she doesn’t know much about Fairfax County. And as an outsider, she is a perfect target for unhappy county residents who have been at war with the district on issues such as teaching about race and admissions to the country’s most selective public high school. As my colleague Hannah Natanson reported recently, Reid is opposed by the county NAACP chapter, many parent groups and students. Several young people at Mount Vernon High School walked out of classes to protest the new superintendent and how she was selected. Jaya Nachnani, an 18-year-old senior at Mount Vernon, told Natanson: “We want to know if she’d be prepared for such a diverse and big county, because, you know, it’s a totally different ballgame.” Nachnani is one of four students who wrote a

going outside can be the wrong move. But since about two-thirds of superintendent hires are outsiders, the headhunters know it’s bad for business to say that in public. U.S. school districts such as the 180,000-student Fairfax County system worship the myth that outside candidates whom they do not know have to be smarter than the people who already work for them. They do nationwide searches for the same reason rich people buy enormous mansions with far more living space than they need. They would be thought strange if they didn’t. This problem has new importance, because the turmoil caused by the pandemic has led to a big jump in superintendent turnover, from about 15 percent annually to 25 percent, according to AASA, the School Superintendents Association. The Fairfax County School Board just named Michelle Reid as its new superintendent. As head of the much smaller Northshore School District in Bothell, Wash., she was declared 2021 National Superintendent of

Even some of the
best school boards
experience an
uncomfortable
moment when
they appoint an
outside candidate
as a
superintendent
thinking that will solve their
problems but find that isn’t so.
The best new example is the
trouble in which the Fairfax
County School Board finds itself.
Like many other school boards, it
couldn’t resist hiring an
attractive outsider, but as a
consequence, parents, students
and other important folk are in
revolt.
These two key words are the
source of the problem: national
search. When school board
members, and the public
relations professionals who write
their news releases, need a new
superintendent, they cannot
stifle the urge to say they are
launching a national search, or
words to that effect.
What they actually do is hire
headhunting firms. Those
executive recruiters are smart
people who understand why

School districts, stop hiring splendid outsiders to be your superintendents

Jay
Mathews

BY STEVEN YODER

Jodie Parks works full time as an
occupational therapist at a Michi-
gan state psychiatric hospital. But
since October, she has had a sec-
ond job: spending four hours a
week, she estimates, making calls
and chasing down paperwork to
prove that she previously served in
the military.
She needs that proof to have her
student loans forgiven under the
federal government’s Public Serv-
ice Loan Forgiveness program,
created by a 2007 law that pledged
to erase students’ debt if they took
lower-paying but critical jobs with
nonprofits and the government.
It’s a promise that, for most
borrowers, has yet to pay off. Fewer
than 2 percent of applicants were

approved between 2017, when the first borrowers became eligible, and the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. And among the huge number of applications denied or lost in the bureaucracy were many from Americans who perform per- haps the ultimate public service: joining the armed forces. “I’m another veteran who’s been told that there’s a service for veterans, and then when you try to get through the red tape, it’s too hard,” said Parks, who was in the Air Force from 2009 to 2015 and then earned a degree in occupational therapy. “So you just kind of give up.” Ninety-two percent of military borrowers who applied for loan forgiveness before the pandemic were denied by the Education De-

partment, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Of- fice, because of confusing and narrow rules about eligible loan types and repayment plans that made it difficult for them to qualify. “The law made a promise to people that if they went into public service jobs, they would have their loans forgiven. And a lot of people went to school on that basis,” said Christopher Madaio, vice presi- dent for legal affairs at Veterans Education Success, which advocates for military members. In October, the Biden adminis- tration temporarily loosened the program’s rules for one year to give more borrowers the chance to qualify. Waived are many of the strict guidelines that stymied applicants. That has helped more

members of the military with student debt: About 1,500 have had their loans forgiven under the waiver since October, a spokesperson for the Education Department said in an email. But there are almost 177,000 active-duty service members whose federal loans are or could be eligible for forgiveness, according to the GAO. And that larger number doesn’t include the thousands, like Parks, who are no longer on active duty. She and other veterans said they’ve spent months trapped in a bureaucratic maze that may make it harder for them than for nonmilitary borrowers to get forgiveness. Thousands of dollars are in play. About half the active-duty service members who have federal student loans have balances of more than $13,000, according to the GAO. A lot is at stake for the armed forces, too. In an all-volunteer system, it has a tough time finding people to fill mission-critical jobs, including doctors and information technology specialists, for whom the forgiveness program could be an effective recruitment tool, the GAO noted. In a survey of military lawyers, 94 percent said they would be more likely to quit the service if the program were eliminated. For Parks and other veterans, the biggest hurdle in getting loan forgiveness has been proving to the Education Department that they served — an odd problem, since a fellow federal agency, the Defense Department, has that information. Parks, 39, has about $48,000 in student loans, and when she heard about the temporary waiver in Oc- tober, she got to work assembling her forgiveness application. A key piece of it is a form that applicants must get signed by current or former employers — government agencies or nonprofits — certify- ing the dates that forgiveness applicants worked there. For Parks, getting that employment certification form signed by the state of Michigan, her current employer, couldn’t have been easi- er. She thought it would be the same with the Air Force. Instead, she spent weeks making calls to find out who in the bureaucracy might sign. Finally given the number of a person she was told could do it, she tried him every day for a month and never heard back. Next, she contacted Veterans Af- fairs, getting rerouted repeatedly until she reached an official who leveled with her: It would be near- ly impossible to get a signature out of VA because it didn’t have anyone designated to provide one. He sug- gested she go to a military base and ask someone there to sign the form, or contact a commander she knew. But most of her command- ers had retired in the six years since she had served. All this would have been avoid- ed had her loan servicer, an Educa- tion Department contractor called FedLoan Servicing, accepted as proof a standard official document veterans get when they leave the military: their certificate of release or discharge, better known as DD Form 214. It shows veterans’ dates of service and is used as proof for benefits including VA home loans. But, Parks said, FedLoan told her it wasn’t enough. Other veterans and service members have experienced simi-

lar frustrations. To qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, a person has to not only work full time at a public agency or nonprofit but also make 120 payments on their loans — typically over 10 years. Navy veteran Stacy Hunter, 46, submitted her DD 214 with her forgiveness application in October but was told in a letter from FedLoan and the Education Department that her seven years of service, during which her loan payments were de- ferred, didn’t count toward her 120 payments. That’s despite the department’s announcement in October that months spent on active duty count toward PSLF even if the service member’s loan payments were in deferment. Mike Smiley, 42, also spent many hours getting military sign- off for, and seeking answers about, the loan forgiveness he believed he had earned. He served 14 years in the Navy as a doctor. Today he’s a pediatric pulmonologist in St. Louis. With $50,000 owed in student loans and four children, he would be hugely helped by getting out from under that debt, he said. FedLoan wouldn’t accept his DD 214 and even rejected a letter from the Navy’s personnel command verifying his service, Smiley said. But former Navy co-workers connected him with the human resources department at his old command, and the department signed his employment form. He submitted his forgiveness application in December. After hearing nothing for several weeks, Smiley submitted a complaint to the Education De- partment and later went to the department’s ombudsman. He started calling FedLoan every two to three weeks, spending at least an hour on hold over his lunch break. On one call in early March, he found out that his application was stuck because he had saved it as a PDF file. Finally, on March 22, his loan forgiveness was approved. “I really wish they would come up with a process to take care of people, not just myself, but other people who are in my shoes who maybe aren’t as persistent,” he

said. After the waiver announcement in October, the number of forgiveness applications spiked by 40 percent, said an Education Depart- ment spokesperson who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she wasn’t authorized to speak on behalf of the department on this topic. “The loan servicer system had not quite been recon- figured to be able to send the kind of automated communications that align with the terms of the waiver and the benefits that were being offered.... This is not a perfect process,” she said. If a forgiveness application is otherwise in order, the spokesperson said, the DD 214 “generally suffices” to prove military service. Asked in what cases it wouldn’t be enough, she said she didn’t know. As for FedLoan, spokesperson Keith New said by email that DD 214 forms are acceptable if submitted with other information and “reviewed on a case-by-case basis.” Madaio of Veterans Education Success gives the Biden adminis- tration credit for using its authori- ty to temporarily waive the program’s narrow rules, a step for which military borrower advocates had been calling. “The ad- ministration is trying as hard as it can,” Madaio said. The Education Department is now working with the Defense De- partment to automatically match data across the two agencies, said a department spokesperson — which could end borrowers’ strug- gle to get signatures. And it’s col- laborating with advocates on per- manent regulations that could help more borrowers qualify after the waiver expires in October. For her part, Parks feels lucky that her work schedule makes it possible to keep on top of her forgiveness application. “If I wasn’t at a job with an afternoon shift, there’s no way that I would have gotten any of this done,” she said.

This article about military veterans and student loans was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

Veterans seeking loan forgiveness still mired in red tape

COURTESY OF MIKE SMILEY Navy veteran and pediatric pulmonologist Mike Smiley spent months seeking answers about his l oan forgiveness application.

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The Washington Post - USA (2022-04-25)

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