With the third resignation of a schools superintendent in the past two years, it may now be fair to say that the Minneapolis School Board has reached its nadir. We can now look back and see a series of three (or more) truly disastrous examples of institutional decision making. The first, of course, was the sycophantic devotion to the underperforming yet popular Carol Johnson, who broke her contract for a sweetheart deal in Memphis. Then came the inexplicable decision to turn the district over to David Jennings, a savvy Republican politician with no educational background to speak of--a decision, that predictably inflamed the knee-jerk “activists” in the black community and painted the School Board into a political corner and likely influenced its short-sighted “national” search (which turned out to be far more limited than was publicized) for a replacement, which gave us the ornery Dr. Peebles.

This sequence of events should not have been a surprise to anyone who was paying attention. Johnson was a popular crossover bureaucrat who could convince most of the minority community that she had their interests in mind despite the fact that minority students suffered so dreadfully during her tenure that the NAACP eventually filed suit to close the education gap. She was even more popular with middle- and upper-class whites, who saw their children thrive under her watch and could feel comfortable entertaining the delusion that, because she was black, the district was working to raise up the underclass.

With Johnson’s departure, in the midst of a legislative coup d’etat that put education funding into the hands of the rubes at the Capitol, the Board intuited that Jennings, a former House speaker, would be able to communicate with the loonies who controlled the purse strings at the Legislature and thus encourage some semblance of sanity in state education funding. The Board failed to realize, of course, that Jennings ascended to the top of a very different Republican Party than what exists today. He can barely get an invitation to a GOP campaign fund raiser these days, given the fact that he continues to grasp a vague sense of reality--something that escapes most state Republicans in 2006. Worse than that, he was a white guy.

And so, through some delusional combination of racial prerequisites and academic militancy, the School Board ended up hiring Peebles--a woman with a reputation for cracking the whip on underachieving schools, but who had no prior experience as a district administrator. Indeed, she had to cram in a few night courses in order to get her superintendent’s license. Predictably, she forced positive academic changes at a few select schools while alienating nearly every principal, most of the teachers, and a good many parents.

School Board members, of course, are all devout DFLers and are particularly responsive to the teacher’s union and middle-class, white, progressive-minded activist public school parents, neither of whom appreciate larger class sizes, the re-assignment of favorite teachers, or the reallocation of resources from successful to struggling schools. But all of these changes were required by state budget cuts, federal and state mandates (many of which remain unfunded), and the School Board’s desire for some small bit of good academic news.

So Peebles, the new sheriff in town, went to work cleaning house, straightening up slack curriculum, and strengthening underachieving schools. She took no credit for the latest upswing in test scores, yet she left an unmistakable mark on some schools. Meanwhile, she refused to speak to the major media, browbeat her underlings, and generally caused great consternation among those who had the greatest access to the School Board.

All of which is not to argue against pushing Peebles out of a job. A superintendent has to do more than simply raise test scores; she has to communicate a vision to the community, she has to rally teachers and parents behind a common goal. She has to secure the trust and confidence of elected officials. Peebles did none of these things, and it was not at all certain that she would have done so in the future. So her departure will generate little grieving outside of the marginalized black activist community.

It should, however, generate some interest in the upcoming School Board elections. The current board (or half of it, at least) has some explaining to do about how it so bungled its most recent hiring effort. And it needs to embark on a new search in a manner that will cast a net wide enough to capture a better caliber of prospects than it did last time around.

If we are forced to endure yet another tragically inept search for a new superintendent, voters should be inspired to do some new hiring of their own on the School Board in November.