The Seattle superintendent selection saga ended tonight, at least for now. The school board voted 6-1 to name interim superintendent Raj Manhas as superintendent on a one-year contract with an option to extend for a second year. I attending this evening's school board meeting. It was less a business meeting for a public authority than a group therapy session. It reminded me of the house meetings at the co-op where I lived my sophomore year of college.

Each of the board members, who politely address each other as Director Somebody or Director Somebodyelse, each had their turn to say how effective the whole search process was, how well it worked and how much they appreciated the input from the mayor, and the city council president and the newspaper editorial boards, etc.; how much they all learned from the experience, and how at the end of the whole thing odyssey they discovered that the best candidate for the job was not any of the 40 people they interviewed, but their very own acting superintendent! In fact, this was all a lot of face-saving nonsense, the process was a disaster, the mayor, city council president and newspapers were not, in fact, helpful, but irresponsible in undermining the school district's search process and damaging the district's reputation.

Although the superintendent seems to be a reasonble guy and I wish him all the best, if he was really the guy the school board wanted, they would have included him as a candidate from the beginning, or dispensed with the whole elaborate search process altogether. Instead, four serious professionals had to waste a great deal of their time and have their reputations trashed in the local media for a week. The public vetting process is a new and uniquely Seattle innovation that the public will surely insist on the next time we have to hire a superintendent, but who in their right mind would agree to such a circus of an interview process? Unfortunately, it will be that much harder to find a qualified superintendent the next time around.