Here's Bloomberg's model at work

I might be wrong about the originator, but my recollection is that Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York came up with this approach to running schools and "improving" them: bring in someone whose entire professional career was spent not in education, but in business. The corporate world. After all, you don't need to be a teacher in order to run a school and supervise teachers. You just need management experience, right? Someone who understands finances, resource management, performance review, etc. That's all you need ("...you don't need nothing else", says Latka). Right?

We saw how that's worked out. Witness the chancellorship of Joel Klein, formerly US Assistant Attorney General. And, in it's most extreme incarnation, it brought us the Cathie Black debacle.

Now, Atlanta is facing the realities of following this approach, in the person of Errol Davis, a businessman whose only prior connection to education is that he served as Chancellor of the University System of Georgia. Before that, he spent his career at Alliant Energy and Wisconsin Power & Light. He appears to have last set foot in a classroom (any classroom) in 1967, when he completed the MBA with which he followed his Carnegie Mellon degree in electrical engineering. No question he is intelligent, but that alone doesn't make a successful educator, or superintendent.

Now, after upsetting folks with his handling of the APS CRCT cheating scandal, he has continued to draw fire by pursuing decisions without making sure of community buy-in. He has repeatedly misjudged the climate, and understimated the need to have the public, especially parents, on board with your decisions and policies for the school district. You'd think that someone with a seat on the Board of Directors of General Motors would have better people skills than that, but apparently not. Tonight, as I write this, the APS Board is deciding (maybe) the future of Davis' tenure as superintendent. http://www.ajc.com/news/news/fate-of-superintendent-erroll-davis-unclear/nTNGM/

UPDATE:
Board votes to extend Davis' contract: http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local-education/atlanta-school-board-extends-embattled-superindend/nTR5J/