State Superintendent of Education: elected or appointed?
I don’t have much of a problem with a Lieutenant Governor elected along with the Governor instead of being a separate ballot line, but I do think an appointed Superintendent of Education is a bad idea. (Both proposals just passed the House and are headed on to the state Senate.) One can assume (I guess) that most people who vote for a winning gubernatorial candidate wouldn’t mind if he/she were replaced by someone of the same party if incapacitated. But in many (recently most) elections, voters have picked a Superintendent of Ed who is from a different party than the governor and articulates a rather different vision for education. Maybe that makes government run less smoothly. But I think it also indicates that the voters are saying something important, something that should not be ignored. After all, the state superintendent does not run local schools on a day-to-day basis. He or she is concerned not just with pesky details about which the voters are uninformed, but with a wider vision for education in our state – something about which many voters know at least a little and have pretty strong opinions.
Thoughts? If you live in a state where the state superintendent of education (or equivalent position) is not an elected official, how’s it working out?
- KPE
All I know about how things work here in California comes from the first paragraph of the LA Times’ endorsement statement from the last election, which argues that it’s nonsensical to have an *appointed* Board of Education which actually sets policy, but an *elected* Superintendent whose job it is to execute said policy. That makes sense to me, but I have no opinion about whether the proper solution would be to subject the Board to election or the Superintendent to appointment. If I were a good small-d democrat I would say the former, but I confess I don’t really trust the voters of California.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/27/opinion/la-ed-supe-20100427