Louisville’s schools chief called ‘jewel’

Google “Shelley Berman” and see what you get.

It won’t be the superintendent of the Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Ky. Instead, you’ll get the 86-year-old comedian who still performs stand-up, who was a regular on the likes of “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show” in the 1960s and 1970s, and who in recent years has played the father of “Seinfeld” creator Larry David on the hit HBO sitcom “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

The Shelley Berman who will be in Eugene Tuesday, as one of three finalists to replace George Russell as the Eugene School District’s superintendent, was born Sheldon Berman in Chicago in 1949. He laughed through the telephone line last week when asked if he was so named because his parents were fans of the comedian.

“No,” Berman said. “They didn’t know (who he was). But we did grow up in the same Chicago neighborhood.”

Berman did confess that he once tried to get into a “Shelley Berman” show in Florida because he shares the comedian’s name.

But Berman has not been laughing much recently. Instead, he’s been embroiled in controversy in Louisville as his four-year tenure in charge of the 99,000-student school district nears its end on June 30.

The Jefferson County Board of Education voted 5-2 in November not to renew Berman’s contract.

Last month, the school board considered a possible revote to retain Berman — until Berman himself scotched the idea.

“We were not the right fit for him,” board member Carol Haddad told The (Louisville) Courier-Journal newspaper last month.

Before coming to Louisville, Berman was superintendent of the tiny, 2,800-student Hudson School District 40 miles west of Boston from 1993 to 2007. He was named Massachusetts Superintendent of the Year in 2003.

“In Massachusetts, he was able to be hands-on with everything,” Haddad told the Courier-Journal. “In a district as large as ours, you just can’t do that.”

Haddad refused further comment when reached by phone last week, except to say of Berman, “I’m not very happy with him right now.”

But Berman has many supporters.

“When he was in Hudson, just a stellar record there,” said Jim Mabbott, executive director of the Oregon Association of Education Service Districts, who served as lead consultant for Iowa-based Ray & Associates, which led the superintendent search process for Eugene’s top job.

“And I will tell you, if you’re going into a district of 100,000 students, twice as large as the Portland School District, if you don’t ruffle some feathers, then you’re not doing your job,” Mabbott said. “I think he’s a very strong candidate.”

Several organizations in the Louisville area have rallied in support of Berman, including the local chapter of the NAACP, the Jefferson County Teachers Association and the editorial board of the Courier-Journal.

“Looking for a new superintendent is an ill-advised course,” the paper opined last month, two days before the board was supposed to vote on whether to reconsider Berman’s ouster. “The board has shown no evidence that it knows how to work with and guide a superintendent; it does not promote constructive community discussion; (and) it is more responsive to vocal malcontents.”

Two issues were at the crux of the school board’s frustration with Berman. One has deep roots in Louisville history — and the history of school desegregation in the South.

Busing trouble

Two days before Berman’s first day on the job in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Jefferson County Public Schools’ three-decade-old plan of assigning students to schools by race was unconstitutional. Thus, Berman’s first task was to assemble a team of lawyers and district staff members to come up with a new plan.

The old plan was based on a requirement that black student enrollment at every district school be no more than 50 percent and no less than 15 percent. The new plan, which the school board approved 7-0 in 2008, simply changed the requirements from being raced-based to geography-based, Berman said last week.

It divided the district into two areas, Area A and Area B, with the former consisting mostly of families of low-income and low-education status, and the latter being mostly the opposite.

Under the new requirements, 15 percent to 50 percent of students at each school must be from Area A regions. The plan was launched for the district’s 89 elementary schools at the beginning of the 2009-10 school year, and is scheduled to begin for middle school students in the fall of 2012, and for high school students in the fall of 2013.

But many parents of elementary school students were upset that their children did not get into their preferred school in 2009, according to the Courier-Journal, and then some busing problems during the first two days of school last fall resulted in a new uproar when some children got on the wrong buses and didn’t get home until 9 p.m.

The controversy over the student assignment plan had “little to do with what I was doing,” Berman told The Register-Guard. The issue of busing black and white students together goes back to the days of desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s, and the original student assignment plan based on race in 1975 that the Supreme Court overturned four years ago, Berman said.

“I’m not busing,” Berman said. “They think if they get rid of me, they’ll get rid of busing.”

Eugene School Board Chairman Craig Smith spent Thursday and Friday in Louisville with fellow board members Beth Gerot and Mary Walston, interviewing many of Berman’s colleagues, Jefferson County Board of Education members and other community folks. Smith said Friday that many of the Eugene board’s questions about Berman, such as accusations that he has spent too much time traveling instead of running his district, as well as concerns over district busing, were satisfactorily answered.

“We’ve looked into that at some length,” Smith said of the student assignment plan issue, “and got satisfactory answers on all that.”

“One of the best”

The second problem confronting Berman, who began his educational career in the 1970s as a social studies teacher in Maine and then Massachusetts and once dreamed of becoming an Olympic fencer, was two straight years in which six district schools were among the 10 lowest-performing schools in the state, based on reading and math scores. But Berman said students in those schools, with high percentages of low-income students, have been struggling for years.

“I think he has done a good job under difficult circumstances,” said Raoul Cunningham, president of the Louisville branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “He came on just as the Supreme Court had ruled against (the district). He was able to put the pieces back together and assemble a student assignment plan that was not disruptive of the system, (or) of the goals of diversity.”

His critics notwithstanding, Berman said he feels he was a “great match” for the Louisville schools and is most proud of what he calls the “real work” done around student achievement, creating a more rigorous curriculum and revamping professional development for teachers.

“It’s a pity,” he said of the situation in Louisville. “There’s a lot of popular support for what I was doing.”

As a “progressive educator” who is big on diversity, Berman also believes he’s a “good match” for the Eugene district — even if the job pays about half of the $273,000 he earned annually in Louisville, according to the Courier-Journal.

“I knew going to a smaller district I wouldn’t be making the same I receive here,” Berman said. “But I think that’s a conversation the (Eugene) board and I will have to have.”

Linda Duncan, one of two school board members who voted against his contract not being renewed and a longtime high school teacher in the Louisville schools, said she believes Eugene will get a “jewel” if Berman is selected.

“If you take Dr. Berman, you’re getting, I think, one of the best education minds in the country,” Duncan said. “We just have a different political situation going on here right now. It’s just very high-charged, and he’s just kind of been caught in the middle of it.”