21 vie for Miami-Dade Superintendent job, but only three candidates matter

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The Miami-Dade Public Schools superintendent search is down to the part where everyone pretends it wasn’t always going to be an insider.

After spending $30,000 on a national search and collecting 21 applications from educators across the country, Miami-Dade School Board members are about to begin narrowing the field for the next superintendent.

And Ladra can’t help but wonder: Did we really need a national search to end up exactly where we started?

The board is expected to shorten the list next week before selecting a successor to Superintendent Jose Dotres sometime in mid-July. In April, they voted to reject an outside search firm, but in May the board reversed itself and directed its attorney to negotiate with Hazard, Young & Associates (HYA), a nationally known search firm for educational leaders.

And on paper, the applicant pool is impressive.

There are superintendents from major districts in Colorado, Texas, Illinois, and New York. Former state education chiefs. Charter school executives. Nonprofit leaders. Career administrators. Enough educational credentials to fill an entire School Board auditorium.

Read related: Miami-Dade School Board rejects outside help for superintendent search

Among them is Denver Superintendent Alex Marrero, who oversees nearly 90,000 students and was a finalist for the Chicago schools job. There are district leaders from Texas, Chicago, Boston, and beyond.

The search firm got what it was paid to get: A pile of résumés.

Now comes the politics.

Because while 21 people applied, the chatter around School Board headquarters suggests the race may already be much smaller. Ladra keeps hearing the same three names: Jose Bueno. Rafael Villalobos. And Marrero.

While there was some discussion last week about Marrero not having all the qualifications the board wants — no actual teaching in the classroom experience — the end result was that they would give Marrero and the other 13 candidates who came up short extra time to be vetted.

Everyone else may be applying for the job. Those three appear to be competing for it. And Ladra’s money is on one of the local boys.

If there is a frontrunner, many insiders believe it’s Bueno, the district’s current chief of staff and perhaps the candidate best positioned to navigate both sides of the superintendent’s office: the educational bureaucracy and the political minefield.

That’s not a small distinction. Running Miami-Dade County Public Schools isn’t just about curriculum, test scores, and budgets. It’s also about managing nine elected School Board members, Tallahassee mandates, union relationships, parents, principals, and whatever controversy happens to be trending on social media before breakfast.

Bueno has already been doing much of that work from inside the administration. Dotres might have told him what to do, but he was the one doing it. And he knows where the bodies are buried.

More importantly, he knows where the spreadsheets are buried.

Then there’s Villalobos, the longtime South Region superintendent whose supporters point to a track record overseeing one of the district’s largest and highest-performing regions. If the board wants continuity with a slightly different face, Villalobos checks a lot of boxes.

And then there’s Marrero, the outsider with perhaps the strongest national résumé in the field.

Every superintendent search needs at least one candidate who allows board members to say, “We conducted a thorough national search.” Marrero appears to be that candidate. Whether he is also the candidate they actually want is a different question.

Read related: Nobody wants the job part 2: Miami-Dade School Board draws few entrants

The irony, of course, is that Miami-Dade has been here before. Every superintendent search begins with promises of a broad national effort to identify the best educational leader in America. Then reality arrives.

Because the superintendent of the nation’s third-largest school district isn’t just an educational position. It’s a political one. Which is why insiders often have advantages outsiders can’t match.

They already know the personalities. They already know the factions. They already know which problems are real and which are simply recurring agenda items.

By mid-July, the board will make its choice. For now, the official story is that eight candidates met all qualifications, but 21 applicants are still under consideration.

Unofficially?

Ladra wouldn’t be surprised if this race is already down to two.

And maybe fewer than that.

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