Once again, the Amherst public schools are searching for a permanent superintendent.
There are many important criteria for a good superintendent but I strongly believe that, in addition to the appropriate qualifications and experience, we must hire a superintendent with a high level of cultural competency – the ability to understand, value, and navigate cross-cultural differences among students, families, staff, and the community.
We are fortunate that our community is multicultural. It’s one of the things that makes Amherst so special, and our superintendent needs to enthusiastically embrace it. I urge the screening committee and the Regional and Union 26 school committees to consider candidates through the lens of cultural competency.
Furthermore, I recommend something that may seem unorthodox at first – that the screening committee do a “blind” initial review of candidates. In this process, candidates’ full names are removed from their submission material, to remove the bias inherent in seeing a name.
We would all like to think that we are unbiased, and yet because we are human, none of us is. An applicant named Brett Connor, for example, will elicit a different set of biases than an applicant named Lakisha Jones. A New York Times Magazine article (“Is Blind Hiring Best?” Feb. 25, 2016), describes how this approach has been successful in numerous hiring settings.
I believe that implementing this simple idea would go a long way toward ensuring that the process to determine which applicants to interview is as unbiased as possible. This may be unconventional for a superintendent search, and perhaps has never been done here before, but given Amherst’s track record of hiring and retaining superintendents, it behooves us to think outside the box to help ensure a successful search process.
I strongly urge the Regional and Union 26 school committees to implement my suggestion.
Jennifer Page
Amherst
The writer is a candidate for Amherst School Committee.
