Kansas City News Blog

During his short tenure as superintendent of Kansas City's Public Schools, Anthony Amato earned his share of detractors. Since he wasn't around long enough to develop ideas, it wasn't clear if the programs he implemented would have long-term results or if they were prepackaged methods designed to provide a quick academic bump that would wear off within a year or two.

It didn't help that about half the school board hated him, as well as many teachers. Were they mad a necessary reformer wouldn't accept their disastrous methods? Or was he just a good salesman who didn't like dissent? Amato recently finished his first semester at his new job running the Stockton Unified School District in California. We know this for sure: It helps if the people you work with don't hate you.

Regarding Amato's public persona: He seems to have avoided most of the pitfalls he fell into here. An editorial in the Stockton Record praises Amato for delivering "Big Time" on his promises to improve the district's performance. The article lists a few good PR moves that might've helped his image here -- like coordinating city churches to ring their bells as a symbolic wake up call and announcing the district's poor education stats that hadn't been made public before his arrival. He's getting more than three times as many students to take the SATs, and test scores seem to be rising. A search of Stockton's local media finds almost no criticism of Amato from his new school board, unlike Kansas City officials who publicly took shots at him.

Amato has also made the same moves he was criticized for in Kansas City. Some teachers claimed Amato's push of the multimillion dollar Success For All reading program was simply a canned move that he'd repeated in every district he'd run, regardless of its long-term effectiveness or the district's needs, because he knew it looked good. Several called the program's training process here rushed and chaotic. Immediately upon taking the Stockton position, he announced that district would adopt the program.

Amato started the Kansas City job in July 2006, and announced his resignation in January 2008. By then the board had given him a critical performance review. Others accused him of calling female board members "bitches" when talking to staff.

We hope Amato gets to run his programs in Stockton for the rest of his current, four-year contract. Before Kansas City, he'd typically go into a desperate district, have a honeymoon period and leave after fewer than three years, with the words like "stand-offish" and "aristocratic" thrown around in his wake. It'd be nice to see whether his ideas really work in the long run. -- Peter Rugg