His new role as superintendent of Wake County schools won't have the intensity of combat or perhaps some of his other assignments in the U.S. Army (from which he retired as a brigadier general after 28 years), but Anthony Tata will have plenty to keep him busy. Moonlighting as a commentator on television or as a current-affairs blogger, as has been his practice, would not be a good fit with his new job.
And yet, the school board majority that hired Tata - a bloc aligned with area Republicans - appears to have put no such limits on his activities. So he should give them up voluntarily.
Tata's appearances on TV and his blogs tend to lean toward the Republican-conservative philosophy. He also has made pointed criticisms of President Obama, explaining that he wanted to exercise his right to free speech. Such criticisms are permissible on the part of a retired general officer, but they're not likely to be helpful coming from the head of North Carolina's largest school system, a nonpartisan post. And it's as a school superintendent that Tata's duty now calls.
Plenty busy
His former boss in the District of Columbia schools, where Tata as chief operating officer focused on purchasing, contracts and operations, said Tata did not identify himself as associated with the school district when he made his appearances, for example, on Fox News. Still, such arrangements are a bad idea. Although the caption on the screen might not say "Wake County schools superintendent," it would be well-known, particularly in Wake and in this region, that Tata held such a position.
He would, in offering essentially political opinions, be associating the school system with those opinions. He would risk alienating thousands of parents and damaging his credibility if he came across as someone with a partisan political agenda. And yes, this would apply whether the Wake superintendent was a conservative appearing on Fox or a liberal holding forth on MSNBC, Fox's liberal foil.
The fact is that Tata will need to do some hard work here on the ground in Wake County to build support from parents and all taxpayers for that matter. He is an unknown. He must focus on the tasks at hand, at home.
Mending division
He also should recognize that he's coming to a community that is sharply divided over the direction of the public schools, with the school board majority taking the controversial and ill-advised step of eliminating a policy aimed at achieving diversity in school enrollments. And thus, Tata needs to be sending the message to as many individuals and as many groups as he can that he intends to be a fair-minded, open-door leader who'll make decisions based on a cross-section of opinion - and that his judgment would be based on what's best for the county's students, not a political party.
Offering his opinions on hot topics in the news won't help him build that public confidence. It would be a diversion he doesn't need. Further, he surely does not want those appearances to "define" him as a newcomer to the community. Some, for example, already are raising their eyebrows at a Tata comment that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was far more qualified to be president than Barack Obama.
Ideally, the new superintendent would have been present to field questions on the day he was chosen, but the clumsy and rushed handling of the matter by the board majority was sadly not surprising.
And so, Anthony Tata can make one of his first important decisions as superintendent before he even gets here at the end of January, by saying he will be giving up the pancake makeup and the hot lights and the blogging keyboard to focus on the very big job ahead.
