Mike McGill has just been named state Superintendent of the Year by the New York Council of School Superintendents.

In the blurb that accompanied the announcement, the president of his school board was quoted as saying, “It is clear that Dr. McGill’s innovative leadership is inspired by a dream of what the district can become, what education can be, and what each child can achieve.”

And Les Loomis, head of the NYCSS, called him passionate.

Dreamer? Passionate? We asked him to explain himself.

Me: Explain yourself.

McGill: We educators are supposed to be hardheaded realists but hidden deep within is indeed an idealist, which I think you have to be in this work. Superintendents are supposed to be hardheaded, at least.

I think what keeps you young in this business is contact with really good people and I’ve been really lucky to have worked with really fine boards of education, here in Scarsdale in particular; with some terrific faculties and with parents and kids who really care about education and that makes a huge difference.

My English department has periodically allowed me into the classrom to teach a class or two – they’ve been very kind to an aging administrator – and the student contact has been very rewarding.

And I think the issues that schools are dealing with today are important not only to the schools and their communities but increasingly we see how essential they are to the future of our country.

Me: Such as?

McGill: One of the great discussions we’re involved in now is the conversation about how well American kids measure up to educational standards that we would like them to meet—and what it means to meet those standards. The issue frequently gets posed as a matter of economic necessity—kids have to learn in order to be productive workers or so the economy will function better. While that is certainly a desirable product, I think we are being called to ask ourselves whether that indeed is the purpose of education in a democracy.

Is the education that will prepare kids to be good workers necessarily the same education that will prepare them to be contributing citizens?

I propose that an education aimed mainly at economic ends does not consider many of the important civic and ethical issues we face as human beings. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether young people will become contributors, whether they’ll make a difference in other people’s lives.

I think it’s important for schools today to pose those kinds of questions for our public and the broader society.

Me: Funny, many of the people calling for schools to focus on educating students for the workforce are the same ones calling for schools to do more with civics.

McGill: I think there are lots of subtexts there. Certainly for many schools, that becomes an issue of what is an equal, equitable, accessible education.

For school districts like ours in which kids basically are high-achieving to start with—partly because we do a good job and partly because they come from families where education is valued and they start out with a lot of advantages—we ask what’s out on the frontier beyond the normal measures of effectiveness.

If you listen to people like “Richard Elmore,”:http://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty_research/profiles/profile.shtml?vperson_id=315 who’s a teacher at Harvard, he says the very top top American kids are scoring about the 75th percentile on international studies. So we know our top performing kids are doing very well. What what are the challenges posed by those kinds of data?

What’s interesting to me about places like Scarsdale is that because high-performing school districts aren’t having to deal with some of the very gritty kinds of reality that some of our urban schools must deal with, we’re in a position to explore alternative ways of doing things and ask questions that go to the heart of what truly strong public institutions do and and to the heart of how they can function most effectively.

It’s a real privilege but it’s also a responsibility. Particularly today when so much of the impetus for educational change has shifted from localities to the federal or state government. I think it’s very easy to lose sight of the fact that historically one of the tremendous strengths of the American public school system has been the initiative and the individuality of local school districts.

Me: That sounds conservative.

McGill: It’s a strange twist from someone who as a 1960s person is pre-disposed to a kind of professive social vision, but yeah, I think in a lot of ways a free marketeer would feel comfortable with what I’m saying.

I think there’s a lot to be said for initiative and independence and the distinctiveness that can come out of environments where people know other people well, people know the immediate problems and issues well and are able to craft solutions and responses that are appropriate to those people and that place. The best teaching is done by people who know each kid and can shift their responses and there’s an analog at the school and district level.

There’s danger in moving to big government—we could lose sight of the strength of smallness. Getting that balance right is something I think we need to be tending to.

Me: Thanks.