The legend is already being packaged for eventual distribution in bookstores: Fresh from Desert Storm, a dynamic retired general takes over the helm of Fulton County, energizing Atlanta, Georgia with his inspirational leadership. Atlantans are stunned when their commander-in-chief suddenly decides to answer to a higher calling. In a great city on the opposite side of the continent, a foundering school district is failing the children who are crying out for help, and a courageous school board has come to plead with the one American who can lead them out of the wilderness.
If you live in Seattle, you already know the rest of the story: Stanford has the city’s educational problems figured out before he even gets off the plane. Immediately launching into a 16-18-hour work day, six or seven days a week, he vanquishes bureaucracy, subdues America’s most powerful teachers union and rehabilitates the teachers it has corrupted, courts Big Business, raises test scores, becomes the darling of the media and the social elite, and reverses the flow of emigrants from public to private schools. Sound too good to be true? Maybe it ain’t.
In a typically sleazy education article in The Seattle Times, Joni “Mad Dog” Balter praised the Seattle School Board for its courage and innovation in recruiting a man like Stanford — in other words, a man with no education credentials. In fact, there’s evidence that representatives of one of Seattle’s most maligned institutions may have known they were recruiting a lemon from The Peach State.
The first clue most Seattleites had that something was amiss was an unobtrusive article noting that Stanford was found partially liable in a discrimination lawsuit that Fulton County had just lost. Although The Seattle Times was content to let it go at that, I did a little research and discovered that this was no ordinary lawsuit. The plaintiff was awarded such a large amount of money, he was mentioned by Paul Harvey! (About the end of 1997 or in early 1998, Stanford was fined $100,000, though he reportedly didn’t have to pay, since he was a government employee.)
Through brief conversations with Atlantans, I’ve had glimpses of a Stanford who has become all too familiar to Seattle teachers. Apparently, some Atlantans were irked at Stanford’s penchant for flying around in a helicopter (at taxpayers’ expense), for example.
Just yesterday, I discovered an interesting article on the worldwide web: “Lead or Get Out of the Way,” by Anthony Hefferman, from Creative Loafing, July 22, 1995 [No longer online]. Hefferman noted that Stanford had quit his Fulton County post after just four years, during which he had “been publicly at odds with some of the elected commisioners.”
After consulting with local authorities, Hefferman came up with some ground rules for selecting Stanford’s replacement. The experts gave the cold shoulder to retired military personnel, except for those who had proven themselves outside the armed forces. Noted Hefferman, “In the private sector, the first round of interviews for a senior job is often conducted by a low-level person whose assignment is to diplomatically weed out retired colonels and generals.”
Hefferman also noted, “Unlike Stanford, the new manager should have demonstrated an ability to manage skillfully in a racially political atmosphere.”
I once asked someone why the Seatle School Board offered Stanford such an outrageous salary before he’d even had a chance to prove himself. “To get him here,” they replied. So much for school board logic.
I’d love to know what really happened in Atlanta during the Stanford years. But since The Seattle Times will probably investigate the story when Hell freezes over, and Fulton County officials aren’t doing a lot of talking, we may never know.
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism - 
