Broad and Gorman advising Raleigh superintendent

Here's an interesting twist in the great sibling rivalry between North Carolina's two largest school districts: Charlotte-Mecklenburg's Peter Gorman will spend the next year acting as "executive coach" to Wake's new leader, Tony Tata.

Both are graduates of the The Broad Superintendents Academy, founded by philanthropist Eli Broad "to transform urban school districts into effective public enterprises."

“The executive coach is much like a teacher mentor,” Tata (pronounced TAY-tah) said in a press release today. “The focus of the relationship is on the mechanics of the role of the superintendent and providing support.”

The mentoring match was announced as part of a communications audit the academy provided as part of its support to Tata in his first year as a superintendent. According to the News & Observer, one of the biggest recommendations is for Tata to try to end public feuding among school board members.

“The superintendent and the leadership of the board should work with board members to make a concerted effort to tone down inflammatory rhetoric at the board meetings and, when disagreements do arise, to deal with those disagreements in a courteous and professional way that better communicates to the public the reasons for board member decisions and helps encourage more consideration by the news media of the important positive work the board is doing,” said the audit report.

Gorman didn't get Broad audits when he came to CMS in 2006, but the issue sure sounds familiar. In June, about a week before he officially started work, Gorman toured Philadelphia with a Chamber of Commerce group. I tagged along and quoted him as saying that business leaders were peppering him with complaints about bickering board members.

"If nothing changes, that impacts my efficiency so much that I have to step back and evaluate my superintendency," Gorman told me. (Afterward, he said he'd learned something about being in the kind of high-visibility job where he can land on the front page criticizing his employers.)

Since Tata took the Raleigh job Jan. 31, he's also been part of a Broad-led retreat with the school board to develop a mission, vision and core beliefs statement. The CMS board has done the same at Broad retreats (here's the CMS statement).

It's just one more sign of how much has changed in Wake County since the 2009 election of a board majority with a new vision for student assignment and management of the district. For many of the old guard, CMS was the cautionary example of a "resegregated" school district and all the accompanying woes. Today, it's looking more and more like a crystal ball hinting at Raleigh's future.