The Ballot-Box Bureaucrat: Why Electing Hillsborough’s Superintendent Is Bad for Business and Worse for Classrooms

Hillsborough County Public Schools is far from a small rural district. It ranks as the seventh-largest in the country, is the biggest employer in the county, serves more than 220,000 students, employs over 24,000 people, and manages an annual budget of more than $4 billion.

Now, imagine taking a complex public enterprise of that magnitude and handing the executive suite over to a partisan political campaign.

Take Tampa General Hospital as an example. It is another large local institution with thousands of skilled staff providing essential services. What if Tampa General decided to pick its President and CEO through a countywide political election? Picture candidates debating medical procedures on stage, spending a year raising money from pharmaceutical reps and medical supply companies, and focusing on politics instead of patient care. No board of trustees would allow this, and no major organization could function that way.

Yet that is precisely what Hillsborough voters are being asked to approve in this referendum: replacing an appointed, professional chief executive with an elected politician.

The sales pitch for this measure is wrapped in the familiar rhetoric of voter empowerment and parental rights. Proponents claim an elected superintendent brings direct accountability to parents. It sounds appealing on a bumper sticker, but it completely ignores how governance actually works.

Right now, Hillsborough’s superintendent is accountable every single day. The superintendent answers directly to an elected, seven-member School Board. If the superintendent mismanages district finances, botches bus transportation, or underperforms in the classroom, the board can evaluate performance, mandate corrective actions, or fire the administrator on the spot.

Under an elected model, that accountability evaporates. An elected superintendent answers to the electorate only once every four years. The School Board loses supervisory authority over the district’s chief executive. Instead of a clear chain of command, you get two separately elected entities with competing political mandates locked in administrative gridlock. When policy disputes arise, you do not get accountability; you get dueling press conferences, parallel legal teams, and paralyzed schools. If an elected superintendent proves incompetent, voters are stuck with the damage for forty-eight months unless the Governor steps in to remove them.

There is also the problem of losing qualified candidates.

When our School Board searches for an appointed superintendent, it can conduct a national recruitment, vetting seasoned educators with doctoral degrees in educational administration and proven track records managing large metropolitan systems. Under an elected system, the candidate pool instantly shrinks to registered voters who happen to live inside Hillsborough County lines. We would be trading nationwide professional competence for local political ambition.

If electing school superintendents were the secret to academic excellence, the national map would prove it. It does not. Less than one percent of school systems nationwide still choose superintendents through a partisan ballot, concentrated almost entirely in Florida and Alabama. The states that consistently lead the nation in public school quality, such as Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey, treat school administration as a highly specialized profession. None of them touch partisan superintendent elections. Meanwhile, Florida hovers in the middle of the pack, and Alabama sits near the bottom. Partisan elections do not lift student achievement; they simply turn the executive suite into a permanent campaign rally.

The hypocrisy behind this measure is staggering. Its loudest champions in Tallahassee routinely rail against bringing politics into classrooms. State Representative Michael Owen, who sponsored the legislation forcing this referendum onto our ballot, even posted on social media: “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH – KEEP POLITICS OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS”.

Yet Representative Owen designed a bill whose sole purpose is to inject partisan primaries, party labels, and political fundraising straight into the school district’s highest administrative office.

Parents already have rights, and real involvement comes from attending conferences, volunteering, and working with teachers. It does not come from turning our schools into a four-year campaign, where the superintendent spends time asking education companies and publishers for donations.

Leading the county’s largest employer is a serious executive vocation, not a partisan stepping stone. We do not elect hospital CEOs, so we should not elect our school superintendent. Vote No on the elected superintendent referendum.