Podcast: Terry Grier on Developing More than 80 System Leaders

We’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. Where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host Jessica and today we’re speaking with Terry Greer. Terry was a big district superintendent for over 20 years in four different states. He made Houston the best big urban district in the country.

But his most important legacy is that to date 81 women and men who’ve worked for him have gone on to lead school districts. He’s America’s superintendent coach. Listen in as he talks with Tom about hiring and developing talent. Hey Terry Greer, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast.

Hey Tom, it’s my pleasure. Good talking with you. What a treat to have you on. Terry, where’d you go to high school? I went to high school in a little community in southeast North Carolina,

a little town called Fairmont. And it was small. It was a tobacco town back in the day. It’s located really a little closer to South Carolina than anywhere else in North Carolina. It’s so far back that they pumped sunshine in.

That was a kid, we like to say. Why and when did you decide to become a biology teacher? Well, it was interesting. I can recall being in high school and going with two friends to the guidance counselor’s office. And they were going to pay to take the SAT.

And as we were making the trip and started talking, they were talking about college. And as we got in the counselor’s office, I can recall she asked me, right in front of the two of them, why was I there? And I said, well, I just came down with these guys. And she said, well, they’re signing up to take a test to get into college.

I think the military would be a really good option for you. And I had a teacher that was standing there and he said, no, he’s going to college as well. And here is his fee to take the SAT. And I think it was 20, 25 bucks back then, so long ago. But that’s how I started thinking about college.

Now that my parents went to college, they both wanted me to go. I ended up going to East Carolina University primarily because I went to football camp there as a senior in high school. And that was my experience with college. And I thought, well, OK. And just the story of becoming a teacher, an biology teacher, it’s a long twisted story.

But it’s something I’ve never regretted. I really enjoyed the classroom and missed it. Why school administration? When did you decide you wanted to lead a school and then a system? Again, that’s a funny story.

I was not only teaching, I was also coaching and was giving thought, had been a successful coach and given thought to the next step in the career. And a small college had contacted me about possibility of working as a baseball coach there. And I started back to school in school administration at the suggestion of the principal of the school. And so I was talking to my advisor about it and they weren’t paying baseball coaches much in those days. And I remember him saying to me, son, you need to get serious about your future.

You can’t eat a baseball. And I still can see him saying that to me. And he was really serious about it. And a big part of it was the principal that we had at the time was a great guy. But we used to go to teachers meetings and we would sit there while he would read to us for two hours.

And I used to think, my goodness, we can all read. And as I watched him in the job, I kept thinking, you know, this is something I know I could do. And that’s kind of how it got started. I enjoy working with young people, but I also enjoy working with adults too. And so I thought I was a department chair.

I thought, well, gosh, if you’re in charge of the entire school, you can have more impact on a lot more kids than if you’re just in charge of a classroom or of a department. And so that’s really what in my mind was the motivator to move into school administration. And it just cascaded from there to, you know, if you’re working, leaving one school, if you’re a superintendent, you can lead a number of schools and you also can impact the entire community. Yeah, isn’t that true, Terry?

I think we’ve both early in our lives came to appreciate that the good superintendent can probably do more to change the way a community thinks about itself and its kids and its future than any other job. I can’t think of another. It is just, and the young men and women I work with and coach and mentor, that’s the message. That’s the message I tell them as you start thinking about what you do as a school superintendent. Don’t forget the impact you have on the entire community.

I always believe that type of job you did as a superintendent, as a district leader, the kind of job you did today has an impact on that community. Eight years, ten years, twelve years from now, and there’s no question in my mind that that’s true. Terry, you went on to be America’s superintendent. You were superintendent in four big systems for 20 years, a really amazing legacy. I would love to take a lap around the country and just have you recount a leadership lesson from each of the systems you led.

I think the first place you were superintendent was Williamson County and Franklin, Tennessee. That’s just south of Nashville for folks that don’t know. That’s a pretty big system. Yeah, it’s a big district. When I was in Williamson County, it was an exciting school district.

It was not the first, but we’ll start with that one. And Williamson, it was interesting in that we had very wealthy kids. A lot of the country, Western stars, lived there. A lot of the pro athletes from Nashville lived there. The district’s immediately south of Nashville, Tennessee.

But we also had kids that were very poor. And we had a lot of kids in that district that were disconnected. And so I had been to New York and had visited Legorium Middle College High School. And it was a small high school located on a community college campus for kids that were disconnected. Kids that were not on, didn’t belong to the annual staffed and play sports.

They might go to school because they like Tom Bender-Arch’s physics class. They would make an A in there. But they hated everything else, and that’s the only class they would go to. So I thought, gosh, this would really fit in our place. And as I started examining that concept, I quickly realized I got a problem here because

we don’t have a college or a community college in our county. And so I decided that versus that being something that we’re getting my way, I went to Nashville in a different school district and talked to the president of a community college there. And he agreed to allow us to set up a school at his college. And people were telling me, you can’t do it.

You can’t open a high school in another school district. But there was no law that kept us from doing that. And we did. And so it’s, I think, too many times people give up on ideas when they really shouldn’t. And I can recall going to the school board president at that time and talking with her

about wanting to serve these children. And she really got angry and upset and said she could not support that. That if these children would just behave, if they wouldn’t dye their hair purple, if they didn’t have body piercing, that, you know, gosh, they could just get in and fit in like everyone else. And I remember coming home and talking to my wife about it.

I was really upset. And she started laughing. She said, you know, you’re not framing this right. Think about the way you’re framing it and presenting it to her. And that was a lesson in leadership.

I learned from Nancy. I thought about it for a day or two. I let a week or two go by. I met with her again. I said, you know, we have a lot of these kids in our schools that don’t fit in,

particularly at the high school level. And they’re keeping other kids from getting a good education. And I’ve got an idea where we could move these kids out of our high schools, put them in another school, and educate them together. And then the kids in our traditional high school would certainly be able to get a different type of education.

And absolutely loved it, endorsed it, became a big champion for it. And that school saved an awful lot of kids. It was a great opportunity and a good lesson in leadership that often as a leader, how you frame and how you present ideas, how you create a sense of urgency, using data makes all the difference in the world.

That’s a great story. Terry, I bet you met CeCe Cunningham at the Middle College of Laguardia. Does that sound right? A great friend, a great lady, one of the best educators I’ve ever met. Just a phenomenal, phenomenal leader.

Yeah, I met her in the fall of 99. And she was one of the people that really helped invent the early college movement in America. She was prominent in the middle college movement that really started with a grant from the Ford Foundation. So great story there. It’s about visiting other schools, being open to new ideas, innovating for equity,

being thoughtful about building your case, building support for change. Sounds like a lot of those were early lessons. Absolutely. And I agree with what you just said, Tom. A lot of it is benchmarking, going out and seeing best practices and trying to think about how that might fit your situation.

You don’t have to absolutely replicate something with fidelity. As a matter of fact, you might decide to take an idea and change it, tweak it, make it different. And as a result, it may better fit where you are. And that’s one of the things I know when over the years, as I’ve tried to hire people to work in leadership roles, I always, always tried to hire very bright people.

I used to laugh and say, gosh, when I got in a room with my team, I wanted to be the dumbest guy in the room. I wanted everybody else to really be bright. And I also wanted people to be creative because if you do see an idea that you think is outstanding, in its present form, it might not quite fit your culture. But these creative, innovative people that also are adaptive, can adapt themselves and can adapt different concepts and ideas.

That’s the ticket. That’s who you hire. And I’ve always said, as a superintendent, I never, I believe this, I never wanted to hire anyone and never hired anyone. That was a direct report that they don’t have the ability to become a superintendent one day. We’re going to come back to that in just a minute.

But you had the chance to move from Tennessee back to North Carolina and you took over at Guilford County. You were there from 2000 to 2008. What was your big takeaway from Guilford? Guilford, it was interesting. We started that little middle of college in Tennessee in a different school district in Nashville.

And when I came to Guilford County, I remember during the interview, I asked the Board of Education, what was their top priority? It was a big board, Tommy. I had 11 board members, but I was very surprised at how quick they just jumped on dropout rate. I mean, that it was almost, it was like a unanimous chorus of the board dropout rate. And I said, well, okay, I’ve been looking at some data that was a concern of mine to be frank with you because your dropout rate is quite large.

Let me ask you a question. What percent of your budget do you have dedicated for anything that would resemble dropout awareness, dropout prevention, dropout mediation? What are you doing to address this issue? And it could be, I mean, we could tie it right back to third grade reading, kindergarten through first grade attendance. I mean, anything, any strategy, and they did not know.

And so as we look, it was less than one tenth of one percent of our budget. So one of the things that I learned as a leader is when you identify issues or problems, you’ve got to make sure that your resources are aligned to help you have what you need to address that problem. And we were talking about middle colleges and early colleges. Early when I was in Guilford, we started nine middle colleges and we started the second early college in America.

I think Bard was maybe the first. And then the early college at Guilford was the second. That’s where very bright kids actually attend school at that university. Their freshman and sophomore year taught by our teachers. But beginning their junior year, they simply enrolled in college, took all college courses.

We paid tuition. We negotiated to reduce rate for those kids. And in two years when they graduated high school, they finished two years of college at Guilford College. So that was the first early, true early college in North Carolina. And later as we kept massaging our middle colleges, at that time, Bill Gates came to North Carolina with Governor Jim Hunt,

took a look at our middle colleges and tried to convince us to change and move them more towards the early college model. So the big lesson in Guilford, I think, was making sure that at the central level that we have our resources aligned to help remediate or correct the problems we’ve identified. And then I realized quickly that that had to be the same formula you use at the school level. I’ve seen a number of schools want to spend $50,000 to purchase a new playground or new playground equipment.

And yet they have the lowest math scores of any school in the district and we’re doing nothing to help train math teachers or to buy math manipulatives, for example, for kids. After Guilford, you moved to San Diego for a few years, took on a really big challenge. What did you learn at San Diego Unified? Well, San Diego Unified was an interesting place. We loved it. Who could not love San Diego?

The teachers union there was a challenge. All child, no child focus, all adult focus. And perhaps that’s what unions do. But I can recall there that early on almost anything we tried to do to improve the district, it was just cut off at the knees by the teachers union. So one of the things we began doing, we did it anyway, but I mean, we really started focusing hard on it. Anything we did, we really empowered and involved teams of teachers.

And so when we got ready to make a presentation to the board, it was not me or a member of my cabinet or a principal making the presentation. It was a small group of teachers. And it really put the board in a tough position of having to say no or tabling or wanting more information before they would approve a reading program. Or I remember we were at that time we were implementing the concept of smart goals into the district. And it really had a huge impact on the school system.

I remember when we won the Broke Prize while I was at Houston, San Diego was also in that final group of four districts. And a lot of that I’m fully convinced came from the improvement they saw utilizing the smart goal concept of really tackling problems and making sure that you have things you could measure and you could set goals that were realistic and that you could achieve. So I think what I learned there was that there’s different ways to lead. And one of the ways that we were able to lead effectively there was through

a degree of involvement that probably was a little more dramatic than it would have been. Had the union not had so much influence over the board. Then you moved to Houston 2009 and you had a really great seven, seven and a half year run there. What did you learn in Houston? Well, Houston was an interesting place and we love living in Houston more than anywhere we’d ever been.

Hot as heck in the summer, but take that away. It’s just a great, great place to live. One of the things that in Houston is as you move from small district to a little larger district to even a much larger district to the six or seven largest district in the country, what you realized is how difficult it was to scale and how important it was that every opportunity to hire a leader was the most critical decision that you were going to make as a school superintendent.

And I just had the philosophy there that if you could hire a great leader, you’re better off not hiring one at all and you’re better off having an interim and you keep looking, you keep developing, you keep working, but Houston more than anywhere else really reinforced the importance of having just really great leaders in every role that you needed a leader. And that was key. I remember we replaced 87 principals one summer and these men and women were good people and many of them had

been in their schools for 12, 15 years. Some went to church with board members, some were friends of people in the teachers union, but their schools had regressed, their student enrollment had gone down, their scores had declined, out of school suspensions were up and we worked and spent, invested a lot of money and time and effort in two years and the big lesson I guess there was there are some people that no matter how hard you work, how long you work with them, they either

just simply cannot or will not lead. And in those cases, quite frankly, you try to find something else for them in the organization and if you can’t, as painful as it is and as difficult as it is, they just have to move on top. Terry, you, Houston may have been the first place where you had the presence of really significant charter school presence where you had big-scaled operators that posed really significant competition for the school district and it seems like you developed

an interesting, I don’t know if you’d call it co-opetition, but you at least learned from them and became quite competitive with their offerings. Is that fair to say in a couple different ways, both with magnet schools and turnaround schools? Absolutely and the people that were leading those charters, three of the biggest charter networks in the country, KPS and Harmony, and the leaders were just great educators, good people, passionate about what they did.

I remember my first week in Houston, they held a joint press conference, the three of them, and said their goal was to triple enrollment in the next five years and I’m sitting there thinking, well, where are those kids coming from? If they’re going to triple enrollment, they already got a lot of kids, where are they coming from, from my schools? So we talked about it as a staff and I just said, geez, the choice is something that I’ve always been a little different about. I’ve

always embraced, I’ve always felt parents ought to have a right to decide where their kids go to school, but I said to my team, if they choose not to come here, it’s going to be for different reasons. It’s not going to have anything to do with quality, it’s not going to have anything to do with how we treat and respect parents. And I was there seven years and we grew in seven years 16,000 kids and we saw charter schools close and I remember my first day in the district address,

I invited those charter network superintendents, if you will, to attend and basically I told the entire audience, there were 2,500 people, I said they had a press conference, they’re all here, they said they were going to increase size, they were going to triple their size in five years and what I’d say is guys, just put your helmets on and buckle your chin strap because the game’s on. And we created a portfolio of options for parents and children, I think that rivaled any in the

country. We went from having three partial dual language schools to having over 59 dual language schools in our district. We had the first Chinese dual language immersion elementary school in Texas, we had the first Arabic dual language immersion school in the country. We offered German, we offered French and we opened the first energy high school in America and it was phenomenal, but having said that Tom, we also provided transportation for Kiven, yes, and we did it at no cost to them.

All of those things made what many of us think, made Houston the best district in America, at least among big urban. You won the Broad Prize, you won a big Race to the Top grant. The track record is really remarkable and it makes it really ironic and unfortunate in some ways that we’re talking today when the state just took over the district just three years after you left and I guess it’s sad to see, maybe it just illustrates the importance of quality, ethical

leadership and in its absence how quickly situations can evolve. Very sad day in Houston today. Yeah, it was a sad day. I also think that it also underlines something that too few people talk about. I think it’s a role of the superintendent. You also have, it’s a fine line you walk between working for a board, working with the board and trying to help mode or lead a board and some people will say, you know, board leadership is not the superintendent’s

responsibility. It has to be, right? Yeah, it has to be. It really does. I can’t remember being in Houston and you know, people would ask me about my board and say, I got one of the best boards in the country. Well, I had some good board members but I also have to remember the year that we won the road prize. I can remember that same year we won a $12 million race to the top grant. I remember that year I got all kinds of recognitions, the council of great city schools, national superintendent

of the year. I had good people. It was not me but Tom, I can remember that year there was an article in the New York Times front page called a photograph and it said something to the effect if any urban district in history has ever had a better year than Houston ISD, we can’t find any evidence of it. And I remember that year when I did my, they did my evaluation, we were in close session and the board president said, you have anything you want to say before we get into talking

about your performance. I just passed out a copy of that article and I said, I think this article, I guess you guys have seen it or read it, we sent you a copy. I said, I think it says most of what I want to say and Tom, one of them said, one of them said, Terry, you know we don’t care about things like that and started giggling and two or three others giggling and it, it, it, it, I didn’t get upset or anything. I just smiled and I said, well, I think a lot of you care about these

kinds of things because these kind of things really get at why we are here. We’re here for kids and we’re here for the children of Houston and you know, it was kind of fascinating to hear someone sit there and say, we don’t care about these kinds of things and it does, it’s always, I’ve always been concerned, I don’t have the answer, but I’m always worried about governance, school governments in this country. I think we’re the only country in the world that has school boards

and I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know what you do instead of them and I’m not advocating for them to be abolished, but I can tell you this, you cannot, you cannot be a great superintendent or a great leader unless your board is, allows you or is willing to work with you to make that happen. It just, it’s just, I don’t see how it’s possible. Terry, I want to finally get to the punchline and the reason that I gave you a call the other day, I travel around the country and

there’s not a city that I go to where I don’t run into a Terry Greer protege. You’ve done more to develop educational talent than anyone in history. I’m quite certain of that. With a little digging, I found out that 81 men and women that have worked with you have gone on to lead school districts. That’s probably two or three times more than anybody else could claim. Number one, it’s just such a wonderful and powerful legacy. You got to feel really proud of that, but more than that,

it suggests that there’s more to the, this story than just leading big systems for 20 years. It suggests that you had a different hiring criteria and you thought differently about growing talent. You’ve talked a little bit about this in the podcast already, but I guess I’d love your philosophy of hiring first. What is it that you look for when you’re trying to hire a school leader or somebody on the leadership team in a district? Well, you know, all that’s very kind. I’ve been

fortunate, Tom, to work with some of the best and brightest men and women in education in this country. I’ve always thought when you look at hiring people, we’ve talked a little bit about this before, but I’ve always wanted, I’ve always tried to find unusually gifted people, talented people, and I’ve always been open to thinking a little outside of the box. I can remember, like yesterday when I was in San Diego, and we were looking for a chief information technology

officer and a real good friend of mine, there, Matt Spathis, who’s in the business community there. Matt was way ahead of his time from a technology perspective and we, I was talking with him and brainstorming with him about people that we needed to look at and we started interviewing people and talking to people. And then this person came to our attention that had been the IT guy in a smaller district outside of San Diego, Lemon Grove, ISD, and his name was Darryl LeGase. And Darryl called

and talked to Darryl and Darryl said to me, well, I would not be comfortable applying in San Diego. And I said, why? He said, well, I wouldn’t want to embarrass you. And I said, why? What are you talking about? He said, well, I only have a high school degree. And I said, well, that’s all that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and a lot of other people in IT have as high school degrees. They didn’t graduate from college. Why is that an issue and a problem? And it didn’t bother me at all

because of his skill set, his talent. I remember in Houston ISD promoting Rick Cruz from a fifth grade teacher to an assistant superintendent for college completion. I didn’t know anyone in the country that had a position called college completion. I knew people that had Jobs career college ready. But I was more interested in kids graduating from college. And I was particularly interested in our poor kids that had high potential going to tier one Ivy

League schools. As I would go to high school graduations and shake hands of kids wearing honors cords and beta club collards and say, where are you going to college? Where are you going to school? And these kids would say, local community college or a local school that didn’t even have admission requirements, but you didn’t hear Harvard or Penn. And so Cruz helped us develop the Emerge program there in Houston. And last year, 479 kids from Houston got accepted to and attend,

now attend, tier one Ivy League schools tuition free. But Rick is this unusual talent. And I can remember even with the smart people I had on my team, when I announced to my team what we were doing by bringing Rick in, I had some blowback and pushback. And it was, well, you can’t move a fifth grade teacher into an assistant superintendent position. He’s not been a principal. So what does that have to do with the job that we want him to do? And I think that, again, if you focus on

hiring bright people that are creative, that are adaptable, and, you know, can be flexible, that’s what I always tried to look for. Terry, is it, is it, I’ve heard Mark Zuckerberg say the same of trying to hire people smarter than you for your leadership team, but it probably can be a little bit intimidating when you have a room full of people that could, you know, are capable to do your job? Well, it never intimidated me. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t smart enough

or it intimidated me. You know, I always felt like my role as superintendent and my role as a leader was to basically get those kind of bright people in a room, really take a hard, deep dive look into the data about the organization and come to some consensus with them about what our major problems were. And then we really, we really went after it a little differently than a lot of other people. We tried to really focus on, on, on an issue, try to make tremendous progress on that

issue, then move to another issue. I think too many people in education and leadership, I look at all these strategic plans. I’ve seen so many strategic plans, Tom, that if you implemented everything in the plan with fidelity, nothing would get better. And they have 900 different strategies. And what you see is that every school board member, every community group, they have one pet project in a strategic plan. And, and, and I think often that if you could focus on one or

two key things that everybody could, could really rally around and put your energy and your effort, your resources towards softening them, that you’re going to win the bro prize. You’re going to be recognized as one of the better school districts in the country. I just think too many districts, too many schools, they think when you try to do everything, you can’t do anything. And that’s what I see a lot of. So you get, you get bright people out in a room, band the creativity. And

what’s fascinating about that with those kinds of people, what I found is very seldom did you see them attack each other, but the good ones, oh my goodness, when you came in with an idea, whether it was me with an idea, they, some of them used to say he has terry epic ideas. He just has too many terry epic ideas. Well, you take a terry epic idea like he merged with that idea that I came up with about poor kids wanting to go to college. You, you turn it over to Rick Cruz. And

by the time he and his team get finished with that terry epic idea, it’s 20 times better than anything I would have come up with. And there’s what’s exciting about working with these folks, Tom. I appreciate that you continue to reflect on leadership every day in the last few hours you’ve, you were tweeting about leadership development. People want to follow you at TGREAR, HIST. You said a few hours ago when you hire a superstar, don’t be afraid of modifying outdated job descriptions

to take advantage of their skill. Get, get out of the silos of yesterday’s compartmentalization. And in an earlier tweet, you talked about getting smart people on the bus and then worrying about the right seat. So you really do take a talent first approach, right? Well, I can remember Drew Hulahan, who is now the superintendent union county, North Carolina. And I heard Drew when he was very young as a, as an elementary principal in Houston. And after his

second year there, I mean, you knew, I knew after the first year that he was an unusual talent. And brought him into the central office. And I think I put him in a different chief officer role each year for three years, because I knew, I just knew where he had the potential to go. And I remember when he was a chief HR officer, we were opening a new school. Basically, we were repurposing a school. It was in the historic white ward in Houston. It was Ryan Middle School.

And it was a school that had at one time 1200 kids and it was down to 288. And I had drew quietly working with Baylor College of Medicine for an entire year with doctors and professors. And they were developing a curriculum for a college prep medical careers middle school. And he was doing that while he was chief HR officer. And he was wearing two or three different hats. And that school now is full of students. It’s one of the best choice schools in the country. And kids take

a Latin sixth, seventh and eighth grade, eighth graders take high school biology and algebra one. It’s a title on school. It’s a phenomenal success. But Drew was the one that led that effort. Another person that very similar to that was Rodney Watson, who’s the superintendent now in spring ISD. And I could sit here and I just could keep naming you off person by person, district by district, where they might have a role at Drew once one year and then the chief academic officer

for the district. But he was also involved in other things. And so I think leaders that if you just go in and have departments and they get to be waist deep in silos, you don’t take advantage of your talent. We used something, a concept that Xerox used to use year ago. Tom, I know you’ve used it project teams. And we would have cross functional people coming in from different departments working on a particular project that we were trying to solve or a program that we were

trying to implement. And often what we found was someone out of a totally different department would come up with a concept and idea that no one else had thought about that really made a lot of sense. And was the key to our success. All right, Terry. Last last thought for this morning of the 81 people that that you helped to develop who have gone on to lead systems. Many of them are women and people of color. You must be proud of the equity

progress that you have helped to create. It’s really exciting to see such a diverse group of people that have come out of places like Houston and San Diego and Guilford. You know, Tom, as I said earlier, I was lucky to be able to work with so many bright people. And during a long career, when you’re around a lot of bright people that are so gifted, you get recognized and you receive honors and awards. Quite frankly, sometimes I think undeservingly.

It was more about what the teachers in the district did, what the principals did. That was the bro prize. But I guess I’m probably more proud of that than anything else that I was associated with during my time in education. You know, school districts like Houston, where we were 92% non white kids in that district need to have leaders that look like them, that talk like them that they can relate to. They need to have models of success. And, you know,

people that can tell you, oh, just I just don’t have enough teachers of color or I don’t have enough teachers, minority teachers. Well, it’s sometimes I think that, frankly, it’s because if you don’t have something that’s called you don’t want it badly enough. I know in five districts I worked in, we started scholarship long programs for high school seniors that were the top 15% of their graduate class. We focused on young women. And we focused on kids of color who go to local colleges

and universities and get degrees, teach teaching degrees and come back and teach for us. And we did the same thing in Houston. Houston now has 100 kids a year that come back to Houston ISD to teach that went to the University of Houston. We did the very same thing with teachers when we wanted to grow our bench strength for administrators. We would offer teachers scholarships to go get their master’s degree. And we would pay for it and then give them jobs when they came back. And a lot of

those people that we offer those scholarship loans to were for young women and or women and also young men of color. Terry, it’s been a treat to have you on the podcast. There’s a lot of us that really respect the work that you’ve done. The 81 people that have gone on to lead systems are just a small indication of the gift that you’ve been to American public education. So we appreciate you joining us this morning. And thanks for an amazing career. Well, like I said, Tom, thank you

for having me. And again, sometimes I just enjoyed the ride so much because of the caliber of people that I was able to ride with. Great, great, great people, great leaders, all dedicated and cared deeply A big thanks to Dr. Greer for joining us on today’s episode. We so appreciate his commitment to leadership development and his national legacy of training more than 80 superintendents. For more, listen to our episode with Dallas superintendent Michael Hinajosa. We’ve got it

linked in the show notes and on the blog. And before you go, don’t forget to leave us a rating and hit subscribe. We love reading your feedback and you don’t want to miss out on any future episode. That’s it for today listeners. Thanks for tuning in for the Getting Smart podcast. This is Jessica signing off.