CMS superintendent is up for national honor before he even gets his first job review

Clayton Wilcox still hasn’t gotten his first formal job review from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board, which hired him as superintendent starting in July 2017.

But the Council of the Great City Schools has already tagged him as one of the nation’s best superintendents. Wilcox is one of nine finalists for the council’s 2018 urban superintendent of the year award, which will be presented in Baltimore on Thursday.

The council’s October newsletter lists the finalists but doesn’t say how they were chosen. The council alternates between honoring urban school board members one year and superintendents the next. The winner will be awarded a $10,000 scholarship to present to a student.

The nomination highlights an often-noted contradiction about CMS: The district and its leaders tend to be lauded nationally even as they’re embroiled in local criticism and controversy.

“In many ways this honor is not an individual award but a national recognition of a great public school system — working hard every day to get better and serve all children well,” Wilcox, who led three smaller districts before coming to Charlotte, said in an email responding to an Observer query.

He has led CMS only 16 months, a stretch that has included highs and lows.

Under his leadership voters passed a record school construction bond, county commissioners provided money for a teacher raise and educators around North Carolina applauded him for supporting a May teacher rally for better pay and working conditions. He has spoken forcefully about the need to combat racism and poverty by doing more to ensure better opportunities at all schools.

But Wilcox is still working on a strategic plan to deliver on the changes he talks about. He has drawn criticism for the pay and practices involved in some of his early administrative hires, and for being slow to disclose results of lead testing to parents. In August, Wilcox distanced himself from a controversial school board vote on boundaries and school construction in suburban towns that were granted the power to create their own charter schools.

Wilcox’s contract allows for an annual performance bonus of up to 10 percent of his base pay, but the school board has yet to decide how much to award him. Before finishing his job review, the board waited on test scores and other data for his first year in office, which came in September. Those results were, in Wilcox’s words, sobering, with declines in some crucial areas.