Thomas A. Shannon.

A Farewell to NSBA's Eloquent Messenger

If you've read any periodical from the National School Boards Association during the past two decades, you are certain to have received an unsolicited lesson in English diction from the organization's master wordsmith, Tom Shannon.

Shannon, doubling as NSBA's executive director over that time, has taken wicked delight in delivering new vocabulary in his sometimes magniloquent columns about the workings of local school boards. Whether he has lamented a "debilitating animus" in American society, a "hopeless dissonance" in democratic institutions or centralized bureaucracies "endemically resistant to change," he consistently demonstrates a flair for his command of the language.

Asked to describe his prolific writings, Shannon paraphrases the philosopher Cicero: "Never act upon a subject until you first have written upon it."

Shannon, who retires at the end of June, has taken some good-natured ribbing over his use of multisyllables and flamboyant phrases in his bylined columns in both American School Board Journal and School Board News, an advocacy newspaper he started.

Jack Peterson, the long-time executive director of the Arizona School Boards Association, says his running joke is that "when Tom Shannon writes an article, before I start it I get out my thesaurus and dictionary.

Shannon once responded in inimitable fashion to a reader who complained about his need to use 50-cent words. He fired back in mock seriousness: "I suggest you osculate my gluteous maximus."

He points to some of the lighter moments when recapping what he considers the highlights of his distinguished tenure at NSBA's helm. Shannon says it is difficult to single out pieces of his work, musing that "something's not worth doing if it isn't fun." Yet he has been a demanding association executive since assuming the director's job in 1977, one year after NSBA moved its headquarters to Washington, D.C., from Evanston, Ill. (The organization opened its own building in Alexandria, Va., in 1984.)

He has shepherded NSBA to new heights, presiding over an organization whose annual budget has ballooned from less than $4 million to about $18 million today and whose full-time staff has grown from 74 to 130. That's been accomplished in part by ensuring the association always puts its best foot forward.

"If he found something had gone out with a spelling error or a grammatical error, you got taken to task for it," says Lynne Glassman, who spent 15 years at NSBA before recently joining the AASA staff. "That kind of thing says something about a tight ship with high quality that takes pride in everything."

Shannon, a lawyer, served as AASA's legal adviser in the 1970s while working as chief deputy superintendent for the San Diego City Schools. He has acted collegially with AASA leadership over the years on projects of mutual interest. Recently he composed a letter that was sent to every board of education president in the country endorsing the idea that school boards ought to include AASA membership dues in a superintendent's employment contract-one year after AASA endorsed NSBA's national affiliate membership program.

Yet he remains ardent in his articulation of superintendent-school board accountabilities. Two years ago Shannon dismissed an Education Week essay recounting how school boards were unfairly terminating superintendents and harming their reputations as "better literature than it was commentary."

He considers one of his most satisfying accomplishments over the years to be "interpreting the role of the superintendent to school boards."

Shannon says he has tried to model an effective board-executive relationship with his own governing board, made up of 25 representatives from local school boards. While admitting to his share of disagreements with board members over the years, he says he never gives way on moral issues. "If they want to go a different way on a policy matter, I'll go with them. ... I was appointed, not anointed to this job."

He describes a widespread misconception among superintendents. "Too many have converted simple disagreements about educational policy into matters of great principle. [Superintendents] need to realize that education is a contingent matter in which reasonable disagreements may occur."

When he leaves his post June 30 and assumes emeritus status six months shy of his 65th birthday, Shannon will move into a new public arena. He will assume an adjunct professorship at George Washington University, where he says he will be able to "continue addressing my favorite subject--the American institution of representative governance in public education as epitomized by the local school board."