'Impatience Born of Experience'

Retirement Tribute: Dan Domenech

In his first full-time teaching job, 23-year-old Dan Domenech was assigned to a class in Queens, N.Y., with 35 challenging 6th graders. Rather than spending the year struggling with them, he experimented with behavior modification techniques he had studied at Queens College.

Domenech created a token economy, doling out tokens for good behavior that students could turn in for privileges. “One of the big privileges was they would go around the corner with me to have lunch at my house, where my mother would make us sandwiches after we shot some hoops,” he recalls.

One year, he based the curriculum on “Fiddler on the Roof,” intertwining it with reading, writing, math and history, and finally having his students perform excerpts from the show for the student body at the elementary school. The show was a hit, but more importantly, his students’ attendance, behavior and academic performance rose markedly.

“It was a lot of fun for me, and it was a lot of fun for the kids,” he says. “It makes the point that when kids are engaged and doing something they enjoy, they learn in the process.”

A Disruptive Inclination

Domenech, now 77, who will retire this month after almost 15 years as AASA’s executive director, never stopped innovating or, as he puts it, “disrupting.”

One of his recent disruptions may be his most ambitious. He teamed the association with the Successful Practices Network to create a commission of 30 superintendents, CEOs and foundation leaders to develop what has become the Learning 2025 initiative. Its modest goal? “To totally redesign schools, education, from the way it is, which is a throwback to the 18th century, to the way it should be in the 21st century,” he says.

The initiative, which already has drawn more than 130 school districts across the country, grew in part from the chaos COVID-19 has wrought in schools, shattering traditional notions of schooling and prompting urgent discussions about virtual learning, year-round schooling, flexible grade levels, personalized learning and other nontraditional practices.

Domenech says he wants to see 300 districts participating in the initiative in the short term and, ideally, a couple of thousand by 2025.

“I’m trying to kind of imitate the disruptive technology concept, where when you get 20 to 30 percent all of a sudden using a certain technology, it switches over and everybody wants to do it,” he says.

A ‘Colleague-Leader’

It was no surprise to Mort Sherman, AASA’s senior associate executive director, to see Domenech take on such a bold project so late in his career. In an early conversation about the idea, he says Domenech simply declared, “You know, if we don’t do it, who will?”

“He saw the problem,” says Sherman, whom Domenech brought aboard the organization in 2013 to expand professional growth opportunities for current and aspiring leaders. “He quickly said yes to being the co-lead of the commission, and he works tirelessly to share the work across the country.”

David Schuler, superintendent of Township High School District 214 in Arlington Heights, Ill., who will succeed Domenech as executive director later this month, got a similar response from Domenech when he asked for AASA’s support for Redefining Ready!, a college- and life-readiness initiative he developed in his district before sharing with others through an AASA network.

“He didn’t skip a beat at all,” says Schuler, a past president of AASA. “He said, ‘Go for it, David, that’s exactly what we need in public education.’ It would have been just as easy for him to have rolled his eyes and said, ‘There’s a lot of other people who are taking a run at this, Dave, let’s let them do it,’ but that’s just not his style.”

Schuler and others who have worked with Domenech say it’s also not his style to slow-walk a project once it’s been approved. Domenech visited Schuler’s district in suburban Chicago to observe the program before AASA launched Redefining Ready! nationally.

“You’re not going to go into a meeting with Dan and talk, and then come back two weeks later and talk about the same thing again,” Schuler says. “There has to be a plan, and if he and his leadership team give their thumbs up, action will take place.”

Adds Sherman, who spent time as superintendent of five school districts: “He’s always been about the doing, the acting, not just the white paper on the shelf somewhere. It’s an impatience born of experience.”

Despite Domenech’s unwillingness to sit still, Sherman considers him a consummate team player. “When I introduce Dan, I introduce him as a colleague and as a friend, never as a boss,” he says. “As a colleague, he gives us tremendous latitude and respect to do our work. He is very much like a colleague-leader.”

‘Sink or Swim’

Domenech’s early school experiences were of the “sink or swim” variety, he says. He was born in Cuba, where his grandfather owned a sugar cane plantation while his father spent much of his time in New York City overseeing the sugar sales. At 9, he relocated with his family to Manhattan. They flew into Newark, N.J., in January.

“All I remember is the plane door opening and it was like opening the door to a refrigerator,” he says. “I had never experienced cold weather. I didn’t even have a coat, and my father wrapped me in a blanket and carried me down the steps of the plane.”

With both parents working long hours, he was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Tarrytown, N.Y., along the Hudson River. He didn’t speak English and no one in the school spoke Spanish. He had been a 5th grader in Cuba but was placed in a 2nd-grade class, where he languished.

“I pretty much spent my days sitting in the back of the classroom by a window when the Tappan Zee Bridge was being built,” he says. “I would look at the workers on the bridge and assign names to them — that was Manuel and this was Jorge and that was Juan.”

One day he surprised his teacher by solving “advanced” arithmetic problems, and the next day he was moved up to 5th grade, where he was promptly bullied because he spoke Spanish. He hung on at the school for eight miserable months before his parents brought him back to Manhattan.

As his English improved, so did his appreciation of school. At 15, he got a summer job working with children who were newly arrived in the country, preparing them for school in September.

“I would wear my white shirt and tie and stand in front of the group as their teacher,” he says. “That’s what got me into education. I loved it, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”

Climbing the Ladder

Despite his fondness for teaching, his career in the classroom was short-lived. “I loved it, but I only got to do that three years because I was promoted,” he says with a laugh.

While teaching the 6th graders in Queens, he was pursuing a doctorate in education research at Hofstra University. This led to a job at the Nassau County Board of Cooperative Educational Services, where he studied innovative instructional practices and introduced them to area schools.

Six years later, with doctorate in hand, Domenech entered school administration, landing an assistant superintendency in the Deer Park district on Long Island. A few months later, the superintendent was fired and Domenech got an interview for the job. He proposed an ambitious plan to close two elementary schools and introduce full-day kindergarten, personalized learning, open-space classrooms and other innovations. He was offered the job on the eve of his 32nd birthday, an especially young age at the time for someone entering the superintendency.

Three years in, he moved on to lead the larger South Huntington School District on Long Island, where he introduced similar innovations, including bilingual instruction and on-site day care services for the children of teachers and district parents. He stayed there for 13 years, then accepted the superintendency at Long Island’s Western Suffolk BOCES, an appointment of the state education commissioner.

Lessons in Politics

Domenech thought that move would include a hefty pay boost, but when the retiring superintendent of the BOCES, who was making $200,000, departed with a $960,000 severance package, then-Gov. Mario Cuomo was incensed. He persuaded the state legislature to cap the salaries of BOCES superintendents at $128,625.

Suddenly Domenech’s pay was not only lower than what he earned in his old job, but less than his assistant superintendents were making at his new one.

During that time, the top job in the New York City School District opened up, and friends encouraged him to apply.

On a Friday night in September 1995, the city’s board of education voted to appoint him chancellor of the largest school district in the country. Domenech’s photo appeared on the front page of The New York Times the following morning. A profile called him “an educator with fire” and described Domenech as “a man suited for the pressures of politics as well as those of boardroom and classroom.” He spent the day doing interviews and accepting congratulations.

But by law, the appointment still had to be ratified at a public meeting that night. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who had made it clear he wanted more control over the city’s schools, spent that day pressuring board members to change their votes. In a 4-3 revote that night, with Domenech and his family looking on in the first row, the board rescinded his appointment.

“It was shocking,” he admits. “It was crushing. It taught me a huge lesson that I never forgot over the years — about the role of politics in education and how you can’t ignore the politics.”

But even before his encounter with Giuliani, Domenech had demonstrated his political savvy by taking on the long-troubled Roosevelt Junior-Senior High School in Nassau County.

At the state education commissioner’s request, he led an inspection team into the school and produced a scathing report, writing, “If a community could be charged with child neglect, possibly with abuse, Roosevelt would be a strong candidate.”

The New York Times noted that Domenech showed a “deft political stroke” in managing the intervention, which culminated in the state’s first takeover of a school district. It also wrote that he does not “suffer from a lack of confidence or a reluctance to speak his mind. Now and then he has straddled the line that separates frank from brash.”

Reacting to that now, Domenech says, “I would say that’s very appropriate. I’ve never been shy about telling it like it is.”

Tough Decisions

Following his New York experiences, as one of the nation’s most prominent figures in K-12 education, Domenech vied for the superintendency in Los Angeles and was one of three finalists before he took himself out of the running. A year later, he was named superintendent of the Fairfax County School District in Virginia, the 12th largest district in the country.

In his customary style, he hit the ground running. Within his first two years, he worked with the school board to group elementary students by skill level rather than age, offer full-day kindergarten, and open Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes to all students who wanted to take them, a rare practice at the time. AP and IB participation soared.

“Districts like Fairfax have shown that many more kids are ready than teachers and counselors think,” observes Jay Mathews, a Washington Post education columnist who covered Fairfax at the time. “So Fairfax, with Dan’s leadership, started to encourage all kids, particularly low-income kids, to do AP or IB.”

After seven years at Fairfax, Domenech accepted a job as a senior vice president at McGraw-Hill Education, where he built relationships with large school districts nationwide.

Four years later, he moved on to AASA, as the eighth executive director in its 158-year history. Immediately, he had some difficult calls to make. It was 2008, and the nation was heading into the Great Recession. The organization wasn’t ready for it, having gone through six deficit budgets in as many years.

One of his first moves was to make the excruciating decision to lay off 15 of the organization’s 50 employees. He also bought out AASA’s lease on its top-floor offices in Arlington, Va., and purchased a building for the association in Alexandria, Va. The move cut facility expenses almost in half.

“There were hard decisions that had to be made to get things straightened out in the organization,” says Chuck Woodruff, who had worked with Domenech in the Fairfax County schools and joined him as chief operating officer at AASA. “He is willing to and does make the tough decisions.”

In part because of those early decisions, Woodruff says, AASA is now in “the best financial situation it’s ever been in.”

Driven by Mission

Perhaps the most impactful accomplishment in Domenech’s tenure at AASA is formation of the Leadership Network, which has significantly expanded the organization’s mission, membership and bottom line.

“It was a dream that Dan and I shared to create an Urban Superintendents Academy,” says Sherman, who heads the network.

One of the first moves was to approach Howard University and the University of Southern California to help AASA create academies for superintendents of color. “That was clearly an initiative we undertook. There weren’t people banging on our doors,” Sherman says. “But it’s a really important part of who Dan is. It’s not just building programs, but programs that are mission-driven — mission in the sense of serving America.”

Gail Pletnick, a past AASA president and former superintendent in Arizona who consults with AASA’s Aspiring Superintendent Program and Personalized Learning Cohort, says increasing equity for educators and the children they serve is what drives Domenech’s work.

“He is an inspirational leader who operates from his own values and belief system, and I think that’s what makes him such an excellent leader,” she says. “He really believes that all children deserve and must have a quality education.”

The Leadership Network now encompasses 35 professional academies for superintendents, aspiring superintendents, principals and aspiring principals, including programs exclusively for Latinos and women and cohorts addressing topical areas like personalized learning and early childhood education.

“This was always the unfulfilled heart of our mission, which has blossomed and now has grown into the largest department and the largest revenue source for AASA as well,” Sherman says.

Active Retirement

Domenech says he took the job at AASA expecting to stay for three or four years. Instead, he remained for nearly 15, giving him the second-longest tenure of AASA’s eight executive directors, following only the association’s first executive. So why retire now?

“Well, because I have a huge family,” he says. He and his wife Lori have four children, 12 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Even so, his retirement seems to include some caveats.

“I’m not somebody who can stay home and play golf every day,” he says. “I have to be engaged.”

He plans to write a memoir that he hopes will be instructive to aspiring leaders. “I want that book to be kind of a professional development, where it’s not just a biography but where I incorporate my life experiences into strategies for leadership,” he says.

Domenech also expects to continue to serve on a few advisory boards (he’s been the school leadership representative on the Federal Communication Commission’s Universal Service Administrative Company board for the past 10 years), and he points out that AASA’s former presidents (he served in the elected role himself in 1998-99) tend to remain active, jointly meeting twice a year — at AASA’s National Conference and its Legislative Advocacy Conference in Washington, D.C.

“We do have this sense of a family,” he says. “It’s an organization that I’m proud of, that I love. I leave it painfully, because I know it’s time for me to move on, but at the same time I’m going to miss the organization, the people I’ve worked with, the people who have been my boards, my presidents. We’re all friends, and we’ll be friends for years.” n

Paul Riede is a freelance education writer in Nashua, N.H.