With Rita Bishop’s departure, the School District of Lancaster begins yet another search for a superintendent. My guess is that they will do what they did prior to hiring Bishop; look for a rising superstar.

That may be the wrong approach.

The thinking in a lot of urban districts goes like this: Our problems are immense, and we need a rising superstar to help us address them. At the very least, we need someone with fresh and maybe groundbreaking ideas; someone who knows about the grant process and can turn on the spigot of money in a district where the tax base is eroding (see Phillips, Vicki) and the locals just can’t or won’t cough up any more.

And so Lancaster has had that; two of the last three superintendents have been educators on the rise, the third being the disastrous tenure of Ricardo Curry.

Bishop, profiled in this Lancaster New Era piece over the weekend, can take credit for some incremental progress made by the city district. Still, a superintendent who comes in like a hurricane and leaves a few years later really can’t see reforms through to completion. They can put things in motion, but when they leave before the outcome is achieved - and then the new boss comes in and institutes his or her pet reforms - what really gets achieved?

The merry-go-round approach does not lend itself to long-term stability. That is a reason the district might want to consider promoting from inside this time around, if in fact there are any appropriate candidates for that. But I suspect they’ll just do the nationwide search thing again. The problems are dire. But I just don’t know that the last two superintendents hired this way have done anything, long-term, to solve them.