I’ve been musing for days (here and here) about who should be the next Secretary of Education. And then along comes David Brooks (writing about Sarah Palin) and crystallizes it all for me:

It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events - the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight.

How is prudence acquired? Through experience. The prudent leader possesses a repertoire of events, through personal involvement or the study of history, and can apply those models to current circumstances to judge what is important and what is not, who can be persuaded and who can’t, what has worked and what hasn’t.

So what kind of experience matters most for potential education secretaries? It strikes me that there are two big parts of the job-education policy, and executive management-and thus the ideal person would understand (a) education; (b) policy (especially federal policy); and (c) management.

Rod Paige, for example, was very strong on (a) and (c), having led a major  urban school system. And he had good instincts on (b), but because he was new to the Washington game his views (particularly in the early days of NCLB’s formation) were often overlooked.

Margaret Spellings, on the other hand, is very strong on (b) but weak on (a) and (c). She never really worked in schools, nor had she run anything sizable before, so it’s not surprising that she’s known as a “policy wonk,” not an executive or an educator. (Nor is it surprising that she’s considering a run for governor or the Senate; she’s a political animal, in the end.)

So what about candidates for the job under McCain or Obama? Does anyone have the full package? There’s former North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt, with his deep education policy track record and lengthy executive experience. (Other governors, such as Pawlenty or Napolitano, have these same attributes, just to a lesser degree.) But for all of his work on education, he was never an educator, and thus might miss blind spots such as the likely unintended consequences of policy decisions.

And superintendents, such as Arne Duncan, have similar profiles as Rod Paige-good on education and good managers, but newcomers to the halls of Congress.

Perhaps the strongest case could be made for Jon Schnur, who runs a sizable organization (New Leaders for New Schools) that is involved in the nitty-gritty  of schools and who already worked in a policy position at the Department of Education. How ironic that someone who’s barely 40 years old could be considered to have the most relevant experience of them all!