According to news reports and social media pages, Spotsylvania County schools is leaning towards hiring Mark Taylor as the new superintendent. Taylor is a former Spotsylvania County administrator and attorney with a business background. If this is true, Taylor is a brilliant outside the box selection for Superintendent.

A Superintendent, like a Chief Executive officer, must have a strong business acumen in order to effectively manage resources and priorities. Knowing how to place the right people in the right role is an important part of providing strategic, operational, political, and financial leadership of an organization. These are business skills. The leader of the organization does not need to get into the weeds of specific day to day items. That is left for others to handle.

Those that argue that an educational background is necessary to lead a school division make a serious error in logic. It is the classic appeal to authority logical fallacy. A person that has a “credential” like a PhD must be trusted at all costs because they are the “experts”. We must bypass logic and reason in favor of the “expert status” that supposedly comes with a credential.

Look no further than the previous Spotsylvania County Schools Superintendent. Baker was a political hack that did very little to solve the problems in the school division. Test scores progressively got worse during his tenure. The school division became more politicized as Baker allowed the administration to promote political candidates as we covered in previous Spotsy Wire articles. Wokeness grew into the school division instead of the singular focus on education. No one was held accountable internally with the money lost from the turf fields scandal. There was resistance to financial audits. The list goes on and on. Yet, we are supposed to trust this “expert” because of his “educational credential”?

If Taylor is the person that ultimately becomes the Superintendent, this is a great pick. Taylor is a conservative with a business background that we predict would remove the wokeness from the school division and provide better leadership than the previous Superintendent. The lack of a business background was one of many reasons why the previous Superintendent failed during his tenure.