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Iowa educator Elizabeth Celania-Fagen said her wide variety of experience in both large and small schools gives her the tools necessary to advance TUSD with the innovations for a 21st-century education.

On Monday, Celania-Fagen was the last of four candidates for Tucson Unified School District superintendent to meet with the public. She is an associate superintendent in Des Moines, Iowa. About 50 people gathered at Catalina Magnet High School to hear her speak and to ask her questions.

"The heart of who I am is focusing people around the future and what we want from our schools," said Celania-Fagen, who has doctoral and master's degrees in educational leadership from Drake University in Des Moines. "Not everybody understands the difference between a 20th-century educational model and a 21st-century educational model."

Celania-Fagen described a high school program she has implemented in Des Moines called Future Pathways. It was designed as a competence-based program in which students integrate the core skills, knowledge and abilities from different classes together for larger projects. The program, with 465 students and 15 teachers, shows what's possible in education, she said.

"The achievement gap is the manifestation of a system that's outdated, a system created to create compliant factory-level workers in a society that needed that," she said. "But the future of this country is about creativity. It's time for a drastic transformation. It can be done, and when it is done, the results are outstanding."

Her doctoral work examined why good ideas in education don't tend to be implemented well. Celania-Fagen said too often in education, new ideas are just thrown out without enough regard to whether they'll help.

"We all suffer a little from initiative fatigue," she said. "The first step is to filter them through what we want to do. Implementation is the Achilles' heel for education. It's a longer-term process where you give people skills to do new things. It's not just drive-by staff development."

The other three candidates for the post — Rick Myers, a retired IBM executive; Patti Lopez, a TUSD administrator; and Delfino Alemán, an area superintendent from San Diego — held forums last week. Superintendent Roger Pfeuffer has said he will retire from TUSD at the end of June, and the district's Governing Board has called a special meeting for tonight at 8 to publicly announce the next step.

"I think she was clearly the most qualified candidate," said Edward Messing, a retired band director and parent of a high school student. "She has a lot of ideas, and she seems to have a practical knowledge of what's really happening. (For) so long, TUSD hasn't included teachers, parents and so on, and she seems open to collaboration."

Betsy Krause, a parent of two TUSD students, said she liked Celania-Fagen but hasn't made up her mind. "She strikes me as very progressive, very experienced, and she comes with great ideas. She's a straight shooter," Krause said.

On StarNet: Read transcripts of chats with TUSD superintendent candidates at azstarnet.com/education.