Elizabeth Celania-Fagen, TUSD Superintendent

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If people in the Tucson Unified School District are waiting for new Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen to pick up a torch, lay out a definitive path and say "Follow me, this is the only way!" it appears they'll be waiting a long time — and that's a good thing.

Fagen's approach to transforming the city's largest district is much more engaging and bestows responsibility on parents, teachers and community members. She seems invested in innovation as a means to an end, not just as a buzzword.

She told the Star's editorial board Monday that she has a collaborative style that will allow people to rise to the occasion and reach goals.

She appears to have faith that they will, but also seems ready to deal with the situation if they don't.

We've said it before, but it remains a core belief of ours: The caliber of our educational system has a direct effect on our economy, our crime rate, our livability and our ability to solve shared problems such as transportation and growth.

If Tucson is to succeed as a community, TUSD must succeed. The school district is too big a part of our collective welfare to be allowed to fail.

This is why it's so crucial for Fagen, and TUSD, to flourish.

It's tempting to want a person in a position of power to tell us, "This is what you need to do to fix all of your problems. If you just do this one thing, it will all be better." But that's not true leadership for the long term.

Conversely, Fagen's approach is to break big ideas down by asking, for example: What is the biggest factor in student classroom achievement?

If it's the classroom teacher, then what makes a classroom teacher successful? How can a school principal assist that teacher to do his or her best job possible? And how does that principal's supervisor help the principal do that? And how does the superintendent help that individual supervisor to make sure that happens?

Fagen's vision of TUSD as the district of first choice for Tucson families is full of hope. She foresees TUSD schools deciding for themselves what kind of school they want to be — specializing in Montessori education, for example, or honors classes or maybe the arts — and then developing that kind of school from the inside out.

What follows is more choices, more outreach to parents, more investment from employees and families.

The biggest roadblock — other than people's potential unwillingness to change — is that over the past few years public education has become too focused on compliance with state and federal rules, paperwork, standardized tests, school labels and formulas that must be met.

It's a nationwide phenomenon, but in Arizona we know it through the AIMS tests, No Child Left Behind and Arizona Learns.

Under this compliance-oriented environment, educators are given all of the responsibility of making sure kids pass the test, reach the benchmark, jump through the hoop — but aren't given the responsibility of figuring out how to get there.

Fagen's approach is not to discard these measures, but to set out the goals and give schools and educators space to come up with what works for the kids in their schools. It's an awesome responsibility, and not everyone will be interested in or up to the challenge.

Fagen must be unafraid, when the time comes, to move those people to another school that's a better fit or out of the district.

Her method is to start with the desired results and work back from there. It's an intriguing approach that will take much more investment, creativity, trust, patience and professionalism from the people of TUSD than waiting for marching orders from the new boss.