Top aides selected in Philadelphia district

Incoming Philadelphia schools chief Arlene Ackerman has named two executives to her team. Michael Masch will receive a $220,000 salary as the district's chief business officer. He is the state's budget secretary and a former member of the Philadelphia School Reform Commission. Tomas Hanna is the new chief of school operations. He has been a teacher, principal and vice president for human resources in Philadelphia, and is returning from Providence, R.I., where he was a deputy superintendent.
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SIDEBAR: The Philadelphia School District has adopted a $2.3 billion budget with few painful cuts, but $5.9 million will have to be eliminated in the future. The spending plan represents about a $109 million, or 5 percent, increase in spending over the current $2.19 billion budget.
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EARLIER: The Philadelphia School District has made public the contract of its incoming chief executive officer, Arlene Ackerman. Ackerman, who officially begins work on June 1, has a contract to run the 167,000-student district for five years; in the first year, her compensation package is worth $494,000, according to the nine-page contract.
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FROM MARCH 2008: The Philadelphia School Reform Commission has formally approved the hiring of Arlene Ackerman, a former San Francisco superintendent, as the district's chief executive officer. With an annual base salary of $325,000, Ackerman, 61, will be paid $50,000 more than former schools chief Paul Vallas.
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EARLIER: Arlene Ackerman, named the new school district CEO in Philadelphia, says she plans to downsize the district's central office and send more resources to schools. She wants to give schools more autonomy in improving student achievement and raise the accountability for doing so.
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Arlene Ackerman, 61, a former San Francisco schools superintendent, is expected to be named the next schools chief in Philadelphia. Ackerman also once ran Washington, D.C., public schools and served as a deputy superintendent in Seattle.
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From January: Cassandra W. Jones, the Philadelphia School District's interim chief academic officer, has applied for the district CEO job, the first clear sign that the search process has extended beyond the three finalists who were interviewed last week. Two finalists who interviewed last week remain in the running. They are Arlene Ackerman, a former schools superintendent in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, and Leroy D. Nunery 2d, a former executive at Edison Schools Inc. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

A former executive at the for-profit Edison Schools Inc. is one of three finalists for the top job in the Philadelphia School District, sources say. Leroy D. Nunery II previously oversaw Edison's New York City-based charter school division. The other finalists are Arlene Ackerman, 61, a former schools superintendent in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, and Kent McGuire, 52, dean of the College of Education at Temple University in Philadelphia. (Philadelphia Inquirer)