PITTSBURGH (AP) – When the city school board hired a former Massachusetts legislator to lead the district, it joined a growing group of urban districts that have hired nontraditional superintendents.

About a dozen school districts around the nation – including those in Philadelphia, New York City and Baltimore – have hired superintendents with backgrounds in business, the military or public policy, rather than strictly education.

Many of those districts have been happy with their decisions, seeing higher test scores and better community participation, and that’s encouraged other districts to follow their lead, said Henry Duvall, a spokesman for the Council of Great City Schools in Washington, D.C.

In the case of Pittsburgh’s school district, the school board last week approved the hiring of Mark Roosevelt, who’s never led a school district or even a school.

Roosevelt, 49, is the former director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. He has never worked as a superintendent or held a teaching position but completed a 10-month training program for urban superintendents run by the Broad Foundation in Los Angeles.

Nontraditional superintendents often succeed because of their lack of experience in the education system, said Tim Quinn, director of the Broad Foundation’s program – the Broad Urban Superintendents Academy.

“From their perspective, there isn’t anything that can’t be done, and they see everything from a fresh set of eyes,” Quinn said. “They often say, This doesn’t make any sense – why would we continue doing all these things that don’t work? We need to change strategy.”‘

One of the first successful nontraditional superintendents was retired Army major general John Stanford, who was hired by the Seattle school district in July 1995.

Stanford proposed tougher academic standards, ended social promotion and started a “reading offensive” that encouraged the community to donate thousands of books to schools.

The district’s test scores rose and continued to do so after Stanford’s death from leukemia in November 1998.

“If you talk to people today, they just genuflect when they hear his name,” Quinn said.

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley in 1995 appointed Paul Vallas, the city’s former budget director, to lead the city’s district of 400,000 students.

Vallas created a five-year balanced budget plan, raised academic standards, expanded after-school programs and built dozens of new schools. Math and reading scores rose, but leveled off near the end of Vallas’ tenure, which ended in 1999.

He is now the chief executive officer of the School District of Philadelphia, where he has made reforms that helped boost the number of schools meeting state math and reading standards from 22 schools to 160 schools last year.

“You don’t have three years of that level of growth without doing something right,” he said.