Asked about the best days he experiences as Baltimore County schools superintendent, Joe A. Hairston rejects the premise of the question.

"I try not to have highs and lows. I try to keep it this way," he says, sliding his meaty hand along an even plane.

Almost everything about Hairston fits this picture of low-key steadiness. He walks deliberately with a slightly stooped posture, the product of two recent knee replacements. He greets new acquaintances with a gentle handshake, looking pleased but never beaming like a politician. His voice rarely rises, even when he's asking stern questions of a subordinate.

Some critics have called him aloof, but he says his neutral demeanor is a major reason he has held onto the job for 10 years when, according to national statistics, the average superintendent lasts 3 1/2 years. That stability, Hairston says, has allowed him to bring rigorous Advanced Placement courses to all county schools, design high-tech classrooms that are the envy of neighbors and graduate black males at unusually high rates.

"I think he's brought extraordinary leadership at a time when we really were changing demographically," says school board President JoAnn Murphy. "The poverty rate is up, and when that happens, student performance generally plummets. But not here, and Joe's absolute insistence on high standards and rigor is a major reason."

Running the country's 26th-largest school system is no small task. With 104,000 students and 17,000 employees, it's about the same size as Charleston, S.C., Hartford, Conn., and dozens of other American cities.

During Hairston's tenure, minority students have become the majority in the system. Despite successes in rehabilitating schools such as Woodlawn Middle and Arbutus Middle, others are headed for state-supervised reorganizations because of poor test scores. Another controversy always lurks around the corner, as Hairston learned recently when teachers lashed back against the onerous requirements of the Articulated Instruction Module (AIM), a grading system created by one of his top lieutenants.

The episode revived old criticisms that Hairston keeps his counsel too close on major decisions.

"The system is pretty good, but I just imagine how much better it could have been if he had listened more and relied more on the people around him," says former board member John Hayden, one of three who voted against renewing Hairston's contract in 2008.

Hayden says he became troubled by Hairston's management style early in his tenure, when the superintendent submitted a thick reorganization plan to board members less than an hour before asking them to vote on it.

"I read pretty good, but the only thing I was competent to do with that thing was weigh it," says Hayden, an attorney at Whiteford, Taylor & Preston LLP. "That made me nervous about him right out of the gate."

Hairston forged a strong early relationship with teachers but has lost their trust with poor communication during situations such as the AIM controversy, says Cheryl Bost, president of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County.

"We really have not had the collaboration we once had," she says. "It has become very frustrating. Once you lose that trust, it's hard to get back."

The superintendent does not apologize for his approach, saying he makes tough decisions through personal reflection. "I'm not someone who's going to call for advice all the time," he says.

Dealing with changeHairston, 62, says he does not like to toot his own horn, but he speaks with great pride about the job he has done leading Baltimore County. He says his ability to stay ahead of educational trends and avoid nasty confrontations makes him the perfect superintendent for a complex county that is changing, although reluctantly.

Asked if he'd want to trade places with his Baltimore City counterpart, Andrés Alonso, he says, "What I did was much more difficult. They wanted me to move the school system forward, but they didn't want any controversy. That requires a different skill set."

School board leaders share Hairston's view of his record. "He's one of the top superintendents in the country," says Vice President Ed Parker, who served as principal at Sollers Point Technical High School and praises Hairston's focus on data-driven accountability and technology in the classroom.

Parker says the county has been lucky to keep Hairston, who contemplated leaving to run the system in his hometown of Virginia Beach in 2005. "The research shows that student success correlates with stability in leadership," Parker says. "Certainly, that has been the case here."

Other county leaders offer more mixed appraisals of the longtime superintendent.

"Sometimes he hits the nail on the head and sometimes he's off base," says state Sen. James Brochin, who peppered Hairston with tough questions in a Feb. 18 hearing about the AIM controversy. "What I like about him is that when he's off base, he'll listen and change. Joe doesn't dig his heels in."

Brochin says he has brought many touchy issues to Hairston over the years and watched the superintendent form lasting relationships with the concerned parties. He adds that the system is clearly better than it was before Hairston arrived.

"I don't think any of his detractors could say otherwise," Brochin says. "It's one of the premier systems in the country, and he's the one steering the ship."

The talk of national renown is not hyperbole, according to superintendents from other parts of the country, who say Hairston is widely respected for his emphasis on technology and on reaching out to struggling students.

"Coast to coast, people know Joe Hairston and look at him as a representation of a successful educational model," says Steve Joel, superintendent of Nebraska's Grand Island system. "He has influenced me in ways that he'll probably never know. I'm taking copious notes whenever I hear him talk. You know you're listening to someone who's been through the wars."

Learning from the NavyHairston grew up as the eldest of three children in a Navy family. His father, a ship's boatswain, sailed in the invasion of Normandy and earned a Purple Heart after shrapnel riddled his body. After World War II, he remained in the service, in part because he couldn't accept the limitations that segregation would place on him at home.

Hairston saw the boiling frustration in his father and vowed never to be consumed by similar emotions, part of the reason he seeks an even keel to this day. He says the peripatetic Navy life shaped him in other ways that would prove essential to his career. He learned to get along with people as a stranger in new situations and to focus on results rather than personal comfort.

"In that environment, you understand that the mission is everything," he says. "You do what you have to do to get the job done. Feelings have nothing to do with it."

When his father succumbed to a spinal infection caused by his wounds at age 47, Hairston, then in high school, became the man of the house. He says he has been comfortable accepting responsibility and making decisions ever since.

In college, he played tackle for powerful Maryland State (now the University of Maryland Eastern Shore). In those days, before many Southern schools recruited black players, future NFL stars filled the rosters at historically black universities such as Maryland State and Morgan State. Hairston played on the same line as future All-Pro Art Shell but carved enough of a niche for himself that he's a member of the UMES athletic Hall of Fame.

Upon graduation in 1969, Hairston faced a tantalizing choice: the Navy's officer candidate school, a programming job at IBM or a tryout with the Washington Redskins. As most young men probably would, he chose football. But he didn't make the team.

He remembers walking out of training camp on a lovely sunny afternoon and seeing a fellow prospect from Texas sitting dejectedly on his suitcase. "Why are you so upset?" Hairston remembers asking. "You have a degree, don't you?"

"He looked at me like I was from Mars," Hairston says. "He had never graduated. At that moment, I looked up to the sky and said, 'Thank you,' because I knew I would be fine."

With that lesson on the value of education in mind, Hairston became a physical-education teacher in Prince George's County and swiftly moved from there to the administrative ranks. He was among the first wave of black leaders rising at integrated schools. He learned a valuable lesson while teaching in a heavily Italian neighborhood.

"This is what I came to understand about parents: As long as you do something good for their child, they will support you," he says.

Nevertheless, he had few visions of leading a school system.

"I didn't think you could do that," he says, alluding to a glass ceiling lingering from segregation. "Not in those days."

As a principal, he became known for using corporate models to improve struggling schools. He arrived with core sets of goals and principles, and made sure every school activity was geared toward his objectives. He insisted on numerical measures to chart progress. Such focus on accountability has become the prevailing trend in American education, but Hairston says his approach created plenty of resistance in the early days.

"People used to look at me like I was crazy," he says.

'Gone With the Wind' countryAfter 27 years in Prince George's County, Hairston left to become a superintendent in suburban Atlanta in 1995. He was the first black school leader in a county known as the fictional setting for "Gone With the Wind." After five contentious years in which principals and teachers bristled at his accountability measures, Hairston was ousted by a 5-4 school board vote.

So he was used to being a racial pioneer and an outsider when he became Baltimore County's first black superintendent in 2000. The board gave him a tricky mission - modernize the schools but do so without stirring up a lot of fuss.

He remembers people approaching him in public and asking pointedly, "Why are you here?"

Hairston created his first stir with the staff reorganization that raised concerns for Hayden and others. Shortly after, he introduced his Blueprint for Progress, which has become a bible for his administration. When his subordinates present plans at internal meetings, they often refer to key phrases from the document.

"All means all" is a favorite, summing up Hairston's belief that struggling schools will improve only if students are held to the same rigorous standards as those in thriving schools. It's the reason why he has pushed to have at least 12 AP courses offered in every county high school.

Skeptics might view such phrases as empty generalities, but Hairston supporters say he has an unusual ability to keep a sprawling system focused on core goals.

"The key is the belief system. What do we stand for?" says Brian Scriven, the principal at Woodlawn High, which is under state-mandated alternative governance. "At every step, the message and vision are clearly articulated. He gives us the road map, and as principals, all we have to do is work the plan."

Before taking his current job, Scriven guided Woodlawn Middle School through the staff and curriculum overhauls that got it off alternative governance. He required teachers to join "action teams" focused on improving curriculum, student safety and professional development. He instituted common planning time so they could share best practices. He asked them to use data analysis to dig into the problems of struggling students.

Through it all, Scriven used Hairston's leadership as a model.

"Dr. Hairston always talks about the quiet confidence, and he exudes it," Scriven says. "He's very direct. He has that laserlike focus on the problem at hand."

Though test scores have lagged at some heavily African-American schools, Hairston's attention on closing achievement gaps has never waned, says Ella White Campbell, a Randallstown community activist. She praises him for using incentives to draw excellent teachers and principals to struggling schools. Campbell recalls one instance when Hairston responded to community outcry by removing a weak principal and allowed her to participate in interviews for the administrator's replacement.

"He is excellent at getting principals to give the best they can," she says. "I consider him a very profound individual."

Hairston says he could not have done the job for so long without support from the county's appointed school board. He opposes a recent movement to make the board partly an elected one, because he says the introduction of politics would create a more volatile atmosphere at the top of the system.

But some say Hairston has managed the board too effectively and that members don't provide an adequate check to his power.

"I think the biggest criticism might be that he has the board wrapped around his thumb," says Brochin. "Which isn't a criticism of him. He's doing his job. They need to understand that they have a role in overseeing what he does and push back sometimes."

Brochin says he saw that lack of checks and balances in the recent AIM controversy, which erupted over winter break.

The directive to implement the grading system arrived in a superintendent's bulletin distributed just before Christmas. Hairston had been on leave since Nov. 12 because of his knee replacements and says he was unaware of his subordinates' decision to move forward with AIM (a spokesman said at the time that Hairston was kept abreast of the move).

He says that as soon as he returned to work in early January, he responded to teacher outrage by halting implementation of the grading system and ordering a task force to study AIM further. He can't understand why anyone is still talking about the controversy.

"In the context of everything we've done in 10 years, it was that in terms of importance," he says, pointing disdainfully at a bread crumb.

Hairston, whose wife teaches social studies at Owings Mills High, says union leaders stirred contention over AIM as part of their overall quest to fight accountability measures for individual teachers. "It could've been handled fairly easily," he says. "But you had a group of caustic resisters who wanted to manufacture a crisis. People wanted it to happen that way."

Bost says teachers were simply opposing a plan that would have added a lot of work without producing clear benefits for students. She does not believe Hairston was uninvolved with the decision to move forward with AIM and says her members fear the grading system could return under a different guise.

Murphy says, "We wasted a lot of time on something that shouldn't have caused this kind of upheaval."

Though she was satisfied with Hairston's solution, the board president says, "There was a vacuum in leadership while he was gone, and that's something that can't happen again."

'She remembered me'Hairston sounds exhausted when discussing AIM but peps up whenever discussion turns back to children. On a recent morning, he dropped by Pinewood Elementary in Timonium for a surprise visit and tucked his massive frame into a bitty chair so he could check on the progress of second-grader Angelina Gioffreda, whom he met two years ago. He listened patiently as she explained how she kept her binder organized. "She remembered me," he said afterward with delight. "Isn't that something?"

He talked with another girl who had recently arrived from Turkey and assured her that he had been much shyer than she when he moved around as a military brat.

Next, he headed to an assembly of student government leaders from around the county, who peppered him with questions about technology in classrooms, the sequencing of history courses and condoms in the nurse's office.

He seemed thrilled that some of the sharp questions came from Woodlawn High students. "That's the first time I've heard them be that eloquent," he said. "They have a lot more confidence in themselves."

"Being around positive people just fires you up, doesn't it?" he said after leaving the assembly.

He'd need the energy for an afternoon of helping his administrators sharpen their presentations for a coming board meeting. Hairston seemed particularly concerned that state-ordered reorganization plans for several schools contained few specifics beyond planned staff overhauls. "I'm still trying to look for that hook," he said sternly.

Hairston, who says he's unlikely to seek another term when his contract is up in two years, talks often about the difficulties of a superintendent's life - the weeks spent negotiating with adults instead of thinking about children, the decisions that will invite blame no matter what, the schedule that has him at legislative hearings early and awards banquets late. He regards himself as the calm eye at the center of a perpetual storm.

The only days of genuine calm, he says, are the last ones before major holidays and summer vacation. He asks his transportation coordinator to call him at the end of such days to let him know that the last bus has made its rounds safely.

"That kind of serenity is priceless," he says. "I know that we've done our job."

Joe Hairston Age: 62

Job: Baltimore County schools superintendent since 2000

Hometown: Virginia Beach, Va.

Salary: $301,791

Family: Married to Lillian, a social studies teacher at Owings Mills High School, and has two grown sons

Accomplishments: Introduced Blueprint for Progress that has guided system for nearly a decade, created corporate partnership to build "virtual" classroom at Chesapeake High, increased AP course offerings to an average of 16 per high school, helped guide Woodlawn Middle School off state-monitored improvement after almost eight years.

Fun fact: Played on offensive line at Maryland State with future Hall-of-Famer Art Shell and tried out for the Washington Redskins in 1969