The state Board of Education is embarking on a search to fulfill its most important duty: selecting a new public schools superintendant.

The person chosen will have to be shown capable of remaking the large and often unwieldy Department of Education into an agency more responsive to individual school needs, one in which the principals have been empowered to make key decisions on their campuses.

This requires fundamental changes. For the principals, power should come with responsibility. Principals, currently under union protection, should relinquish that shield and accept the accountability that being a true manager requires.

At the superintendent’s level, what’s needed is a skilled administrator, one who can start a demanding job without second- guessing. For this reason, although an unfortunate outcome, it was the right decision for Darrel Galera, a well-known candidate for the post, to withdraw his name from consideration.

Galera is a former principal at Moanalua High School and a leading advocate for department reform. He could have brought a front-line perspective to the top administrative job, which could have helped to propel the move away from top-down administration that he favored and that does have merit.

However, he also put himself in an untenable position, one that any candidate for this job should have anticipated and avoided.

Galera, appointed to the BOE in October by Gov. David Ige, helmed the development of the governor’s “blueprint” for educational reform.

But the chief conflict arose because Galera worked with other board members to devise the search process for hiring the successor to Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi, who Galera has long criticized and whose contract has not been renewed.

When Galera then resigned his board post and threw his hat in the ring for the superintendent’s job, the appearance that he had the inside track was unavoidable.

The Harold K.L. Castle Foundation withheld its $50,000 grant funding the superintendent search, asserting a lack of confidence that the process could be even-handed. The BOE suspended the search. Galera stepped away as a job applicant, and immediately the search resumed.

It’s distressing that a private foundation with a mere $50,000 could have such an outsized influence on a process that should be run independently by the school board.

This raises the issue of the job description for the next superintendent. What’s surprising is that the criteria provide the outline of a candidate who sounds a lot like Matayoshi. For example, here’s one element:

“Minimum of five years in progressively increasing leadership roles in public or business administration working with multi-year strategic planning and budgeting. At least five years shall have been in an executive capacity leading a diverse senior team in a large multigeographic organization, and at least three shall have been in an educational environment.”

Matayoshi, who came to the job in 2010 from the business world, could be faulted for lacking experience in the classroom setting at the outset. Surely her experience shepherding the DOE through a challenging period of federal mandates has overcome that deficit. She led a team achieving improvements in student learning that have been durable.

As recently as September, the BOE gave Matayoshi an “exceeds expectations” evaluation, capping a series of positive annual reports. Matayoshi may be associated with a more structured era of educational administration, but given her stellar reviews, she should consider applying for the post herself, making the case that she could make the change the BOE seeks.

Whoever the next superintendent is, the selection must entail a fair, deliberative process. Only that will yield the candidate who has both a clear vision of needed change, and the administrative skill to deliver it.