Raise your hand if you really want to be a school leader
The latest e-newsletter of the Horace Mann League includes a listing of “The Major Issues that Research Shows Public-school Superintendents Face on a Daily Basis.” I’ll review the findings reported by the league, named in honor of the founder of the American public school system. To Mann, education provides “the balance wheel of social machinery,” a universal experience designed to “equalize the conditions of men.” That noble goal remains elusive today, as it was then. Perhaps leadership can provide the solution. Let’s see how that’s working.
The first area of tension is the current climate of political conflict and community polarization. There is a cacophony of voices shouting different, competing demands as ideological divides produce escalating culture wars. Even math has been accused of being “woke” when it includes things like graphs showing income disparity across demographic groups. The Horace Mann report describes the daily impact on a superintendent as requiring the management of criticism, misinformation, and politically motivated attacks while trying to maintain credibility and trust.
The next problematic part of a superintendency concerns school board relationships and governance tension. School boards can clash with school leaders, producing disagreements about roles, authority and vision. School boards can micromanage administrators, change priorities capriciously, give in to public opinion and leak confidential knowledge. These intrusions may result in the need to navigate between running the school for the benefit of students, and meeting the demands of district politics and power alignments.
The third stressor concerns staffing shortages and workforce instability. The conditions of schooling have made teaching a very unnerving profession, with teachers getting fired and disciplined over violations of some community members’ sensibilities. Teacher attrition and faculty shortages extend to the declining availability of substitute teachers. Others are bailing out as well, including bus drivers and school nurses, exacerbating problems with attendance. And administrators themselves are turning over. Superintendents now spend a good bit of time trying to retain their employees and recruit new ones as burnout ramps up and morale goes down. The impact comes in crisis staffing decisions, emergency coverage of responsibilities including teaching, and incessant attention to job satisfaction.
A fourth challenge comes in addressing student mental health and behavioral escalation, to which I’d add teacher mental health as teachers burn out with their own stressors. Among students, especially immigrants, there is heightened anxiety, trauma, aggression, disengagement, and chronic absenteeism; and there are too few adults to provide sufficient counseling. Superintendents need to address on a daily basis school safety, behavior, parental intrusions, and a crisis in recruiting school counselors.
A fifth tension has been around for some time, but now is critical: budget constraints and financial complexity. Enrollments are going down, costs are going up, federal relief is expiring, facilities are in disrepair, and state funding formulas can change with every election. The impact on leadership is constant tradeoffs between doing what is best for the school and doing what is affordable given a tight budget. These decisions inevitably produce winners and losers, amplifying the problems of morale and job satisfaction.
Next on the list is academic recovery and accountability pressure that are often in conflict. Accountability measures do not take disruptions like the pandemic lockdown into account, expecting ever-increasing test scores no matter what the circumstances. Superintendents are impacted when they try to manage the balance between test score pressures and deep, meaningful learning with school boards and activist real estate agents, among others, viewing test scores as far more important than learning concepts.
The seventh stressor is the emergence of technology, AI, and cybersecurity risks, and the challenges they create for data security and student safety on social media. Meanwhile, others demand greater digital literacies and thus more time on devices. Superintendents are tasked with dealing with legal and ethical matters, along with public opinion that is rarely harmonious.
Finally, the job produces personal isolation, loneliness and burnout that produces turnover in administration, and thus potential disruption in school continuity. Leaders need to be resilient under constant pressure, and given that it’s lonely at the top, doing so with few colleagues with whom they may commiserate.
Many superintendents are now crisis managers. The more political the job, the less it becomes concerned with quality teaching and learning. Internal school politics are difficult enough to manage. Now, national and global politics have entered the scene, with no prospect of relenting. Most administrators began their careers as classroom teachers, and teaching kids a school subject does not prepare them for running a complex, contentious institution and the community it serves. They may get advanced administrative degrees, but writing a dissertation and managing the anger at a school board meeting draw on different skills. Most administrative learning comes on the job. And the lessons come hard.
What to do? I have always avoided leadership roles. I’ve always been one of the boys in the lab, rather than an executive in the scholastic C suite, in schools or universities. As a teacher in the 1970s and 1980s, I hoped to have principals and superintendents who listened to student and faculty concerns and made an effort to address them. The more rigid and dictatorial the leader, the less functional the school.
There is a need for adults throughout the school and community to listen as well. That quality is considered part of “civic discourse.” It is designed to help students engage in disagreements respectfully. Having it modeled by grown-ups would help kids see what it looks like, and to see that it is more productive than shouting insults and characterizing adversaries as morally bankrupt. Like Rodney King in the 1990s, I wonder, “Can we get along? . . . Let’s try to work it out.” Because if we don’t, there may be few people left who aspire to become educators to begin with, and to seek leadership roles as their careers mature.
Peter Smagorinsky is a retired professor at the University of Georgia.
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