It's no secret to teachers and principals that a new superintendent who seeks their support must speak the truth about their schools. This would-be leader must not only assess the district's current performance honestly and fairly, but also wisely judge the potential for school improvement and the pace at which progress can realistically be made. Leadership depends on trust, and trust is grounded in a shared understanding about what is working and what isn't, how practice might be improved, and what steady progress will likely entail. Credibility must be earned anew by each superintendent.
Although superintendents hold the position of greatest administrative authority in a district, they can't check each school every day to see that their reforms are being enacted. No superintendent can bring about change simply by mandate. The real power to effect change (or to resist change) resides not in the superintendent, but in the teachers who work in the classroom and the principals who hire them. Superintendents depend on them to enact the changes they propose; meanwhile, teachers and principals wait to pledge their support for those changes until they believe that the superintendent deserves it.
But what is it that teachers and principals look for, and how do superintendents convince their constituents that they are worthy leaders? Several years ago, I set out to understand the superintendent's leadership—what it is and how it works.
A Survey of Superintendents
Working with a survey team, I selected 12 newly appointed superintendents in four states in the Northeast. We conducted 300 interviews with school board members, central office administrators, principals, and teachers, spending about two years in each district. We wanted to know how superintendents lead and how others respond to their initiatives. We sought to understand the interactive nature of leadership within a school system and, thereby, to trace leadership as it moved in many directions within the district.
The sample districts included five urban centers, five inner-ring suburbs, and two working-class towns. Nine superintendents were men and three, women. Two were of minority ethnic heritage; eight were appointed from outside their districts. Four were elevated from within.
All these superintendents set out first to assess their new district's effectiveness. How successfully are children served? How well do students perform? Although some districts succeed with most students, many districts fall short—some far short—of what they could and should achieve; all could achieve more. Eventually, each superintendent would decide how these assessments might inform and promote change.
But there are many versions of the truth about a district's performance, and any district has both triumphs and failures, certainties and doubts. Therefore, the superintendent, considering how to promote improvement, must decide whether to focus on the failures or stress the successes. The first approach may draw public outrage and mobilize reformers to demand rapid improvements. "Telling it like it is" might seem to be what's needed in a poorly performing district; still, that approach can and often does foster resentment and resistance among those whose practice is most in need of change, as well as among those who have been working double time to make things better.
For example, one teacher complained that her new superintendent had reproached the teachers because the test scores of Hispanic and African-American students were considerably lower than those of white students: "He's absolutely right," she said, "but what he doesn't know is that in the last three years we made very significant progress closing that gap. The staff goes crazy. I said to him: 'Well, don't you think you should have asked somebody before you jumped out there?' He said: 'Well, I didn't assign blame to anybody.' I said: 'You don't have to. The implication is that we're not doing our job.'" Another teacher commented: "It's like the city did nothing right until he arrived."
Alternatively, in a district where students perform well and teachers are committed to continuous improvement, a superintendent may see fit to accentuate the positive. As one teacher in an exemplary suburban district explained, "When you have someone telling you, 'You're okay,' you want to do even better." But if the schools are mediocre, applause and encouragement may serve only to reinforce the things that make them mediocre. Moreover, serious educators easily see through unrealistic, rosy assessments and they abandon superintendents who pose as leaders yet neglect real problems.
The superintendents we studied felt pressured to take a strong public stand about the quality of education in the district. In some cases, this meant rendering sweeping judgments about the sorry state of affairs in the schools. In others, it meant offering only praise, extolling the schools, and not confronting teachers and principals with their shortcomings.
Such either-or assessments ultimately fail to build credibility and trust. In the first instance, they provoke resentment and resistance; in the second, they breed complacency. Neither prepares the way for leadership.
Several superintendents, fortunately, did not fall into the either-or trap. Rather, by fashioning a blended approach, they systematically distinguished what worked and was worth promoting from what was failing and had to be revised or eliminated. The experiences of two of these superintendents—one in a failing and poor urban district, the other in a successful and affluent suburban district—illustrate how these individuals used a blended approach in promoting quality education in their districts.
Confronting Chaos
Union School District had gone through five superintendents in three years and was just emerging from receivership when the board started its search for yet another leader. The district struggled to serve its 28,000 students, most of whom were poor and many of whom were recent immigrants.
The board hired Clara Underwood, an African-American woman with considerable teaching and administrative experience, as a superintendent who could defuse hostilities and, as one respondent put it, "bring quiet to this district in the midst of a storm." But the challenge was great. "Union was torn apart," a principal explained. "There was no direction. The principals didn't listen to anybody; they went their merry way." Another principal summed it up this way: "She inherited a cesspool."
Underwood saw right away that certain of the district's practices were destructive and unacceptable. She took action. She eliminated separate classrooms for bilingual students in junior high school because they totally segregated students from their English-speaking peers. She squelched a widely used program called "test sophistication," in which students practiced multiple-choice tests day after day. She insisted that principals meet regularly. A teacher recalled: "Before she came here, we had 22 fiefdoms. Every school did its own thing. Every principal did his or her own thing." Such autonomy might have been acceptable to Underwood if the schools were successful—but they were not. "Children were not learning. Teachers were not teaching. And the principals were busy saying, 'I run a good school. I run a tight ship.' But the kids weren't learning."
Respondents did not feel demoralized by Underwood's firm, swift response, for they believed that their new superintendent was well informed and careful to distinguish the good from the bad. Teams of five supervisors visited one school per day, observing as many as 45 teachers in each school. "We noted the curriculum, the performance of our principals, the tone, the climate, homework policy, suspensions, and absenteeism," one supervisor explained, "and sought to find out why certain schools in our district were working well and others were not."
Underwood fed this information back to the principals, parents, and teachers, noting the strengths and the shortcomings. She voiced strong convictions and acted decisively to reprimand those who were not doing their jobs, while encouraging teachers and principals who were trying to do better. Respondents in Union knew that their schools had serious problems, and were willing to face those problems in part because Underwood was careful not to level blanket criticism. Rather, she identified those who were failing and closely monitored their performance. She gained a reputation as a tough superintendent who would write up teachers and principals for not getting results. But she was also generous with praise and resources for those who showed initiative and worked hard.
"Clara Underwood has a very unique ability to make people feel confident, unthreatened," said one teacher. "She gives off a vibrancy, getting people to want to do things. It's very difficult, sometimes, with the problems we face, to just keep on going day after day." A principal concurred: "The teachers really feel they are contributing a lot to what's happening in the district to improve education. She encouraged us, sometimes, when we were ready to give up. We are not by any means out of the woods, but I think we have come a long way."
Her frank honesty and compassion earned Underwood credibility and trust in the district. "She came in and was faced with some decisions, and she handled them immediately," said a teacher. "People realized that she was fair-handed and didn't sit on any hidden agendas. And so they decided, 'I'll lay it on the line,' and now there are very few people resisting—'No, no, no'—and there are more people saying, 'How can I get involved? How can I get on the bandwagon?'" For those in Union who had believed that high expectations and goodwill were incompatible, or that accountability and innovation were at odds, Clara Underwood demonstrated otherwise.
Challenging Complacency
Oakville School District, the suburban district where Mike Ogden became superintendent, contrasted starkly with Union. The community was prosperous, stable, and predominantly white. The schools enjoyed wide public support and were said to be among the best in the country. Their students' high test scores were proof of the schools' success.
And unlike Union, where a parade of Clara Underwood's predecessors had come and gone in rapid succession, the prior superintendent in Oakville had a long tenure and was much beloved. "The Oakville board was interested, number one, in continuing the kind of leadership they had," one administrator recalled. "They were very happy with that. At most, the board might have sought evolution—they certainly weren't seeking change." Several respondents recalled that they had hired in Ogden, a white administrator from a nearby district, a "clone" of the prior superintendent.
Ogden found the district to be a bit self-satisfied. He visited classes and talked with teachers. Oakville was calm, unlike Union; Ogden faced not chaos but complacency. When he reported back to the board after six months, he endorsed what was good. "He affirmed what was going on here," a principal recalled. "He was impressed, and it wasn't an act." But some things in Oakville didn't impress him, for instance, a system of tracking and departmentalization in the elementary schools. Research and his own experience had convinced him that tracking stigmatized children, limiting their chances to learn, and that academic departmentalization in the early grades led teachers to focus more on subject matter than on children. He believed that some students were succeeding at the expense of others, and he said so. He asked the district to review its current structures for teaching.
People in Oakville were not accustomed to criticism of their schools. One teacher who had believed in tracking children recounted her ongoing discussions with her new superintendent: "Mr. Ogden felt very differently than I did. Over the course of the year, he shared information with us, and we have taken ownership of a new idea. He kept telling the board that tracking sometimes works to the opposite effect of what you want, and keeps children behind." At first, she wasn't persuaded, but she kept an open mind. "As I talked to parents, and watched things that happened in school, you know what? I started to take a new look." Eventually, she changed her mind. "If we expect a little more from children," she told Ogden, "maybe we'll get a little more from children." She credited Ogden with approaching the staff "in a very diplomatic way—a way of sharing knowledge and sharing the idea with us—so that I finally changed to his way of thinking."
Ogden set out to provide leadership for the teachers and principals of Oakville as they changed their practices. But some teachers found the prospect of change to be unsettling; they saw change more as a threat than as an opportunity. In support, Ogden had them visit other schools where they could observe teaching in heterogeneous classes, and he sponsored workshops on interdisciplinary teaching. He helped principals figure out how to change the organization of their schools to accommodate untracked, interdisciplinary teaching.
A year and a half after Ogden's arrival, all of Oakville's elementary classes were heterogeneous, and elementary academic departments were being phased out. A cluster of middle school teachers had begun to team-teach, and interdisciplinary ventures were emerging at the high school.
"We're not totally there, but we're definitely on our way," said a teacher who enthusiastically supported the changes all along, echoing her counterpart in Union. In the two radically different school districts, there was potential for positive change.
Ogden himself commented reflectively: "I find myself navigating between those goals and dreams 45and hopes that you have for a school system, and dealing with the limits and realities that are there."
The Teaching Mission of the Superintendency
Rather than issuing wholesale judgments about their respective districts, Clara Underwood and Mike Ogden carefully distinguished success from failure, good work from bad. The communities may have had certain expectations—condemnation in Union, commendation in Oakville—but they accepted these blended assessments, which were informed by observations in schools and classrooms.
Thus, these two new superintendents established credibility as educational leaders. Both led by encouraging teachers and principals to look closely at their practice, to consider new ways of working, to experiment with unfamiliar approaches, and to make commitments together for the sake of students. Theirs was a teaching mission, and they educated by example. One Oakville teacher said of Ogden: "He's a teacher's teacher."
These superintendents modeled the kind of leadership they hoped to inspire in others. They listened attentively, asked good questions, and explained how they interpreted what they saw and heard. And in time, others assumed leadership as well. "Principals are talking with principals and sharing their knowledge and their expertise," said a Union teacher, "and a lot of people have overcome a feeling that they need to keep their successes to themselves. More people see now that they can benefit from sharing what they have done."
At its best, leadership is a collaborative experience of teaching and learning, and a superintendent who reveals all sides of the truth prepares the way for such leadership.
