Rethinking the Focus on District Leadership

Last week, the Broad Foundation announced the recipients of its highly anticipated annual award. For the first time, the million dollar prize was divided between two districts: Gwinnett County, Georgia and Orange County, Florida. As has been the case with past Broad Award decisions, the 2014 process elicited mixed reactions. Along with expected and perennial questions about the selection committee’s methodology, larger policy discussions about the role of district level leadership have emerged from the announcement of these and past award winners. A recent paper authored by Brookings’ Matt Chingos, Grover Whitehurst and Katharine Lindquist, “School Superintendents: Vital or Irrelevant?,”questions the degree to which superintendents can realistically be expected to bring about substantive change at the district level – a method of reform in which the Broad Foundation has invested significant time and funding.   

One of the most biting critiques of the Broad Foundation’s annual prize came last year from Bellwether Education Partners’ Andy Smarick, in which he called for an outright end to the competition. He and others took particular issue with the prize selection committee’s emphasis on improvement and their disregard for overall achievement when choosing Houston as the 2013 winner. He then went on to declare more generally that urban school districts are ineffective drivers of innovation. This year, Smarick and others have rejoined the chorus of Broad Prize commentators. The Foundation’s decision to accept just two finalists and to then split the award between them spawned confusion and dissent. Broad’s justification – that the applicant pool was underwhelming – only fanned the flames. If so few urban districts have shown overall improvement, might critics be right that these districts and their leaders are on the sidelines of meaningful progress or in some cases, even obstructing it?

When discussing district-level change, the blame or praise often falls on superintendents. The Broad Foundation’s recent profiles of the winning districts perpetuated this paradigm by primarily attributing the improvement to strong leadership. However, according to the authors of “School Superintendents: Vital or Irrelevant?” superintendent turnover and level of experience has been linked with only very marginal changes in student achievement, indicating that perhaps we should not look to superintendents to be strong bearers of district change. Compared to teachers, principals, and a host of other factors, these superintendent characteristics were associated with less than one-third of one percent of the variation in district-wide student achievement in the two states studied. These findings are not totally unsurprising given the lack of direct involvement that a superintendent has in the classroom. Nonetheless, they may reinforce the claims offered by critics like Smarick that investing in urban districts and their leaders constitutes a waste of time and money. On the other hand – and according to the underlying premise of the Broad Center’s Superintendent Academy– this lack of impact may signal a need for more investment in training strong district leaders. Either way, these findings do suggest that superintendents may not be the obstructionists that some believe them to be; at present, they apparently have little direct effect on student achievement– positive or negative.

In addition to evaluating the specific impact of superintendents, the authors of the Brookings’ paper tease out the overall effect of a district’s characteristics on student achievement (controlling for major demographic differences). While the impact of district-level factors such as the involvement of parent groups and the attitude of the school board remains quite small relative to variables like the effect of teachers – 1.7 percent versus 4 percent – the authors find that the district in which a student is enrolled has an impact more than five times greater than the superintendent who leads it. This observation is somewhat surprising since the impact of the superintendent and district are presumably closely linked. At the same time, however – and as the Brookings authors acknowledge in their findings – this interconnectedness could also explain why superintendents have not had a significant role in improving student outcomes. A superintendent who has been hired by a school board may reflect preexisting district effects for the same reasons that a company’s board hires a CEO who aligns with its values and culture. Conversely a superintendent may also be attracted to a district that reflects his or her vision.

Reformers should first decide and clarify what they believe superintendents’ role should be. Secondly, they must evaluate if this role is compatible with what we now know about the relatively small but complicated impact of district leadership on student outcomes. Aside from the institutional limitations that reformers will need to first tackle, are superintendents to be revolutionary pioneers of change, effective managers, neither or both? This decision will require radically different skillsets. School districts and the leaders who are at their helm have been asked to navigate a highly political system that shackles them to the whims of school boards. Recognizing that superintendents may not be the most effective vehicles of change in a complex system, if they can at least be effective managers, the authors of the Brookings’ paper concede that this could have unexamined positive effects on factors like teacher attrition. The Broad Superintendent Academy model, which trains successful private sector and non-profit CEOs to manage school districts, could then be a viable method of preparation. But the Foundation’s larger mission to improve student outcomes by rewarding innovation at the district level with its prominent annual prize may need rethinking. Trying to tackle the difficult institutional obstacles that rebuff district level progress may prove more fruitful.

In a system that offers only symbolic power but asks for extraordinary results, school reformers should adjust their view of what superintendents can realistically accomplish. The 2014 Broad Prize disappointment and Brookings’ research on superintendents' impact could mark a turning point in the way that limited resources are invested.