Should superintendents be elected?

A troubling truism haunts the American education policy arena. Almost as sure as the sun rises and sets, each year superintendents will step down from their posts. If the superintendent is in an urban district, they will have spent no more than three years on the job. District superintendent turnover is a national crisis that becomes more and more normalized with each new administrator entering and exiting the turnstile. When superintendents leave, it is often politics — not performance — that drives the rapid departures.

I argue for a relatively simple solution to this problem. School districts should elect their superintendents. Most school districts select the superintendent through their school board. The board usually has sole authority over the hiring and firing of the superintendent. In large districts, the hiring process tends to be hyper-professionalized. School boards often recruit large consulting firms to lead national searches, where they recruit candidates from across the U.S. Because of this process, we often see large districts headed by superintendents with impeccable résumés but no roots in their communities. Parents, community members, and even school boards at times will quickly turn on high-profile outsiders. Politics swallows them whole.

If the politics are the problem, making the superintendency even more political by publicly electing them seems counterintuitive. After all, do we really want our superintendents behaving like politicians? While we may answer no to that question, the politics of education already have crashed the superintendency party. There is no keeping the politics out.

A failed history of keeping politics out

If the idea of elected superintendents sounds outrageous, look at how the superintendency began. In the early days of public schooling, school committees (a rough equivalent to today’s school boards) selected administrators to oversee the day-to-day operations of schools, after struggling to manage it themselves. They brought in local chief operators who had no other task but to manage district accounting and ensure schools were moving forward and teachers were implementing the designated curriculum. With education being a hyper-local affair, there were few of the political issues we see today.

Heading into the early 20th century, superintendents managed local schools that were still largely restricted to white and wealthy families (especially in the U.S. South). School boards began using their power to hire and fire teachers as a patronage system to satisfy political alliances. The Progressive Movement in the 1920s worked to remove politics from education (and other local office holdings), which elevated the role of the superintendent. By the 1960s, public schooling was more accessible (but still vastly unequal), and superintendents ran local schools using a business administration model. This design left the politics to the school boards, but the politics were no longer so steeped in cronyism. Governance was about the incredibly arduous task of constructing education to work for all kids.

The lessons of the past half century teach us that schools still do not work for all kids. This raises questions about the effectiveness of superintendents. Is the scrutiny fair? School communities often blame their superintendent for administrative mishaps, poor student performance, or national or local political narratives. The political quicksand that traps superintendents often keeps even some of the most capable and well-meaning administrators from executing their plans for improving the quality of education in a district. The research is clear on this. When superintendents stay in their positions for longer periods of time, students on average do well (Hart, Schramm-Possinger, & Hoyle, 2019; Simpson, 2013). When superintendents turn over quickly, students on average do poorly (Grissom & Mitani, 2016).

Electing superintendents

We can extend superintendent tenure by making the superintendency a publicly elected role. By electing district superintendents, we lock them into fixed four-year terms of service. This grants superintendents the ability to access one of the most powerful tools for political longevity: incumbency advantage. Imagine if superintendents got to campaign and make public appeals for why they deserve another term. Imagine if voters had more of an incentive to evaluate superintendents because of their ability to decide their fate through the ballot box. If we want longer tenured and more democratically legitimate superintendents, the best route is to elect them.

If this seems unfathomable, look at the Sunshine State. Florida has had a constitutional provision in place since 1998 that allows for school district communities to elect their superintendent. In 2019, 41 of Florida’s 67 locally autonomous school districts were exercising the option. Since then, three of the 41 have voted to convert to an appointed superintendent, while voters in one district with an appointed superintendent opted to move to an elected superintendent. So, districts are making this change in real time.

All but two of the original 41 districts are Republican-dominated or at least Republican-leaning. This leaves open the question of whether elected superintendents can thrive in districts across the political spectrum.

Consider the state level where voters across regions (except the Northeast) and political partisanship publicly elect their state superintendent. Ballotpedia has been tracking state superintendents for all 50 states. California has been electing their state superintendent of public instruction since the Civil War. In over 150 years, only three state superintendents served for less than four years. Since 1945, no state superintendent held the position for less than eight years.

Compare this with Florida, where the governor appoints the state superintendent. Since 1945, a total of 10 state superintendents served for less than eight years. Of those 10, seven lasted less than three years. Does this sound familiar?

Meanwhile, among the publicly elected Florida district superintendents, we find people like Shirley Joseph in her fifth year of service to Madison County Schools. Sandra “Sam” Himmel is heading into her 20th year of service in 2024 as superintendent of the Citrus County School District.

Can districts make the change?

This is not simply an intellectual exercise. Making superintendents elected officials only requires a simple policy change. In some districts (like those in Florida), a change in bylaws can ease the transition to an elected superintendent. In others, this may require a change in state law or a new state law that legitimizes the use of superintendent elections at the district level. Districts could take this question to the voters and decide on a change based on a public referendum. After all, if a district would consider trusting voters to decide who manages their schools, why not ask them whether they want that type of power?

Being thoughtful about the change is important. Districts will have to determine the proper eligibility criteria for candidates. This is nothing new. The U.S. Constitution outlines eligibility requirements for seeking federal office. Districts like New York City that have mayoral control over schools use nomination panels for potential school board members. The panels require that people meet certain eligibility criteria. When electing superintendents, districts must ensure that the candidate pool consists of people with experience and expertise in education. A certain number of years of K-12 teaching experience or school administrative experience could be a requirement.

Districts could dictate who the electorate would be, perhaps even making space at the ballot box for more community members. Why not make elections open to secondary students? Undocumented immigrants could be considered eligible. Onsite registration and flexible residency requirements could make superintendent elections accessible to the unhoused. This could be an inclusive process.

Overcoming concerns with elections

The primary concern about electing superintendents has to do with the flaws of elections themselves. School board elections are plagued by low voter turnout rates and the overinfluence of special interest groups. It will be important to push for superintendent elections that happen concurrently with federal elections, where voter participation is much higher on average. A strategy like ranked-choice voting  would be particularly useful here as well.

With the right design, we can empower superintendents with the political legitimacy needed to withstand the political storms. This is particularly important in the current moment as those storms rage. In a recent RAND Corporation study, almost 90% of superintendents identified “the intrusion of political issues and opinions into schooling” as the most stressful part of the job (Schwartz & Diliberti, 2023). Chiefs for Change (2023) studied the experiences of former superintendents and found that “the ability to skillfully navigate and respond to charged political environments” is now a vital skill.

With the current structure, we send superintendents into boxing rings with their arms tied behind their backs. They are absorbing the blows of political contestation, and as a result many are leaving the ring. Making the superintendency an elected position could be the way to cut the rope so that they can start fighting back. If this seems aggressive, remember that superintendents do not fight for themselves.

They fight for our kids.

References

Chiefs for Change. (2023). The state of the superintendency: Insights on how to navigate K-12 leadership in a challenging and politicized education space.

Grissom, J.A. & Mitani, H. (2016). Salary, performance, and superintendent turnover. Educational Administration Quarterly, 52 (3), 351-391.

Hart, W.H., Schramm-Possinger, M., & Hoyle, S. (2019). Superintendent longevity and student achievement in North Carolina public schools. AASA Journal of Scholarship & Practice, 15 (4). 4-13.

Schwartz, H.L. & Diliberti, M.K. (2023). Politics is the top reason superintendents are stressed: Selected findings from the Spring 2023 American School District Panel Survey. RAND Corporation.

Simpson, J. (2013). Superintendent tenure and student achievement. AASA Journal of Scholarship & Practice, 9 (4), 10-24.

This article appears in the December 2023/January 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 4, p. 62-63.