Why Do We Need A Superintendent Anyway?

Maybe it’s Time to Consider a Different Leadership Model for Schools

“Ultimately, the authors conclude that when district academic achievement improves or deteriorates, the Superintendent is likely to be playing a part in an ensemble performance in which the Superintendent’s role could be filled successfully by many others. In the end, it is the system that promotes or hinders student achievement. Superintendents are largely indistinguishable.” (source)

In other words, when you look at the data, Superintendents make a lot of money while contributing nothing that could be measured.  

In the case of Berkeley Heights, however, the contributions are rather significant.

Since our current Superintendent started, we’ve achieved a reconfiguration that divided our town and has demonstrated no tangible outcome (other than a violation of law, one school ended up being packed, and more traffic issues), an 88%+ increase in legal spending, a DEI Initiative that for all its pomp and circumstance isn’t showing very much (to the point where activities that the District has always done or some derivative are being relabeled as “DEI”), the District has closed off line after line of communication, and a Superintendent Office and Business Administrator Office that has become politicized and involved in elections along with two budget processes in a row that can safely be described as embarrassing circus acts.

What good that has been accomplished in this District could probably have been done (and more effectively) by those closest to our students. 

Taking the research and our specific context, the inherent problems of one person in charge of a powerful, well-funded bureaucracy become clear.  

• One person having the final say has a greater potential for more impulsive, misinformed decisions. Instead of having six principals negotiating system-wide changes through a slow, systematic process involving players closest to the ground, we’ve experienced one individual making decisions with bad information. In our model, stakeholder involvement is cosmetic – parents friendly to an idea being called to support the Superintendent’s initiative versus a real conversation.

• One person having the final say leads to a BOE that does everything the Superintendent wants or a divisive battleground the Superintendent can manipulate. This structure also leads to a more politicized administration that injects itself into elections to support candidates friendly to them or their ideas.    

• Holding the Superintendent accountable for anything is onerous unless the BOE takes its position of oversight seriously – and most do not. BOE’s tend to believe they made the right decision when hiring a Superintendent and view them as the “expert” – they tend to view their roles as support, not a check or balance. This is a perverse understanding of the role forwarded by the School Board Association attempting to spin the idea of a BOE being different from a government body as “best practice”. The SBA is nothing more than a group of folks who’ve served on the BOE that come up with what they feel “best practices” are. However, these best practices have little to no connection to anything empirical. Sound familiar?
  

Instead of a Superintendent, a system where principals work with a facilitator (someone disinterested in building influence and power as they work with the system but not in it) on system-wide changes with rotating leadership among them that report to the BOE while slower may avoid many of the problems we’ve faced over the last three years. This arrangement can also lead to less impulsive and more informed decision-making because the decisions are vetted by different people with varying interests who run our schools.

Using Berkeley Heights as an example, six principals leading from the ground up and reporting to the BOE removes multiple layers of administration between the school’s and parents’ representatives. It also elevates principals and increases teacher input into decisions as schools become more independent and accountable to the BOE and the public.

Six principles making the decision leads to less polarization as the issues become diffuse and nuanced when multiple interests are negotiating with one another in presenting their case to the public.

A new model with no Superintendent or, at least, a far less influential one may also force those Central Administrators whose positions may be necessary to work more closely with and answer to principals in ways that may make policy and procedure development and implementation more flexible and adaptable to each school. Business Administration and Special Needs are good examples of how Students and the public could benefit. Instead of a “one size fits all” theoretical, flavor of the month approach – these positions would be forced to be more pragmatic, transparent, and methodical in their approach simply by design.

The Business Administrator is an obvious example of how things have gone south. Most entities view a CFO as a check and balance to the Executive; however, in our context, it appears this position has taken on the role of “Defender of the Faith” not only in connection to the Superintendent but those BOE Members who support her. The current arrangement has been radioactive for students, parents, and taxpayers.

Another benefit to this kind of model is cost. We currently have two Assistant Superintendents and One Superintendent, with annual salaries totaling over 500k. This number does not include benefits (health insurance for example) or the cost of staff supporting these roles. Think about what even half this money could do to enhance our schools or support the local economy if placed back in the hands of residents.

We often think that having one person in charge adds to cohesion and leads to a better system, but every example of centralized bureaucratic power – even when checks and balances appear to be in place- never ends up better.

The idea is to make principals the CEO of their schools with a mandate to work with each other on system wide concerns. The oversight on this mandate can be the responsibility of the Board. With the proper support in place, we could have a more flexible, leaner, more efficient and effective system. 

I wonder whether NJ Schools are required by law to have a Superintendent, I wonder why they would be, and we should work to change the law if it exists. Communities should decide what the leadership structure for their school looks like. If not required by law or if there is a way around the law, Berkeley Heights could consider a different approach to how our District is managed. If the current Superintendent left, maybe we don’t have to rush to fill the position and consider piloting a different model in the interim.

The article isn’t meant to offer an exact blueprint for our schools (although it’s a damn good one to think about) but to ask that we consider whether Central Administration’s cost is worth the benefit. It’s also a call to be more creative in our thinking about how our schools are run and to move out of old models that are clearly broken – not just locally but nationwide.

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