Research avenues that examine the superintendency are limitless – and winding.
Just ask Rachel White.
“When I ask a question, I think I’m going to find an answer,” White told about three dozen aspiring superintendents enrolled in NIU Ed.S. in Educational Administration program, “and it usually leads me to the next question.”
Launched in 2021 by NIU Department of Leadership, Educational Psychology and Foundations Associate Professor Ben Creed and Clinical Assistant Professor Lynn Gibson, the semiannual Aspiring Superintendents Forum traditionally allows students to probe the minds of current practitioners.
The April 9 event, however, featured a presentation by White, an associate professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin and a fellow on the L.D. Haskew Centennial Professorship in Public School Administration.
She’s also the founder and principal investigator of The Superintendent Lab, a central hub for data, research, insights and innovation on the school district superintendency and home to the National Longitudinal Superintendent Database.
Her talk detailed findings on the opinions of state boards of education members and state legislators regarding teacher evaluation; the costs of culturally divisive to school districts and superintendents; and trends in the type and nature of superintendent attrition over time.
Interesting revelations shared by White:
- The voices of local teachers are often the most valued by state education policymakers in policies that regulate teacher evaluation, but when that question asks about teachers’ unions, respondents split along political party lines. State education policymakers, however, highly valued superintendent voices – regardless of whether they were presented as individual or group voices.
- Most superintendents agree that engagement with policymakers is important, but actual engagement is often low and dependent on the sizes and locations of school districts, the willingness of policymakers to listen and the attitudes of local school board members regarding the worth of such trips to state capitol buildings.
- Costs of managing cultural conflict, both in dollars and time, reached $3.2 billion nationwide for the 2023-24 school year – and that’s a conservative estimate.
- While it’s concerning that rates of politically charged attrition of superintendents are on the rise, “it’s still the exception and not the rule.”
Future topics on White’s agenda include the “black box” of search firms, the impacts of privatizing K-12 education on the work of superintendents, how technological advancements shape a superintendent’s work and the pedagogy and andragogy of superintendent preparation programs.
White, a classmate of Creed’s during their doctoral studies at Michigan State University, also traced her personal journey into her current life.
Her father has served on her hometown school board for her entire life, including several years as the president, and she frequently saw the various superintendents visiting their Michigan home for official purposes.
She later followed his footsteps – and her grandfather’s as well – when she was elected to her local board of education. Her term of office in Ohio’s Van Wert City Schools, from 2018 to 2022, enveloped the COVID-19 pandemic with colleagues who were “a family that cared about each other.”
More than a decade earlier, as a first-generation college student, she learned that she couldn’t pursue a bachelor’s degree in the hard sciences because her hometown school board had allowed students to take two years of agriculture classes rather than biology.
That gap in her high school transcript led her to major in public policy at the University of Michigan – as well as to the realization that “decisions made at the local level really matter.”
Work as a policy analyst for the Michigan Association for School Administrators inspired her to pursue graduate studies when she found disconnects between best practices in available research and the actions of state-level officials in control of school operations.
Now, as White continues to produce and publish valuable information, she is happy to connect with future administrators and said that some of her daunting statistics should not dissuade anyone from entering the profession.
Local superintendents with an equity focus can impact the lives of countless generations of students by making sure that every child has an opportunity to learn, she said, “and I appreciate that you are up for the task.”
“These are the stories that are the most important for why we should be going into this work,” said White, co-author of a forthcoming book chapter on how superintendents can nourish and protect their well-being.
“Very few superintendents say they would do something different. There are really hard days,” she added, “but the job is really rewarding.”
