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Superintendents for the 21st Century: It's Not Just a Job, It's a Calling By Paul Houston The mission of public school leaders is to help children create a future where democracy is preserved and the ideals of this nation are moved forward, Mr. Houston maintains. And that is a wonderful challenge and an amazing gift to receive.   Illustration © 2001 by Bill Tsukuda

I ONCE HAD a school board president who told me that my job as a superintendent was to be a quick-healing dartboard. And he was a supporter of mine! Over the years I have used a number of other metaphors to describe the role, all of them just about as unappealing. I get the greatest response when I say that the relationship of the superintendent to the community is analogous to that of a fire hydrant to a dog. The reality of the modern superintendency is that it is both exciting and exasperating, and we are finding it increasingly difficult to attract people to the role. Understandably, people don't want to be dartboards or fire hydrants. As we face the challenges of a new century, we must find ways to reconfigure the role of the superintendent so that it attracts our best leaders, even as we also transform it to meet the opportunities that change presents.

There are a number of reasons why people are not interested in becoming superintendents. They see the "lightning rod" aspect of the job, and they choose not to do it. The superintendency is a job fraught with public criticism, mixed with private moments of triumph. Superintendents are sometimes abused and other times blamed. Expectations are high and often unrealistic. I have frequently thought that, if I ever write a book on the subject, I will call it "What Are You Going to Do About It?" That phrase sums up the almost universal expectation that somehow one person in an organization can shoulder the responsibility for all aspects of the organization. That person must provide the "final answer." But, unlike contestants sitting opposite Regis Philbin, superintendents are given no lifelines to help with questions that seem to have no answers.

Yet, when superintendents get together, after they vent about their problems, they tend to talk mostly about their successes. And many who leave the job find themselves working their way back into it. While the job is fraught with external pressures, it is filled with internal possibilities. Superintendents know they can change the trajectory of children's lives, alter the behavior of organizations, and expand the possibilities of whole communities. This creates a powerful attraction to the job. Such ambivalence makes the superintendency a wonderful subject of study. As education stands in the national spotlight, there are few roles as complex or as pivotal as that of the public school superintendent. And as we move into the future, it is inevitable that the job will continue to be one of controversy, concern, and consequence.

Most of the people who have been superintendents have found it exhilarating and challenging in the best sense of that word. It is clearly a position in which a person can make a big difference. But there is much about the current role that is dysfunctional. Expectations and resources are mismatched. Accountability and authority are misaligned. This means there must be a shift in expectations and a corresponding shift in role. Part of the shift that must take place is a change in how the world sees and treats superintendents. But the bigger part of the shift must take place in the hearts and minds of those who fill the role. For how one chooses to confront the challenges of the superintendency will make all the difference.

As a minister's son, I realized early in my own career as a superintendent that there are a great many spiritual overtones to the superintendency. The ultimate responsibility of the role is to shepherd other people's children through the often dangerous valley of childhood. So it is easy to see religious symbolism in the role. That led me to a realization that superintendents tend to spend most of their careers between Palm Sunday and Good Friday. They enter a community as a new savior who is thought capable of performing miracles and healings. Sometime later, they are put on trial, marched through the streets in public humiliation, and crucified. Jonathan Kozol once said that he thought that cities needed superintendents because they needed someone to die for their sins. While this is a disturbing thought, there is still the reality that Easter Sunday follows Good Friday and that resurrection remains possible. The superintendent of the 21st century must look to the hope of resurrection as the source of possibilities for success. It is a tough job, but it is one that bears great promise and possibility.

The Challenges

While much of the attention of school reformers is focused on accountability, test scores, standards, and the like, much of the superintendent's job is actually shaped by issues that exist on a more macro level. And that is where the superintendent of the 21st century should focus attention.

School leaders of every stripe must face a number of broad social challenges that are reshaping our society and the way children learn. These are what I call the "demanding D's" of change that will shape the future. They are things liking changing demographics and growing diversity. The shift in population to Sunbelt states, the generational divides created by baby booms and baby busts, and the changing complexion and accent of America's children all create real challenges for school leaders.

The job is made more difficult by the divide between the haves and have-nots and by the devaluing of our children. The dirty little secret of American education is the degree to which we allow inequities in resources to exist between communities. These inequities mean that the children with the greatest need often have the fewest resources and that those who come to school as the most advantaged are given even more support once they enter the schoolhouse door. Although America leads the world in talking about how much it values its children, it is often near the bottom of developed countries in the measures that show how it truly values its children. That is because America tends to put its resources into remediation rather than prevention. This was best summarized for me by someone who pointed out that America is a nation that will air-condition its prisons, but not its schools.

One cannot overlook the deemphasis on education that leads us to substitute test scores for learning and to believe that the only goal of education is making a living rather than making a life. But there are several D's that strike directly at the heart of what the superintendent of the future will do.

The first of these is deregulation. Most major industries in the U.S. have been deregulated, and it is now education's turn. This change manifests itself in such issues as home schooling, vouchers, and charter schools, as well as in the massive changes brought on by privatization. The reality is that the world for a 21st-century school leader will be one in which competition is a way of life and scrambling for dollars and customers will be requisites for the job. The role of the future will not merely entail running a school system. The superintendent of the future will also serve as a broker of services and as an ensurer of equity. The task will be to determine which services are needed and what the best source of the services is and then to make sure that every child benefits from them.

The second big issue confronting school leaders is devolution. This is the historical wave that pushes power from centralized to decentralized places. It was the force behind the break-up of the countries in Eastern Europe, it is the force behind the growth in power of America's governors, and it is the force behind the movement toward site-based management in America's schools. What are the implications for people who have traditionally run centralized organizations, such as school systems, in a devolutionary moment of history? Successful superintendents of the 21st century will be those who find a way of leading by sharing power and by engaging members of the organization and the community in the process of leading.

The third big issue that directly affects superintendents is demassification. Historically, people got their information from mass media that were limited in diversity. When I grew up, I had three choices of television channels to watch. Today's children have literally hundreds. This increase in choice is both positive and popular. People can choose how they spend their time and to whom they are exposed while they spend it. However, it also means there are fewer common experiences that hold society together, and this erosion of the common ground necessary to hold a democracy together presents a potential threat to our future.

Although the experience of public schooling still constitutes much of that common ground, the very institution of public education is increasingly being called into question. The challenge to public education created by the nearly 20 years of unrelenting criticism of schools presents a clouded future. What happens to America if the movement toward demassification destroys the ties that bind? Superintendents of the future must focus on creating learning for children that is on the one hand individualized and connected to personal interests and on the other hand inclusive of the broader social context that will allow children to live together in our increasingly complex democracy.

The final issue that will have profound implications for school leaders is disintermediation. This daunting word refers to a phenomenon that occurs when a technology introduced into society replaces old institutions. For example, when Gutenberg invented the printing press and in so doing made the Bible accessible to the masses, he "disintermediated" the church. People no longer had to go to a priest to get the interpretation of God's will. They could read and decide for themselves. That led to the Reformation and a profound shift in humanity's relationship to God.

Today, computers, CDs, and the Internet are disintermediating schools. Schools have been the place where people go to get learning. That is no longer necessarily true. Parents and children no longer have to go to school to have access to skills or knowledge. They can access these via technology. What are the implications for leaders in this brave new world? Twenty-first-century superintendents will understand that learning is no longer about place, it is now about process. They will find ways of extending the reach of schools beyond the schoolhouse door, while maintaining the traditional and historic role of public schools as central to our society. Schooling must continue to convey civic virtue to our population.

We can like or dislike these challenges. It doesn't matter. They are with us, and that is really all that counts. How school leaders choose to face them will make the difference in how the future looks. And choosing to face this new future from a position of strength will require a new breed of leader.

A Superintendent of Education

The reality is that, for superintendents to be successful in the future, they will need to completely change their approach to the job. Historically, if superintendents were good at the management issues, they were held to be successful.

Let's call that being good at the "killer B's." These were things like buildings, buses, books, budgets, and bonds. It was the "stuff" of education. A superintendent was a superintendent of schools, with the presumption that school was a place for learning and that the superintendent's job was to take care of that place. The future dictates a very different approach.

Educators are fond of pointing out that it takes a village to raise a child. But this begs a crucial question -- what does it take to raise a village? We are no longer a country of villages, and the web of support that historically supported families and children is tattered. It must be rewoven, and the superintendent must play a pivotal role in that task. Superintendents of the future must see themselves as village builders. They can use the centrality of their institutions to help re-create a support system. But they must do so by reaching outward to connect to the resources of the broader community.

That means they will have to be masters of the "crucial C's." The C's are the processes that support the work and get it done. They are things like connection, communication, collaboration, community building, child advocacy, and curricular choices.

Leadership in the future will be about the creation and maintenance of relationships: the relationships of children to learning, children to children, children to adults, adults to adults, and school to community. The increasing complexity of our society, the deterioration of families, and the loss of social capital available to support children and families mean that superintendents must be adept at creating a web of support around children and their families. School leaders can no longer wait until the child is 5 years old to become involved with his or her learning. Much research has demonstrated that the early years of a child's life are crucial. If schools wait to address a child's needs past those formative years, the subsequent work becomes much more difficult.

Leaders cannot forget about children after 3 p.m. Children spend the bulk of their time someplace other than school. If schools are not helping to shape that time through parent education and after-school and summer learning opportunities, the work that schools do will be diluted. Schools must become part of the broader social context that creates a true system of lifelong learning in the community. This does not mean that schools must become all things to all people. It means schools must team up with other care-giving agencies, such as the health department, the parks and recreation folks, or the church down the street to see to it that a network of mutual care is created around the children and their families.

Creating this network will require skills that differ from those traditionally used by superintendents. The ability to communicate and to market ideas will be critical. Superintendents in the 21st century will need to be able to facilitate and affiliate. They will need to turn in their "power over" skills of command and control and take on a "power with" mentality that allows everyone to be part of the action. This is a huge shift in perception and approach, for which new training models will be needed.

The key point is that we will no longer be able to pretend that learning stops and starts at the schoolhouse door. Learning has always been affected by the contextual issues that plague many children and families, and the superintendents of the 21st century must become courageous champions for children, using their skills to muster the broad support for children and families that will enable children to be successful at learning.

But superintendents will need to do more. They will also have to be leaders who see that the content of learning changes dramatically. Yes, they will have to create conditions that get children ready for school. But they will also have to create conditions that get schools ready for children.

New Approaches to Learning

Critics of education have argued for some time that our current system is a failed system, a system that has deteriorated over time and must be reenergized and reshaped by competition if it is to recapture its past glory. This is a false reading of history. The reality is that the current system is better than ever at conducting its historic mission. The problem is that, while the system has gradually improved, conditions have exploded around it. Schools have been making incremental progress in an exponential environment. That does mean that major transformation is required -- not because the system has failed, but because the mission has shifted.

The recognition that we must transform the system has led us to the current efforts at school reform. Unfortunately, these reforms are based on a faulty analysis of what ails us. If you lean your ladder against the wrong wall, you will paint the wrong house. If you believe that the problem of American education is that we need to force students to learn by giving them high-stakes tests and a narrow curriculum, then you will create our current model of reform -- a model that is doomed to failure. It is doomed because current reform efforts are external and overly simplistic. Those who endorse these current reforms rely on the belief that you can bludgeon people to greatness through external pressure. Their efforts are built on a mechanistic world view that stresses fixing the parts to create a better whole.

Education, however, is a human enterprise. So the solution to its problems must be much more organic. It must recognize that all parts of the system are interwoven and that moving one affects all the others. In essence, the difference between current reform efforts and what is truly needed to change schools for the 21st century is the difference between geology and ecology. Geology gets its power by studying the past layers of rock that envelop the Earth. It is a somewhat fixed science that gains its power by studying inert objects. Ecology recognizes the existence of ecosystems -- interconnected systems of living organisms -- that are highly interdependent. The slightest change in one affects all the others. That is also true of the education system.

These differing perspectives on reform lead to very different assumptions about how learning happens. One assumes that learning is external and can be invoked from without. The accountability and competition movements are based on this belief system. Those who hold this view forget that education and learning are essentially internal and tied directly to motivation. Education is really about evocation -- drawing forth the creation of meaning from the learner. Fear has never been a particularly effective motivational tool, particularly when complex thought processes are required. That means that reforms built on a foundation of fear are doomed.

Thus effective school reform in the future will focus on creating schools that students want to go to. These schools will have to be places that are engaging and that allow learners to undertake activities they find meaningful. Creating such schools will require a total revamping of how we approach teaching and learning, and it will require leaders who are focused on the process. Twenty-first-century superintendents will have to be leaders who focus on the organic and holistic qualities of learning and who structure learning that speaks to the hearts and minds of learners.

Creating such schools will require opening them to the broader world. Meaningful learning can happen only in the broadest possible context. Once again, the future will require leaders to turn the current process inside out and to structure learning so that students will use complex skills in practical situations that challenge their thinking while connecting them to reality. It's a tall order.

Who Will These Leaders Be?

How will we find leaders who can act as courageous champions for children and who are willing and able to change the status quo, while acting as collaborative catalysts and working with others to make that happen? We must look very hard to find a source for such leaders. There are really just four problems with the current leadership system: the job is impossible, the expectations are inappropriate, the training is inadequate, and the pipeline is inverted.

The job is impossible because the expectations are unrealistic. We want one individual to be all and know all in a complex system. Furthermore, while we tend to centralize responsibility in education, authority is widely dispersed. We ask superintendents what they are going to do about a particular matter, while we spread the power to do something across a system that includes boards, unions, and community groups. Of late, governors, legislators, and judges have also taken a bite out of the authority apple.

With the current emphasis on accountability, the problem intensifies. Accountability without authority is punishment. That means that either authority must be recentralized -- unlikely in a world of devolution and demassification -- or responsibility must be decentralized. That means that we must evolve a distributed system of leadership in which the skills and the ability to make things happen and the accountability for whether they did happen are spread across a wider spectrum. Under this model, the superintendent must be a team leader and team developer.

Our current training system is inadequate for this new model, because it reflects a rearview mirror approach to leadership. Most of the coursework now required for licensure focuses on the old role. It prepares people for centralized, command-and-control managerial tasks. It doesn't teach the collaborative skills needed in today's more complex and connected environment.

Superintendents must be great communicators. They must be outstanding facilitators. They have to know how to take the pulse of the public and how to sell their ideas. Persuasion is the ultimate tool for a superintendent of education. This is particularly true when dealing with boards of education. The disconnect between superintendents and boards has become almost the stuff of legend, and there are no quick fixes to the problem. However, one thing that would help would be to offer superintendents better preparation for working in a collaborative way with their boards. Leadership in this arena isn't about exerting the superintendent's will, but about working collaboratively with a board for the greater good.

And certainly our current training fails to recognize that leadership in the future will be all about navigating white water. When you get to the top of the organization, there are no right or wrong answers. There are merely dilemmas. There are paradoxes, with each option having both good and bad implications. How does one prepare leaders for such choices?

First, we must recognize that this is reality. We must help our leaders let go of the "black and white" mindset that sees the world as an "either/or" kind of place and come to understand that it is really a "both/and" place, where both ends of the continuum can hold equal elements of truth.

The best training for this would be cross-disciplinary and embedded within preparation for becoming a reflective practitioner. Since the role is being shaped by pressures outside of education, school leaders must be aware of and knowledgeable about these pressures. This means they must be historians, demographers, sociologists, and futurists. And because the work is centered on and carried out by people, management ideas from the business school and spiritual awareness found in the divinity school would also be appropriate.

Of course, nothing about leadership in a fast-paced, pressurized environment encourages reflection. In fact, everything about the superintendent's role makes it reactive rather than reflective. Yet seeing the whole can come only in moments of quiet contemplation. This necessitates forcing reflection onto an active leader. It won't be easy, but it can be done. It comes about through the experiences of writing journals, mentoring, and teaching. Much of the coursework in superintendents' preparation should concentrate on problem analysis. Preparation programs for the next generation of leaders must involve a constant dance between doing the work and thinking about it. Over time, doing this will produce a reflective practitioner.

The current pipeline into school administration is inverted. There are many people in it who have great potential for leadership. They must be nurtured and encouraged. But the profession can no longer depend solely on those who choose it -- i.e., the "wannabes." We must begin to identify a new cadre of leaders who see the role as one of collaboration, rather than of command, and then mentor them into the jobs. These are the "oughtabes," and they must be identified and encouraged. The good news is that the pipeline is filled with them. Nearly two-thirds of the current staff members in district offices are women, and many of them have mastered the skills of affiliation and collaboration through the process of acculturation that we seem to reserve for little girls. We must find ways of shattering the remnants of the glass ceiling and making the role attractive to this new kind of leader.

A Mission, Not a Job

This brings me back to the central question of why anyone would want to do these jobs. Superficially, the current role isn't very attractive, and the challenges we can see for the future make it potentially even more difficult. Why would anyone in his or her right mind choose to become a dartboard or a fire hydrant? What kind of job is that?

It is, in fact, a very challenging job with many frustrations and perils. It is also a job with many psychic rewards. Superintendents have the chance to reshape the lives of children in profound ways. They can create a sense of community where none exists. They can transform institutions of learning through their leadership and courage. They can make smooth the rough path.

I once heard Cornel West, a Harvard professor, describe the superintendency as "soul craft." And he was right. School leadership is about the mind and about how we might better shape the minds of our children. But it is also about touching hearts. And that makes the work much more sacred than we have traditionally thought.

It is ironic that education has become embroiled in the battles over the separation of church and state, when so much of what we do in education is akin to the work of the churches. School leadership focuses on the substance of what it means to be a human and to live together harmoniously in this world. Education isn't about the skills we teach, it is about the spirits we nurture. For without healthy spirits, the world is full of young people like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who could grow into Fidel Castros and Adolf Hitlers.

St. Francis of Assisi once said that, if you work with your hands, you are a laborer. If you work with your hands and your head, you are a craftsman. But if you work with your hands, your head, your heart, and your soul, you are an artist. School leaders will be effective only if they choose to be artists.

School superintendents like to see themselves as CEOs, for they are responsible for the entire school organization. But with authority so widely distributed, that is not an effective model. Certainly, superintendents have the responsibility of CEOs, but they lack the authority. A better analogy might be to liken themselves to ministers. Ministers get their authority from on high. When you work with other people's children and become responsible for them, that is very powerful moral authority. Moreover, ministers get their work done by means of persuasion and by creating common purpose. That is really the challenge of the superintendent of the future. Can we find ways of bringing communities together in a kaleidoscopic environment to create a better world for our children?

The superintendency isn't so much a job as it is a calling. You may choose it, but it also chooses you. You are summoned to it. Part of the responsibility of the current generation of leaders will be to summon that next generation to duty. And that leads back to the fire hydrant. Yes, the hydrant does serve as a convenience for the dog, but that isn't its mission. Its mission is a much more noble one. It is there to keep houses from burning down. Public school leaders may get a little damp from time to time from the exercises of their critics, but their mission is to help children create a future where democracy is preserved and the ideals of this nation are moved forward. And that is a wonderful challenge and an amazing gift to receive.

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Last updated 15 February 2001
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