The role of a school district superintendent demands a balance of professional leadership and political astuteness. Individuals in this role possess distinct skills, values, and beliefs essential for navigating its complexities. This mixed-method phenomenological study employs self-reported values, decision-making styles, and interviews to explore…

The paper is an exploration of dual-role school district leadership in a small rural state. Dual-role leaders are individuals who fulfill all the roles of both the school superintendent and principal. Smaller rural school districts are the districts that often utilize a dual-role superintendent and principal model. The position of principal and…

Expertise about how best to address the challenges schools face does not reside solely in the central office. Columnist Joshua P. Starr discusses how district leaders should rethink their roles to ensure that they are focused on the work that only they can do. Some tasks will be better suited to leaders at the school level, and sometimes expertise…

Catholic schooling in the United States is suffering from a persistent enrollment crisis that has triggered the need for system-wide organizational reforms. However, most of the changes that the sector has experienced has taken place in individual schools making decisions about how to operationally sustain their individual school community. In…

The superintendency can be stressful, and increasingly some individuals are superintendents for more than one district. This mixed methods study focuses on the shared superintendency and stress drawing on a combination of the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and follow up interviews. While no statistically significant difference between single…

A school district's need to satisfy the school community's expectations for current, accurate information and manage a social media presence has increased the necessity for superintendents to employ public relations professionals. As such, these professionals are a recent addition to many school districts' administrative teams. However, few…

Many district and school leaders have leveraged instructional leadership or social justice leadership to advance student achievement for minoritized students. While research has examined these approaches separately, we identify a potential gap at the nexus between instructional and social justice leadership. In particular, we find a need for…

Soon after Xavier Botana took over as superintendent of Maine's Portland Public Schools, he realized that, despite the district's professed commitment, efforts to promote equity were embedded in other programs rather than being its own goal. He knew that if he were going to make his vision for equity a reality, he would need to get the community's…

Both superintendents and principals create a foundation for student achievement, school culture, and the vision of a school building or district. When combined, these two similar yet distinct administrative roles become one unique position with less time and resources to fulfill individual job responsibilities. A dual-role administrator is defined…

Email has become a prominent communication tool for principals. Although principals have reported benefits of communicating via email, they have also indicated that it has intensified their workload. Specifically, principals have indicated that they receive a large volume of email, which contributes to extending and fragmenting their workdays.…

The importance of dedicating time for teacher's professional learning is known, but dedicating adequate time for principals' learning and development is often neglected. The author recommends that superintendents take the following steps to guide their efforts to support principals' learning: (1) get to know principals as individual learners, (2)…

The American School District Panel (ASDP) is the newest addition to RAND's American Educator Panels (AEP) and was designed to survey district leaders two times each school year. RAND recruits ASDP members using probabilistic sampling methods, which allow researchers to weight survey results to generalize to the national population of school…

This is the latest report in the State of the Superintendent series, an annual report intended to provide a reliable, recurring snapshot of the U.S. public school superintendency. Since the American School District Panel began in fall 2020, researchers have periodically surveyed superintendents about their job, focusing on job-related stressors,…

Education has historically been dominated by women, while those in leadership positions are male. Women are acutely underrepresented in the top position in public school districts across the nation. There is consistent evidence supporting that women often encounter both explicit and implicit barriers hindering their trajectory and growth to a…

Moral distress is experienced when one knows the right thing to do, but cannot do it because of institutional or external constraints. This study aimed to understand the extent to which moral distress affects a school leader's role, and the key sources of moral distress. Using a web-based survey (n = 954) and focus groups including school leaders,…