Unlocking Potential: How Political Skill Can Maximize Superintendent Effectiveness

Local superintendents must do an important job while equipped with, at best, modest authority. Superintendents are ultimately responsible for all the schools in their district, and they at least nominally supervise everything that happens in those schools. Yet superintendents cannot count on obedience or even support from the people who work for them, given that both educators and administrators possess wide discretion in implementation. This paper is written to help current and potential superintendents see the full scope of their role and how leaders from various backgrounds can approach it. In a series of studies beginning in the late 1980s, the authors have interviewed superintendents about their successes and failures in building civic support for needed initiatives. The paper draws examples from this earlier work, as well as from Center on Reinventing Public Education's (CRPE's) ongoing tracking of developments in reform-driven cities and the experiences of other public officials whose ability to overcome the structural limitations of their roles offer important lessons for district leadership. Most superintendents, current and aspiring, understand the importance of getting along with other power centers in the school system and the community at large. This paper goes further by attempting to show how superintendents can build coalitions and thereby exercise real power to accomplish things that conventional wisdom would say are beyond them.