Three Things Smart State Superintendents Do To Take Pressure off District Superintendents

Hi friends, Kunjan Narechania here. Welcome back to The Delta.

Earlier this month, RAND released its annual State of the Superintendent report. The findings point to key differences in the challenges that superintendents of small and large school districts face. In large districts, superintendents reported spending much of their time managing internal and external communications, while smaller district leaders were more often focused on budgets and operations. Despite these differences, in my experience, all district superintendents would benefit from three things from their state leaders.

1. Set a clear vision. I often hear state educational leaders describe high-level, loosely defined goals, such as, “All students are reading on grade level.” While this is a laudable and important end goal, it lacks the specificity and clarity that district superintendents need to take action The most effective state superintendents define their vision in crystal clear terms, such as, “All students should be reading meaningful grade-level text and expressing their ideas through writing and speaking.”
2. Commit to focus and coherence. State leaders ask a lot of district leaders. When state leaders are clear about the change they want to see in classrooms and align their own resources – training, communications, funding – to this specific vision, it’s easier for district leaders to focus their own teams. Creating focus also requires deprioritizing initiatives that may create distraction or confusion. If state leaders are focused on improving core instruction, efforts to focus on intervention may need to wait a year or two.
3. Streamline dollars. Every year, state education agencies both make choices with their own discretionary dollars and ask school districts to compete for a mix of state and federal grants tied to individual programs. The state and its districts are more likely to achieve the vision if as much of this funding as possible is focused on the vision for students and teachers. Unfortunately, in most states, a single school district might create 30 different budgets to fulfill 30 different grant applications that must be submitted on 30 different timelines to siloed offices within the state education department. This scheme is not only an administrative burden for district staff (many of whom are in their own siloes at the central office), it also prevents schools from focusing on what matters most. In Louisiana, we worked with state leaders to create a Super App (more on that in this space soon) – now, district leaders can submit a single funding application and spend more time focused on students.

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We want to hear about your area – what are some ways your district superintendents could use support from state leaders? What kinds of state-level support make the biggest difference for district leaders??

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