The Superintendent as Scapegoat

By J.H. Snider

It’s a remarkable fact: Large-district school superintendents have the shortest job tenure of anyone in public education today. According to Tim Quinn, the director of the Broad Foundation’s Urban Superintendents Academy, the average tenure of an urban superintendent, including interim superintendents, is 26 to 28 months. No one knows what percentage of these superintendents leave because they are squeezed out. But it is clearly a large fraction.

In one sense, this finding is no surprise at all. Over the decades, almost everyone else in education, from janitors on up to assistant superintendents, has used collective bargaining to win job protection. So, increasingly, the superintendent is the only person left in the public school system without some prospect of a lifetime-guaranteed job. But the fact that superintendents are so often on the hot seat also reflects a deeper political truth: Superintendents have become the convenient scapegoat of education politics.

This political truth was recently on display in Anne Arundel County, Md., where the school board pushed out the district’s high-profile superintendent despite his having achieved the objectives that a previous board had brought him in to accomplish. During the last two decades, the average tenure of a superintendent in Anne Arundel County, the nation’s 42nd-largest school district, has been under four years. Prior to that, the superintendent lasted...