School Boards and Superintendents (Navigating a Wicked Terrain)

Leadership matters. Today’s school environments present vastly different considerations for educational leaders. As the district’s executive leader, the 21st‑century school superintendent must be prepared to tackle and embrace new terrain focused on practices promoting justice and equity for every child, responding to myriad contextual and environmental factors (such as a global pandemic), and confronting high‑stakes accountability and unfunded mandates. School and district leadership has an influence on student achievement and improved student outcomes. Through collaboration, focused goal setting, alignment of goals and resources, and monitoring student achievement, effective superintendents are able to make a difference. These themes sit at the heart of School Boards and Superintendents: Navigating a Wicked Terrain, which underscores the evolving demands placed on today’s leaders.

Perhaps the most vital stakeholder for the superintendent is their school board. A superintendent’s capacity to be a multi‑directional informational hub to the broader community while working collaboratively with their school board is a powerful, yet politically delicate, position to negotiate. The political nature of the superintendency and board relationship must be acknowledged and must not go underrated. As School Boards and Superintendents: Navigating a Wicked Terrain illustrates, this relationship is often the fulcrum upon which district stability and progress rest.

Given the tensions that exist between superintendents, school boards, and stakeholders—historically and amid freshly intensified political polarization, culture wars, and continual threats to the institution at large—Volume III of The Research on the Superintendency series seeks to explore, describe, and analyze exacerbated tensions due to increased political polarization between school board members and superintendents. We examine the implications for parents, students, and faculty, and how resolution was reached. In the spirit of School Boards and Superintendents: Navigating a Wicked Terrain, we aim to give light to stories most often swept under the rug in order to help others who might be experiencing their own wicked problems and are looking for answers.