Credit: John C. Osborn/EdSource Today

While the leadership turmoil in the Los Angeles Unified School District has attracted widespread attention in contempo months, the state's largest district is far from the merely one in California that is coping with superintendent turnover.

Two-thirds of the superintendents of the country'south 30 largest districts have been in their posts for three or fewer years, according to an EdSource review. 10 have been in their posts for less than a year. Just 3 – Long Beach Unified's Chris Steinhauser, Fresno Unified'south Michael Hanson and Chino Valley Unified'southward Wayne Joseph – take been on the job for more than than v years.

The nigh recent appointment is former schools master Ramon Cortines, who was named acting superintendent of Fifty.A. Unified in October after John Deasy resigned in the wake of a series of conflicts with the elected board of education. Deasy was on the task 3½ years.

Short tenure is a prominent characteristic of urban districts where superintendents typically face intense pressures to enhance low exam scores, cope with periodic budget shortfalls that may require layoffs and school closings, as well as manage the often loftier-wire politics of elected schoolhouse boards.

"Turnover is owned to the position of superintendent," said Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Didactics Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C.

In California, the turnover comes at a time when district finances are improving but superintendents have the added accuse of implementing some of the most pregnant reforms in decades, most notably the Common Cadre standards and the Local Command Funding Formula.

"In general, the job is grueling, is incredibly difficult," said Becca Bracy Knight, executive director of the Broad Center for the Direction of School Systems in Los Angeles, in a previous interview with EdSource. "It takes a personal and professional person toll on people who are in it. This is a task where you have thousands of bosses, and that is very hard. Getting a governance and leadership team that works well together to serve teachers, students and families is very hard, and rarer than it should be."

A autumn survey from the Council of the Bang-up City Schools found that the average length of tenure for current superintendents in the nation's largest urban school districts was iii.eighteen years, downward from 3.64 years in its 2010 survey. It was four.v years for immediate past superintendents, downwards from v.ane years in 2010. A 2022 study of 100 randomly selected California school districts indicated that 43 per centum of superintendents stayed in their posts for three or fewer years. Only 71 percent of those in districts with more than 29,000 student also left within that time frame.

"Turnover is owned to the position of superintendent," said Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C.

Marshall Smith, the former dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education and U.S. undersecretary of education in the Clinton administration, said that information technology takes far longer than the average length of tenure for superintendents to make reforms stick.

"Unless you lot are in that location for eight to nine years, you can't expect to brand big changes," Smith said. Nor, he said, "can you expect to make changes during a fiscal crunch" – precisely the conditions that every superintendent in California experienced during the past five years.

It may be no blow that the just two California school districts that won the prestigious Broad Prize for Urban Education – Long Beach in 2003 and Garden Grove in 2004 – have been marked by unusual stability in leadership. In Long Beach, current superintendent Steinhauser, who causeless his postal service in 2002, succeeded Carl Cohn, who had been at that place for x years. At Garden Grove, Laura Schwalm stepped downwardly last yr later on xiv years in her post – and was succeeded past Gabriela Mafi, herself a quondam main and assistant superintendent in the district.

In some cases, the transition to a new superintendent tin be a smooth one – when a departing superintendent left not considering of disharmonize but because he or she is retiring or finds a job elsewhere afterwards a relatively long tenure.

The changeover tin be especially painless if the incoming superintendent is a current employee in the district. That is what occurred in the Poway Unified School District, where John Collins, a longtime administrator, replaced the highly regarded Don Phillips, who retired in 2010 after ix years on the chore.  In Baronial of this year in the Kern Union High Schoolhouse Commune Byron Schaefer,  who had been in the district for a quarter century, replaced Don Carter, who retired after x years in the postal service — and 38 years in the commune.

But in other cases leadership changes take occurred abruptly – leaving districts scrambling to find replacements with curt observe, or to come upwards with a temporary solution by appointing an interim superintendent.

  • In April 2013,  Oakland schools chief Tony Smith appear he would leave the 46,000-educatee district in June of that year – also shortly to discover a permanent replacement – and he was succeeded by interim superintendent Gary Yee. Oakland appointed a permanent replacement, Antwan Wilson, in July of this year.
  • Also in April 2013, Thelma Melendez announced her resignation after but two years at the helm of the 57,000-student Santa Ana Unified School District, effective at the cease of the schoolhouse year. She was succeeded by one-time Riverside Unified Superintendent Rick Miller, who assumed his mail last November – well into the school year.
  • In October 2013, Sacramento City Unified Superintendent Jonathan Raymond, after iv½ years on the chore, announced he would leave the commune by the end of the year. He was succeeded by interim superintendent Sara Noguchi, who in turn was replaced by one-time Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Jose Banda in July.

These resignations were in part a fallout of the budget battles over the last five years that have resulted in bruising conflicts with teachers unions or parent and customs organizations.

Both Smith and Raymond closed downward schools with low enrollments as budget savings measures. Schoolhouse closures are arguably the about stressful transformations any school district tin experience, because they inevitably trigger resistance from parents and the communities the schools serve, as well every bit the staff in those schools who will either lose their jobs or exist forced to transfer to other schools.

In dissimilarity, Deasy'southward resignation came at a time when the district'due south fiscal outlook had improved dramatically as a result of the state'due south improving economy and the new school financing law that provides near additional funds to districts  based on their enrollment of low-income children, foster youth and English language learners.

In an interview with NPR, Deasy said a major reason he left the district was because of a clash between his advocacy on behalf of "students' rights" vs. "adult and political agendas." That appeared to be code for Deasy's support of a range of reforms opposed by teachers' unions, including the Vergara lawsuit, which seeks changes in teacher tenure and other job protection laws.  At the same time, he said,  "I could have developed and adapted my fashion to have worked with my bosses ameliorate.  Peradventure my pace and fashion I went near it is open up to critique."

Deasy's supporters noted that nether his leadership, graduation rates and test scores had improved. Merely information technology is not clear but how much of these improvements could be attributed direct to Deasy, how much to changes that were in place when he arrived, and how much to the piece of work of teachers and other personnel at the local level.

There has been surprisingly trivial inquiry near what impact superintendent turnover has on pupil academic outcomes. Equally Jason Grissom and Stephanie Andersen noted in their paper, "Why Superintendents Turn Over," published in 2022 in the American Educational Enquiry Journal, "lamentably superintendent turnover lacks a well-developed research base."

In September of this twelvemonth, the Brookings Institution published one of the few quantitative studies on the subject, with the provocative championship, "School Superintendents: Vital or Irrelevant?"

Co-authored by Matthew Chingos, Whitehurst and Matharein Lindquist, the study looked at superintendent turnover in Florida and North Carolina betwixt 2000 and 2010. It constitute that the average tenure was betwixt three and four years – but how long a superintendent was in a district was not correlated with the academic outcomes of its students.

In fact, said Whitehurst in an interview, "nosotros find that which teacher students have makes the almost difference, and later that what school and what district they're in. In that location is little consequence from what superintendent is serving in the district."

I reason that it made fiddling divergence is that superintendents  may not take been in their posts long plenty to issue significant change.

"I've talked to some thoughtful superintendents," Whitehurst said. "Their view is that they actually don't accept control over the levers of alter, they don't have the ability to change the nature of their district'due south workforce, like providing them with differential pay. They are constrained by school boards who oft have advocates within the commune itself, peculiarly teachers."

Whitehurst said superintendents "find it hard to get things done, and frustrations build on both sides, and they go out."

Stanford education professor emeritus Larry Cuban said role of the trouble is that schoolhouse boards often look for a "Superman or Wonder Woman." While these rare superstars may succeed in one district, Cuban noted, they might not in another.

In an October mail service, Cuban wrote:

To lessen the inevitable thwarting that follows the appointment of a savior school chief, mayors and school boards would do well to downsize expectations, display more patience, seek leaders who believe in incremental changes toward cardinal ends, and pay far more attention to sniffing out meliorate matches between the person and the metropolis than betting on a super-star bearing a tin can-plated reputation.

Information technology is possible that with the easing of the Great Recession, and the infusion of funds into urban school districts every bit a effect of the country's reform of its school funding system that California's crop of recently appointed superintendents will confront fewer pressures than some of their predecessors. That could result in them staying longer on the job – and allow them to oversee the full implementation of the Common Core and other reforms underway in their districts.

Regardless of how long they stay,  in that location is widespread agreement that these are exceptionally tough jobs.

"Information technology is not magic, it is not angel dust,"  said Marshall Smith, currently a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for the Advocacy of Teaching. "It is simply hard work."

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