Please note: This transcript was automatically generated. We have reviewed it to ensure it reflects the original conversation, but we may not have caught every transcription error.

Chris Saldaña: Hi everyone, I'm Chris Saldaña and this is the National Education Policy Center's Talks Education Podcast. This month we're talking about educational leadership and the challenges that have faced school board members and superintendents. This month we interviewed Dr. Rachel White, who's an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin.

She's also the founder and principal investigator of the Superintendent Lab, a central hub for data, research, insights, and innovation on the school district superintendency.

So there's been a whirlwind of changes that have happened in education policy. I think folks are now maybe seeing headlines in the news about the U. S. Department of Education potentially being abolished. And a lot of this rhetoric is about giving control to local states and to local school districts. Your work focuses a lot on the superintendency. You started the superintendent lab, and so I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what inspired the creation of the lab.

And then what would you say are the key areas of research that you focus on?

Rachel White: Sure. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for asking. What inspired the creation of the superintendent lab was a bit of a mix of intentional development of the lab and unintentional. So I think if I look back on my prior experiences, I was a policy analyst for the Michigan Association of School Administrators for a number of years.

And in that role, I saw the important work that superintendents do, particularly in policy spaces the ways that they bring to legislators, governors, state boards of education, information about the ways that policy is going to impact their teachers, their students, their communities, the ways that it may disproportionately impact certain types of students or families, and so by bringing those whether it's hard data or qualitative data to the policymakers they were really able to help legislators and others making policy contextualize what this, the implementation of their idea would look like on the ground.

And in doing so, not always, but many times we're able to effectively shape policy. In ways that was better for kids. And so I just saw what power they have. I saw them effectively change state funding formulas and change seclusion and restraint policy and things like that. And I was doing my doctorate at the time and I just felt like no one that I knew of was like really paying attention to superintendents.

I studied policy implementation and I was just like how are we not studying this group if we're so interested in policy implementation? And so did my dissertation on the superintendency. Or on sorry, did my dissertation looking at state policymakers. And how they make decisions when they're taking a vote on education policy. And one of the things that came out of that study from a national survey of state policymakers was it didn't matter what political party you were. Superintendents were one of the most highly ranked informants in the state policy context.

And so then. My next study, of course, was okay. Let me talk to superintendents because I knew also that some superintendents were super involved in some superintendents didn't feel like it was a good use of their time or that their community didn't value them going to the state house, which may be nine hour drive right to testify for three minutes.

And talked with about 58 superintendents did a national survey to really try to understand their beliefs about an engagement in state policy spaces. And it was really out of that I launched the superintendent lab because that study required me to do to do a national survey of superintendents.

And I thought that I could go to the U. S. Department of Education, download a little spreadsheet that had all their emails in it and send out my nice little survey. And I learned that that didn't exist. Me being me, I was like, I'll just make it like, I'll just make the spreadsheet. Went state by state and in most cases, district by district, because most state directories are not like current, like up to date.

When I was doing the study and collected a first name last name and email of every superintendent and it was in that process that I was getting a little frustrated because it felt like every superintendent's name was like John Stephen Michael and I was like gosh, there's a lot of these and so from there wrote this little article on gender gaps in the superintendency based on first names and I got a lot of traction and people were like, wait, you have all the superintendents?

We've done a lot of work at the state level, at local levels, qualitative work. I was like, yeah, I got them all. You're able to do cool stuff then. Look at variation and gender gaps based on, all sorts of different variables across the nation. And so I was like, you know what, I'm just going to.

This is just gonna be something I continue to do. So really, the superintendent lab came out of those couple of projects. So now the lab is home to the National longitudinal superintendent database. That updates we update it every year. We just finished the update. So this will be the first podcast that I have some new numbers for… We, yeah, have that database.

And the cool thing, I'll talk more about the database later, but we have, it's really grown and evolved to incorporate qualitative data on the nature of attrition, types of attrition. So that's how the lab came to be. It's been really cool to watch it I don't know, change over time already.

I now have seven undergraduate research, researchers that are working with me here at UT Austin, doing all sorts of just research on the superintendency. And so that gets me really excited to just expose people one to the field of education policy research, because that was something I didn't even know I could do but also to the superintendency.

And it's always fun to get them to think about like the importance of the superintendent as well. And I also have now partnered with several state organizations to just bring this data to them. And so really, I want most of my work to be driven by people on the ground and the state association saying, here's what we're dealing with.

And then me be able to say, okay, how can my research, my data be useful to you? And if it's not, how can I add to it, supplement change in some way to make it useful?

Chris Saldaña: You mentioned that. This, that you have found that superintendents are one of the most trusted sources of information for policymakers.

And you also mentioned that some of your early work from the superintendent lab has resulted in you finding that there are gender gaps in the superintendency. In, at a point in time when, diversity is under attack. When you think about these two intersecting facts that superintendents are trusted sources of information and that there tends to be a lack of diversity in the superintendency, what have you found are the implications of that?

Rachel White: Yeah. So I think that's such a good point. And one that I typically always bring up that it is not lost on me that the majority of state legislators across the nation, every there's variation within each state, but the majority are still white men. And the majority of superintendents are also white men.

And so I don't think we can ignore that fact when we hear that state policymakers really respect and value the information that superintendents are bringing to them. Now many, most superintendents are bringing very valuable information, but the question is, if the superintendency were more diverse.

Would that level of trust and the wanting of information be the same? We don't know, right? We could be pleasantly surprised that it, maybe it is, but we just don't know. And so I think that, as we think about, diversifying the superintendency one of the things I think a lot about is this isn't, I don't want to diversify the superintendency just for the sake of, getting different people in the seat.

There's really deep rooted reasons for why having someone with certain backgrounds and experiences and particularly educational experiences, thinking about superintendents who themselves were potentially multilingual learners when they went through school. How many of those do we have in the seat right now who can really understand the student experience from a really personal perspective?

But so there's lots of reasons why we want that diversity, but we can't. Diversify the superintendency and not address the broader social issues around how we treat women and leaders of color potentially differently, and some of the research work that I'm doing right now is looking at gender and racial differences and how superintendents make decisions in politicized contexts, and it's been really interesting just to see the ways that women and particularly black leaders have different systems set up to protect them and I think that's something that we have to think about when we're thinking about diversifying the superintendency, and I always tell the superintendents it's Not necessarily I don't need you typically to change your behavior.

We need the way people are treating you to, to change, right? And so this conversation about superintendent diversity, superintendent and policy spaces and the way that they're treated in policy spaces has to bleed into other conversations with policymakers, state board or state boards and state legislators, but also local boards of education and other organized community groups.

Chris Saldaña: It's interesting to hear you talk about the stressors of the job. Oftentimes, I think the headlines recently have been about teacher shortages, teachers leaving the profession, principal shortages, principals leaving the profession. There hasn't been as much attention to superintendents. Do, you mentioned earlier that there also not only has there not been as much attention in the media, but there hasn't been as much attention in research.

And I'm wondering, what do we know about the superintendency and the, maybe the rate of turnover that we've seen in the United States recently?

Rachel White: Yeah. The rate of turnover has been increasing over the last five years. So the national data set started in 2019. That year turnover was 14%. It has been increasing steadily.

And I just ran the 2024-25 numbers. And we are at about the same rate as what we were last year at a little over 17%. So to me, that's a pretty big number. That's almost one out of every five school districts in the nation experiencing a change in their leader, their CEO. In the past two consistently the past two years.

And so the cool thing that we also do at the lab is anytime that a superintendent turns over, we collect qualitative data on the nature and the type of the turnover. And so the type of turnover is typically decently straightforward. We use only publicly available sources. So that's something really important to know is what do we know about it.

Attrition based on publicly available data, which I believe is an important thing because the position is so public. It's so what does the public know about turnover? That's what we're studying. We're working on another way to for superintendents to actually be able to characterize their own attrition experience, which might give us some additional insight, because for a lot of reasons.

Not everything gets reported into the public sphere. So what we know in terms of the type of turnover, we look at resignations, retirements firing or non-renewed. Unfortunately, we have to look at things like death and arrest and conviction. What we do know is that the proportion of superintendents that are being fired has increased over the last five years.

Nationally it's been at about five and a half five last year. It went all the way up to 6%. And this year, I think it looks like it may have gone down slightly. Somewhere more in the five, five and a half percent. We're still cleaning some of that data. And then that we're also seeing lower numbers.

In the area of retirements. And so the past few years, we are seeing more in the mid forties. This year we're more in the low thirties. But we still have to do a little bit of cleaning for that. So we know that's changing a little bit. And then we also use textual and sentiment analysis to code whether or not the attrition is what we call ostensibly amicable or attrition that takes place in a politicized context or contentious environment.

And we want to emphasize that doesn't mean that the superintendent themselves is political or contentious. It just means the attrition took place in that context. So we look for keywords like, let's see, things like a vote of no confidence, right? Or some sort of way that the there's a separation agreement.

If any of those words are in the news articles we code that as political or contentious. And we know that this past year about 11 percent of turnover was affiliated with politically contentious environments which is quite a big increase from prior years You know in 2020 to 21, it was around eight and a half percent.

So it's just been climbing A little bit if we actually only look we don't force those codes on anyone. So if we actually only look at those that we've coded for our amicable or contentious, the if that's the denominator then it's 13 and almost 13 and a half percent are political or contentious.

Chris Saldaña: I don't know if you've run this analysis, but do you have a sense for how these numbers vary by like location.

So if urban districts large metropolitan districts tend to have a higher rate of politically contentious kind of turnover versus rural districts.

Rachel White: Yeah, so it's complex because we do find that suburban and urban districts are more likely to experience the politically contentious type of turnover, but they also are more likely to have publicly available information around the superintendent turnover, so we do track and we have on the superintendent lab a little like data brief on the nature of districts that we cannot find data on the turnover event, and they do tend to be very rural.

Communities that maybe don't have an online newspaper presence, right? They may still have the physical newspaper within their community. And we do find that they are more likely to happen in those types of places, but it could also be an availability of data issues. So we want to be really careful on how we generalized from that.

We do know that that contentious politicized attrition is significantly more likely to happen to women than men. So last year that number was pretty stark. 16 and a half percent of women experienced contentious or politicized attrition compared to 12 percent for men.

Chris Saldaña: Do we know what the implications are of turnover of superintendents?

Rachel White: We are working on studying some of that and I think it's like it's a challenging thing to study because you know the superintendent depending on the size of the district the superintendent has different impacts on things like principal stability teacher stability and growth student experiences and outcomes even things around school finance, right?

The ability to get a bond or a levy passed. And so of course, what we know from some prior research is that superintendent attrition can has costs to a district. One, it has financial costs. Sometimes if it's political sized or contentious or they're fired, you're having to buy them out of their contracts sometimes for millions of dollars.

And then you have costs legal costs many times, and then you have search firm costs to hire someone new. There's also a cost if it's politicized and particularly, let's take Memphis Shelby County, for example, that recently they hired a leader out of Detroit Public Schools a black woman to serve as their superintendent.

She came in this summer, this past summer and I believe she was just voted out. Lots of politics. You can follow it all on the news. At one point though there was a press conference where it was revealed that her brother received an anonymous phone call that said that they were going to put her sister in a pine box.

So some really terrible just I don't even have words terrible ways that superintendents are being treated that's leading to attrition. And we're seeing that women and particularly women of color are experiencing them at a really high rate. And so when that happens.

It makes me immediately think about who's going to sign up to be in that pool for the next superintendent. So the cost of when you have politicized attrition, and there may, it seems to potentially be impacting women more. How many women are standing in line to say pick me next. I want to experience that too.

And so I think there's real cost potentially to the pipeline. When, what the data is showing is that there are certain groups of superintendents that are. more at risk to experiencing these types of things. But it also maybe helps us better support superintendents to say, Hey, school board superintendent match really matters.

And yes, you have to get your start, but at the same time, think about your own well being and whether the type of community that you really want to maybe get your start in. And if at all possible, if there's supports there for you find that community that really is gonna stand behind you and that school board that's gonna support you, help you grow as a new superintendent.

I just think about those costs. And then, of course, educational costs, right? When there's a lot of churn of superintendents in a district the, that impacts culture within the district. And so every time a superintendent comes in and has their this is my new strategic plan and here's what I really focus on, if they've had three superintendents in five years, how much are the principals and the teachers and even the students going to buy into that vision when what they know Is you're gonna leave in a year or you're gonna get fired in a year, right?

And I do think that there's real cost to culture, from superintendent attrition.

Chris Saldaña: It's so interesting to think about those costs, but then also to think about it's an empirical question whether we are more political now than we have been historically, but it certainly feels like it.

There have been really contentious school board meetings, for example, and I know you've been a school board member in the past and now are focusing on the superintendency and you just wrote a report with John Rogers, Robert Shand and Joseph Khan that explores how cultural and political conflicts affect school districts and in particular what the fiscal implications are of these kinds of contentious issues.

You've already laid out what some of the costs may be related to. the superintendency when there's more political or contentious exit of a superintendent. But what did you all find? Just in general for school districts about the fiscal implications of this moment and some of the politics.

Rachel White: Yeah, of course, so I encourage people to read the report.

It's really it's short. And it is pretty concise But we also have we did interviews with a lot of superintendents across the nation and there are some really powerful vignettes in there to really get a sense of what are we talking about when we talk about like the cost of conflict and what are we talking about when we talk about conflict and where we want to recognize up front that there is healthy conflict.

And that actually schools are one of the best places to model how to have healthy conflict. What we're talking about. For is around culturally divisive conflict. And so what we are focused on is conflict that violates what we think are some of the most basic democratic principles. And so that's focused on inflicting injustices on certain subgroups of students or community members and also culturally divisive conflict has this particular emphasis on threatening behavior, violent rhetoric and the spread of misinformation.

Or just permission. And so we really were focused on how much is that costing us? Because schools always have had conflict, right? We have conflict about who we hire as the football coach. We have conflict around bonds and levies. And those are things that are timeless, right? Have always happened. But there's this new conflict that we really wanted to get after.

And what we find is we look at different types of costs, indirect costs, direct costs, and turnover costs. So the direct costs are things like additional security potentially at school board meetings legal costs that districts are incurring Additional costs we heard a lot of folks talking about hiring additional staff to help manage misinformation and disinformation on the internet, on social media, on, those types of things.

And so those are our direct costs, right? We have the indirect costs, which we calculated based on the amount of time that superintendents are spending on these things or other staff spending. And so we did a whole calculation on the average of how much they make per hour. And so indirect more costs are more of those time costs.

And then we have turnover costs. So we, the national survey that we did we asked if the superintendents could report out if they knew of any staff in their district who actually turned over as a result of the culturally divisive conflict in the district. So adding all of those things up, we found that the total cost of culturally divisive conflict in the 23-24 school year nationally was 3.

2 billion with a B. And of course, the cost for districts varies some, what we found is, some districts have a lot of conflict and other districts don't have a lot of conflict, right? And so there are probably a smaller number of districts that are driving some of these costs.

But what was interesting about looking at these costs and just the distribution of who's experiencing them is that almost every district reported experiencing some culturally divisive conflict. And if you think about it, something small in a district of 120 kids can have a really big impact on and potentially like how much money you get to spend per pupil.

Even if it's a relatively small cost. So there was that and the other thing that was interesting is we weren't so far seeing any strong patterns on culturally divisive conflict and the cost being secluded to certain types of states or locales and so there's really no rhyme or reason.

Which is a little bit I think challenging to address them because we can't say Oh, this is happening in rural districts in blue states, right? And we can say, okay, we really need to like, focus on supporting those superintendents. It's no, there were not really seeing any strong correlations or predictors of where this conflict is coming.

It's happening in red states, blue states, purple states, urban areas, rural areas, it doesn't matter. And so it also, though, I think just emphasizes, is How much this has permeated across the United States and that it's costing all kinds of districts across the United States, a lot of money.

Chris Saldaña: I want to ask you about the implications of this, but I want to ask you about it in two ways. One way is to think about what are the implications. both in terms of looking at the superintendency, but then also in terms of thinking about the costs associated with our current political environment. What does that mean for practice?

Like for folks who are in the job right now, superintendents, school board members, even principals or teachers. What does this tell us about their work?

Rachel White: Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good question. Gosh, I think if I had this I think for superintendents this, these costs are hard to quantify.

Sometimes they're hard to explain to community and to school boards more public schools, right? Like we are open to our communities and we want to hear their voices, right? And so I think at the most local of levels, really, Thinking about and finding resources and supports that help superintendents, school boards, principals, everyone communicate out to the community the importance of civil discourse, right?

And that doesn't mean that we don't have peaceful protests. It doesn't, like those things are all really important in the project of democracy that we're in. But like, how do we make sure that we're doing it in a way that is not. dangerous, right? In that same that cost of conflict study, we asked a question of superintendents around the extent to which they had different personal experiences because of the conflict.

And we had 50 percent of super over 50 percent of superintendents said that last year they had at least one instance where they were harassed 10 to 11%. that they had experienced at least one time stalking, property vandalism threats of personal violence, right? And I say these things not to scare people away from going into the superintendency because I think most people knew that going into the superintendency is, it's a very public position and you're very much like a sort of public administrative position within a community.

And it's not an easy job, but I think when I think about educators, I think the implications of this are like we, we have to support each other right now. We have to check in on each other right now. But we also have to be talking to our communities. And I think right now that also feels really hard because what we do know is that some of the conflict that They're experiencing, whether you're the superintendent or somewhere else, is not necessarily from grassroots people, right?

We know, we asked in the survey actually what proportion is coming from people in your community versus people who don't even live in your community, or maybe not even in your state, who are coming in and inflicting these, this conflict in, on your district. And so that's a whole thing that I honestly would love people to continue to study is how do you help support districts that are dealing with conflict that is not truly because of people within their local community that have different values and are pushing for something You know, so I think that's the other thing and then I think from the superintendent and school board standpoint one of the things that they can really do is model like healthy conversation and conflict within their public meetings within, any sort of communication that they have out to the district.

So I think that part's really important is just showing that particularly at this time where things It's not even that things feel conflictual. Things are conflictual in our nation, and there's a lot of divisiveness happening. And so how can school boards and superintendents work together to say many school boards are diverse, right?

Particularly in terms of political leanings and many super school boards are nonpartisan on paper, right? And so the focus is supposed to be on what's best for kids. And how can we demonstrate how to have these conversations and make decisions in a way that comes to consensus and to recognize that in the system that we have.

A decision is going to have to get made about something and not everyone's going to get what they want. That's just the reality, right? But that doesn't mean that we can't ensure that people feel like they were heard, they had space to be heard, and that their opinion is valued and taken into account.

And then at the end of the day, be able to have a conversation, say, this is the decision that we made. And here's why. And we really want you to get behind this and support it through a consensus sort of process. Yeah, that, that part's hard. The sort of, I was talking to my dad about this.

We have a podcast coming out with Jack Schneider where I interview my dad. And it was actually, he's been a school board member for 37 years. And that was his big thing, like that he talked about for a good time. It's You don't, you, I'm not always going to get what I want, and the vote that I ultimately, make may not necessarily be what I would have done personally, but it's the vote that I made because I listened to the community and that's what they want, right?

And there, there were some in the community that didn't want that. This, so it's it is a complex thing.

Chris Saldaña: You describe the local policymaking process as something that, that can be really beautiful, a really beautiful democratic process that if done well can really result in civil discourse.

And when you think about that process and the individuals involved and the role of policymakers that are at the state and federal level. Is there a role for state and federal policymakers or what might that role be in terms of ensuring that the local policymaking process can function as it's intended?

And maybe I know this is a huge question, so it's like, how do we solve all of the problems that are going on in district right now? But as you think about your work in the superintendency and then the work that you've done with school boards. What does that relationship look like between that policymaking process and then, our state and federal?

Laws and governance.

Rachel White: Yeah. Yeah. I think at a really personal level. It's that both levels can recognize and acknowledge their purpose, right? And be really clear about what that is and to recognize, state legislators to recognize superintendents have typically around 20 years of experience in the field of education they have oftentimes at least a graduate degree, most times a PhD.

They have done many years of education and training and all of these things. And they were selected by their local community. They were the best one that their local community is I want this person to lead my district. I trust this person. I value this person. And so for the state or the federal government to say they don't know.

What is good for the kids in that community? I think that's a little like questionable. And so I think it's respecting the expertise and experience that they bring to the community and that their local governing unit picked them to lead it. So don't make their job harder That needs to be and so I think Thinking at the state and federal level around what's your purpose, right?

Is your purpose to be getting your hands dirty around what books people are putting in libraries? When at the end of from what I understand, many people want that to be, want people's To people in the community to have their voice heard and say, we really want this type of book in our library and, that's a local decision.

I'm like, I feel like I'm at a loss for words because it's very confusing to me. The way that we have shifted our behavior because from what came up through political science and public policy and like thinking about political parties and historically how they've operated and the Republican Party being more on the side of local control and respecting that every locale has different needs.

Thinking about education, even if you want to think about education as like a workforce development tool, right? Like a way and we want to. Decentralize the governance. So that way, my local community where I grew up on a centennial farm, instead of taking biology, I took two years of agriculture.

That was a local decision that my school board made because that was the like profession that many people pursued in my community. And I was under the assumption that we are a lot, some of the rationale was. The locals need to have control because they know what's best for their community.

And so I think at the state and federal level, it's okay, what things do we need to have our hands in? And I think for me, what it comes down to is What are the things that are necessary to ensure that every kid is going to have equitable access to high quality learning experiences And what do we need to do to just make sure that is the baseline?

So things like IDEA, Title 1 Title 9 like those yes, like that is the role of the government to say here like at a minimum This is what we want to ensure That every kid, no matter what their zip code, is going to have access to. And then that sort of gets moved down to the state level, right? Where you can say, okay.

Michigan, like we have in Wisconsin, like we have these bodies of water and maybe we like have a certain type of education that we like want to provide because we need a workforce that can be, I don't know, that's it right. Versus someone in a new England state may have some different priorities or someone in the far West may have different priorities.

So the state gets to set some additional priorities to say, Oh, by the way, we also want to make sure we have this minimum experience around this. But without getting into the weeds of forcing the locals to make decisions that maybe are not are being made at a level from people who maybe have very little experience in education particularly in educating students that's in increasingly diverse public schools, right?

So I think just but I, I will just say one more thing. I think our locals and the superintendents also have to at least recognize and acknowledge and be. In the know about what's happening at the state and federal level and understand that this is in the United States. This is our form of governance.

And knowing our rights and our responsibilities is really important at the local level, but also, being able to talk to legislators and recognize that they are under different pressures, oftentimes. And so how do you build relationships with them? As we started this conversation off like to be able to share with them the ways that they're policies are going to impact them regardless of their political party.

Now, I don't want superintendents to sacrifice their emotional or psychological well being by having to interact with folks that maybe, are disrespectful towards them. But I think, yeah. We do at the local level do need to recognize that these people are also human beings that are making these policies that have feelings and emotions.

And so how can we develop those relationships with them while also acknowledging that. In many states, the education budget is competing with the transportation budget, which is also competing with the environment like conservation budget, right? And so they're having to make hard decisions and we don't have an unlimited amount of money.

And so to be able to recognize that and recognize that they're making decisions in a constrained environment is, I think, important in many ways.

Chris Saldaña: Thank you, Dr. White, for being on this month's podcast. As always, we hope you're safe and healthy. And remember, for the latest analysis on education policy, you should subscribe to the NEPC newsletter at nepc.colorado.edu.