社区黑料

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for 社区黑料 Newsletter

The school year starts again in less than a month, and a remarkable number of big districts in Colorado and elsewhere will open it without a permanent superintendent.

Jeffco. Cherry Creek. Los Angeles. Miami-Dade. I鈥檓 guessing Denver will soon join this group of districts given the Denver school board鈥檚 growing frustrations with Superintendent Alex Marrero鈥檚 top-down leadership, poor performance and his search for other jobs.

That鈥檚 a lot of empty chairs in a lot of big districts, and it got me wondering who鈥檚 going to fill them and whether the pipeline that used to fill them looks anything like it did 20 years ago.

My hunch going in was that running a large school district has gotten harder since the pandemic: more expected of schools on mental health and basic student support, more divisive politics around almost everything a board does. So I decided to check that hunch, with the help of Claude and Google.

These are not low-paying jobs. Tracy Dorland鈥檚 starting salary when Jeffco hired her in 2021 was $260,000, and comparable big-district contracts run higher still ($440,000 for Los Angeles’ starting salary plus benefits). Yet the number of applicants for these jobs seems to be dropping.

Jeffco鈥檚 applicant pool fell from 69 candidates in 2017 to 43 reviewed (only 23 of them formal applications) in 2021. Broward County, Florida, went from 39 applicants in 2021-22 to 26 in 2023, of whom just 15 were considered qualified. Charlotte-Mecklenburg dropped from roughly 52 applicants in 2017 to 37 to 39 in 2023.

And it鈥檚 not just the volume. Max McGee, a longtime superintendent search-firm president, wrote in AASA鈥檚 School Administrator magazine in 2023 that 鈥渋n most of our searches, applicants without previous experience outnumber those with experience by at least 3 to 1.鈥�

School boards aren鈥檛 just getting fewer r茅sum茅s. They鈥檙e getting fewer good ones.

The Council of the Great City Schools鈥� most recent survey puts average tenure at 2.72 years, which is close to where it stood in 2003 (2.80 years). But that flat-looking comparison hides a real story: Tenure climbed through the 2000s, peaking at 3.64 years in 2010, and has been sliding since. The same survey revealed something I found more telling: The predecessor of today鈥檚 average sitting superintendent had served 4.85 years, nearly double the 2.72 current superintendents have logged so far.

It鈥檚 worth remembering how differently this job used to be talked about. Rod Paige, U.S. secretary of education from 2001 to 2005 and Houston鈥檚 superintendent before that, said in April 2004: 鈥淥ur nation is crying out for leadership in education. We鈥檙e asking more from schools and asking for it more quickly,鈥� and, more bluntly, 鈥淚 believe that superintendents are the best agents for change and have a great opportunity at hand.鈥�

Eli Broad put it in CEO terms in his foundation鈥檚 annual report: 鈥淪uccess in any organization starts at the top. With responsibility for curriculum, instruction, facilities, finance, personnel, technology and community relations, school superintendents are chief executive officers of complex and demanding public sector enterprises.鈥�

Not long ago, the right superintendent, especially a non-traditional one, could land on the cover of Time, get regular New York Times coverage and pull in serious money from Gates, Walton, Broad and other foundations to remake a district. That鈥檚 a different world than the one Jeffco, Cherry Creek and Denver are hiring into right now.

I asked Claude to code the r茅sum茅s of every superintendent leading the 20 largest U.S. school districts in 2006, 2011, 2016, 2021 and today. Four traits got tracked for each person: whether they climbed the conventional teacher-to-principal-to-central-office ladder (鈥渢raditional鈥�) or skipped it (鈥渘on-traditional鈥�); whether they鈥檇 led anything outside K-12 education at any point (a company, a law practice, a military command, an elected office); whether their undergraduate degree was in education or something else; and whether that degree came from a conservatively defined selective institution.

The headline finding is a real decline in non-traditional hiring. Non-traditional pathways held flat at 20% from 2006 through 2016, eased to 15% by 2021, then dropped to 5% today. Outside leadership experience climbed after 2006, peaked at 40% in 2011, held around 30% through 2016 and 2021, and fell to 10% in the last few years.

None of that happened by accident. The Broad Superintendents Academy, launched in 2002, set out explicitly to recruit business, law and military leaders into big-city superintendencies, and by 2009-11 its alumni filled 43% to 48% of those, echoing the peak of Claude’s analysis.

All this was also reinforced with federal investments to improve big school districts, whether through programs like Race to the Top or philanthropic investments in school district reform and improvement.

Broad wound down its placement program in 2019, folding it into Yale with a $100 million gift and no distinct K-12 placement pipeline surviving after that. A recent conversation with the current Broad class from Yale found no non-traditional participants.

In summary, the infrastructure that created a broader pipeline for superintendents has been dismantled over the last decade.

A recent study by a team of Stanford researchers on the impact of Broad-trained superintendents showed they had fewer years as superintendents than traditional candidates and no impact on student achievement, but increased charter school enrollment.

Tom Boasberg鈥檚 nearly decade at Denver Public Schools is probably the most-studied case in the state: The district鈥檚 graduation rate rose from 39% in 2007 to 71% in 2019. Enrollment grew by more than 14,000 students at a time most urban districts were shrinking, and an independent comparison-group study found that two years of the district’s reforms produced achievement gains roughly equivalent to six months to two years of additional schooling.

Mike Miles in Houston shows the same tension in miniature, on a faster timeline. Standardized test score gains under his state-appointed leadership are real. But Texas Monthly reported that at least some of that improvement came from restructuring course access, delaying biology until 10th grade and narrowing algebra access. The article quoted a testing coordinator warning that the tactic can 鈥渋ncrease your scores 鈥� at the cost of advanced academics.鈥� It鈥檚 still too early to assess the impact of Miles’ changes in Houston

And then there鈥檚 Roy Romer, the former Colorado governor who ran the Los Angeles district from 2000 to 2006 鈥� proof this pattern isn鈥檛 new. Romer鈥檚 district saw several years of real, sustained gains in reading on both state and national tests, driven by an enormous investment in teacher training. A governor with real political skill produced real gains and then hit a wall, 20 years before Denver, Houston and Chicago would each rediscover some version of the same ceiling.

Regardless of the superintendent鈥檚 background, leadership skills and management training, improving a big, complicated school district is enormously challenging.

So what are school boards supposed to do heading into a 2026 search?

They are going to have to dig deeper and work harder to get great district leaders. They will need to look closely at their own bench and will probably be limited to a pool of traditional district candidates.

With the lack of an outside pipeline and a smaller applicant pool, the job of finding the right person to improve the district is harder than it has ever been.

Here鈥檚 hoping a new generation of philanthropists and national policy leaders will rediscover what Paige and Broad were saying 20 years ago: Great public schools need serious leadership at the top, and the job is worth investing in again. Regardless of whether your preference is for traditional or non-traditional backgrounds for big-district leaders, we will need more effective superintendents and an ecosystem that supports wider and better pipelines for these critical seats.

Until then, Colorado and other school boards are going to have to do the hard, difficult work of finding a leader who can drive district improvement. Choosing and managing the superintendent is the important job of a school board, and it鈥檚 harder than ever today.

A version of this essay appeared on , an independent blog covering public education in Colorado, with a particular focus on Denver Public Schools.

Did you use this article in your work?

We鈥檇 love to hear how 社区黑料鈥檚 reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers.