Build Momentum for Education - K-12 Superintendent Series

S05E10 - The Superintendent Lab | Dr. Rachel White, University of Texas at Austin

• Sarah Williamson and Chad Bolser / Dr. Rachel White • Season 5 • Episode 10

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In this episode of Build Momentum, we are joined by Dr. Rachel White, Founder and Lead Researcher at The Superintendent Lab, a hub for data, research, insights, and innovation on the public school district superintendency. She is currently the Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. White has also taught at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and Old Dominion University and has served as a school board member and volunteer coach at Van Wert City Schools in Ohio. She is a member of the University Council for Education Administration, the American Educational Research Association, and the Association for Education Finance and Policy. 

Some Questions We Ask:

  • Tell us about yourself and The Superintendent Lab. (01:31)
  • How do you humanize the role of superintendents and incorporate that in your research? (04:26)
  • In what ways did the RAND study inspire your research? (08:08)
  • How has scrutiny of the superintendency changed over the years, and is turnover being addressed by retention programs? (11:52)
  • In your research, have you looked at partnerships between superintendents and the community? (16:07)
  • Which of your research findings are most alarming? (18:34)
  • In your opinion, how will the new administration impact K-12 leadership? (24:48)
  • How can the community support and advocate for superintendents? (28:06)
  • Tell us more about your hopes for The Superintendent Lab. (30:26)

In This Episode, You Will Learn:

  • All about Dr. Rachel White and The Superintendent Lab (01:40)
  • Humanizing superintendents (04:34)
  • Dr. White’s research (08:13)
  • Scrutiny of the superintendency and retention programs to address turnover (12:22)
  • Partnerships between superintendents and the community (16:33)
  • Research findings that alarm her (18:40)
  • Impacts of the new administration on K-12 leadership (24:58)
  • Advocating for superintendents at the community level (28:22)
  • Hopes for The Superintendent Lab in the future (30:32)

Quotes:

“Superintendents that have strong trusting relationships with their school board—and particularly their school board president—are significantly less likely to be job seeking.”

“What we know is that principal stability impacts teacher stability, and we know teacher stability does impact students outcomes and educational experiences, right? So it's sort of like doing a stepwise process to get to what is the impact of superintendent turnover.”

“Any sort of changes at the federal level may mean that superintendents really have to step up right and make sure that we continue to say, ‘We are going to serve every kid that walks in our door, and we're going to do whatever it takes to do that.’”

Stay in touch with Dr. Rachel White:
LinkedIn
The Superintendent Lab website
Email: rachel.white@austin.utexas.edu


Stay in touch with Sarah Williamson:
SWPR GROUP Website
LinkedIn

Stay in touch with Chad Bolser:
LinkedIn

About "The Secret to Transformational Leadership," which Sarah co-authored with Dr. Quintin Shepherd:
Transformational Leadership Secret website
Purchase the print or ebook

Sarah Williamson:

Hello and welcome to Build Momentum for Education, a Podcast where we explore thought leadership in Education. I'm Sarah Williamson, the founder of SWPR Group, an agency that supports public relations, communication strategies and thought leadership support for school districts, education companies and nonprofit organizations.

Chad Bolser:

And I'm Chad Bolser, Chancellor at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana. This season, we explore a particularly unique perspective in K 12 thought leadership, humanizing the role of the superintendent.

Sarah Williamson:

Throughout the many conversations we continue to have with superintendents, a clear theme has emerged about the need to bring more humanity into the role of the superintendency. In this special series, we interview current and former superintendents and researchers to pursue the core question, how can we better see superintendents as real people navigating complex challenges to provide the best possible education for K 12 students?

Chad Bolser:

We dig deeper into how this important work can help build community, invite collaboration and increase widespread engagement.

Sarah Williamson:

We can't wait to get started. So let's dive in. We're so fortunate today to have Rachel White, the Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin on the show with us. She's also the founder of the Superintendent Lab. Welcome Rachel.

Rachel White:

Thank you for having me.

Sarah Williamson:

Yes, we're really excited to get into some data today. Would you mind sharing that you're doing, particularly with the Superintendent lab, and why you're focusing so much on superintendents these days?

Rachel White:

Sure, yeah. So I'll start with the second half of the question on why I started focusing on them. So I was a former policy analyst with the Michigan Association of School Administrators, and worked really closely with superintendents across the state. Just anytime a new state policy was coming down the pipeline. And what I saw very quickly in that role was that superintendents had a really big impact on what was happening in schools through their political advocacy work at the state house. And so I was getting my PhD at the time, working some time there, and I just felt like in the world of higher ED and leadership, we weren't paying a whole lot of attention to training and supporting superintendents. So ended up starting some research looking at superintendents engagement in state policy spaces, and that led me to build the National Longitudinal Superintendent Database. It kind of got built by accident. I thought that the US Department of Education had some spreadsheet I could just download with all of the superintendents names and email addresses, and I quickly learned that that didn't exist. And so for that project, I actually went state by state, and in most cases, district by district, and hand collected every superintendent's name so that way I could administer a survey, and then I did 50 plus interviews with superintendents across the US. And so it was really through that project that led to the Superintendent Lab, which really at its very core, is also the home of the National Longitudinal Superintendent Database, which is now six years old, almost. So we have around, oh gosh, I'm gonna get this wrong. I think it's around 68,000 superintendent year data points. So we're able to do some really cool stuff around superintendent attrition and mobility. The only data set that allows us to look at mobility across state lines, and we can look at variations based on gender. We're incorporating race into the data set this year and things like that. So that has really what drove me was my personal experience seeing the impact that superintendents have, and then being in the world of higher ed and being like, no one's paying attention to this. And then also after that, I was a School Board Member and became School Board Vice President, and that was during COVID, and just saw how quickly things were changing in terms of the work of the superintendency and the really unique challenges that they were facing. And I just wanted to sort of double down and really focus in and doing research that hopefully can support better, healthier, more humanizing work environments for superintendents.

Chad Bolser:

Well, first of all, thank you for all of that work. That's amazing stuff, but thank you for being a school board member that is a thankless position that only the brave get involved in. But my question here is, throughout this podcast series, we've been looking at exploring the question, how do you humanize the superintendency? So have you considered, and I heard you say, a little bit of this, that perspective in any of your research?

Rachel White:

Yeah. So I think the most blatant way that I do that as a researcher is that we have the NLSD, the National Longitudinal Superintendent Database. And I really I have, oh gosh, six or seven undergraduates that work with me in the lab, helping collect data, clean data, analyze data, and we go through a whole training process at the beginning. And I really talk about how every single line in this data is a person. It's a human being that has feelings, that often has families, and that wakes up every morning and makes a cup of coffee, just like you do, right? And so I really try to emphasize that as you're collecting the data, we need to be really respectful. We're not going to ascribe gender or race to people unless we know for sure that that's how they self identify. And then I think the biggest shift that we had after the first two years is what I noticed in a lot of the research around superintendent attrition and turnover, is that we are just treating it as a 01, right, the superintendent stayed or left, right? But behind every staying or leaving as a story, right? A human beings deciding to stay or leave or being pushed out. And so the NLSD now has a qualitative component to the database. So anytime a superintendent turns over, we identify all publicly available sources that we can to identify both the nature and the type of the turnover. Type is relatively easy to find, typically, so retire, resign, fired or non renewed. Unfortunately, we have to code for things like death or arrest and conviction, but we code all of those things because I do think that a district that experiences attrition through retirement may be in a different place after that transition than a district that experiences attrition through a really contentious firing process, right? And so starting to really think through, how do we sort of humanize this process? And then we also code, we use textual and sentiment analysis, and we code publicly available sources on whether or not the attrition is what we call ostensibly amicable. So the superintendent, you know, retired, there was a parade. They got a plaque, the football field got named after them, right? Everything seemed fine, versus what we call attrition that takes place in a politicized context or contentious environment. So we have keywords. We look for things like Separation Agreement, voter no confidence, you know, let go under conditions that can be discussed, those types of things, right? So for every superintendent that turns over, we have links, we have text, and we have coding of what the nature of that turnover really looked like. And we're able to look at, are we seeing differences in the types of turnover happening across women and men, across white superintendents, versus superintendents of color, those types of things. And so I think that part is really, really important. And then the last piece is just, I'm a mixed methodologist by training, so all of the work that I do will have this quantitative component to it, but I'm always going to have interviews with superintendents to try to see what is the why and of how behind this. And so it's really important for me to be out in the field talking with superintendents to get their stories. And really my goal is actually with a lot of this attrition and mobility research, if you go on the Lab website, you'll see I have maps that have sort of like moving dots all over and my goal is to be able to capture individual stories of those dots. And people could actually click in and see, like, why did this person move from Maine to Washington? Right? Like, and let that superintendent tell their story.

Sarah Williamson:

Yeah, wow, that's a lot of work. And I'm wondering how you even keep track of it all. That's pretty impressive, how every single move. I'm also curious. So you probably have heard of the RAND study in 2022 and 2023 Of course, everyone was talking about how superintendents have one of the most stressful jobs in America. Did that inspire you to do some digging on your own? What have you uncovered in your research?

Rachel White:

Yeah, yeah. A lot of the work that I do focuses on how superintendents navigate politically contentious environments. Attrition is sort of an outcome of that, but it's not, you know, the input. And so a lot of what I do, I do a lot of survey research and a lot of interviews. And so a couple of projects right now are just trying to better understand how superintendents are making decisions. Like, what is their decision making process look like in politicized environments? Seeing some really, I think, probably not like earth shattering, but some interesting differences across gender and across race. Women in the interviewee sample are more frequently, more likely to talk about ways to utilize policy and collaboration as sort of a protection mechanism when they make decisions. So they really want to have a process that their school board knows that they follow, and they're always going to bring in other people to help them make decisions. That was less frequent among white men, not all right, but in our interview sample, particularly white men that have been in the position for quite some time, there actually sometimes was bit of a like, I'm not sure what the question is, right? Because they didn't they, you know, oftentimes are not questioned as frequently about the decisions that they make. People trust them, right? And we know from lots of other research, outside of education, just social science research, that women, leaders and leaders of color are just questioned in their decision making much more frequently. So we're seeing that in the superintendency, but in terms of, like, the stress of the job, yeah, it's really rough right now. There, for sure, some of the things that we're seeing, I don't know if we'll get to it, but we just did a big National Survey on the Cost of conflict to school districts and superintendents. And so a couple of things that really stuck out to me around the superintendents is that in the last school year, so 2023 24 we asked how frequently superintendents felt fearful or worried about their safety or the safety of their family, and about a little over a third of them said that they did feel at least once last year that they were worried about their safety or the safety of their family. Around 50% of superintendents said in the last year they experienced harassment or saw disrespectful images or comments of themselves online at least one time. Around 10% of superintendents said that they experienced stalking, property vandalism or threats of personal violence at least one time in the last year. And I think some people read that, and I think like, oh, well, it's only 10% but we know that anything above 0% is unacceptable in this category. These are human beings, right? Like they do not deserve to have their cars or their homes vandalized, personal threats of violence, actual violence towards them. So it is a really stressful job right now. We're seeing increasing to the proportion of sort of political pressure coming from outside of the district. And so I think superintendents are trying to figure out, like, how do I respond to things like people submitting book ban forms that don't even live in the district, or coming to school board meetings and pushing on things when, like, they're not actual residents, parents, community members. So I think politics is changing so quickly, and I've heard a couple people say this, I'm still sort of grappling with it, because I think a lot of politics is still very local, but I do think that we're feeling like it's shifting a little bit from all politics is local to like some politics is local, but we're seeing some politics coming from sort of this national level as wellnow.

Chad Bolser:

I know that you feel like this is not statistically based, and I feel bad saying it to you as a researcher, but it feels like there's a high level of turnover from the superintendency that we are experiencing that in and around the districts that we serve, certainly in this area, and I think that's not just in this area, but across the country. So my question is, how do you think scrutiny has impacted and changed for the superintendent over the year? And I think the second part of the question I want to add on is, do you see or know of any superintendent retention programs that are are being in place? The best practice of that we talk about employee turnover a lot. I'm not sure that we do about the people that are in you know, what are we doing about retention of those that are in charge of those districts?

Rachel White:

Yeah, yeah. I think you're right. I think, you know, obviously, with social media and just the proliferation of, you know, publicly available information on the internet, the stories around superintendent scrutiny are out there. So it's really hard for as a researcher, for me to like, who's not a historian, for me to say, like it's increased, right? All I can say is that it feels like a lot. I can say from the database that the proportion of Superintendent turnover that's affiliated with political contention or conflictual environment has increased from 9% to 14% over the last few years. Now is that we're able to find more publicly available sources that are covering it over the last five years. We don't know right like and we need to be really open and transparent about that. But what we are seeing is it's more frequently reported that superintendents are turning over in these conflictual and political contexts. And so I think some things that we saw that were very common over the past few years that did not, at least publicly reported, seem as common. Are things like superintendents being fired without cause, right? That was very uncommon before COVID. And I think, you know, the scrutiny of the superintendent, I think, has the feeling that I get when I do my interviews and I'm looking at the data, is that we're trying to find quick fixes, oftentimes, to problems. And I wonder how much of that is related to school board elections, right? And that if your term is two years and you need to get reelected, and you know, like, are you more likely to potentially come in and want to fire the superintendent right away? Because there's a big group of folks in your community that don't think he's a great person, and whatever it is, I don't know, right? But I think we can't be talking about this without talking about sort of the nature of school board elections and the pressures that school board members might be under, as well as who has access to run for school board and things like that. So in terms of retention, best practices, I think there's been a couple of states. I know Oregon did. I think maybe a couple other states have considered this, but they have changed their state policy that prevent some of this firing without cause. On the spot. If you're going to remove a superintendent. I think this, ever you should definitely check this. But I believe Oregon says you have to give them a certain sort of, like, heads up, period. And so I think those types of things are helpful. Of course, there's always exceptions, right? Like, if a superintendent was engaging in behavior that's illegal, like, yes, we need to remove that person from that position, right? But if it's due to politics, right? Like, these are things that are not healthy for school districts. And so I think states and state associations that are supporting superintendents, as well as other national organizations supporting superintendents, are all kind of looking for what are these sort of policy changes that we might be able to make within superintendent contracts that protect them a little bit more from turnover, or that is affiliated with the political sort of whims of the school board or of the community? I don't know that we have a great answer for that yet, but what I can say is that we do know that superintendents that have strong trusting relationships with their school board, and particularly their school board president, are significantly less likely to be job seeking. That was from a study that I did in 2023 so we actually found in that study that superintendents that were experiencing higher levels of contention were not more likely to be job seeking than those that were not, but superintendents that had better relationships with their board were less likely to be job seeking. So politics wasn't pushing superintendents out, perhaps because superintendents have this perception of politics is everywhere. It's like, I'm gonna go to the next district, and it's going to be there too. But what is keeping them from looking to go somewhere else is those positive relationships with their board.

Sarah Williamson:

That is interesting. Yeah, so I'm curious. You just touched on trust and relationships with their board. One of the things we continue to hear from superintendents we're interviewing in this series, and one of our beliefs is that when superintendents partner with their communities to help solve problems really collaboratively. They can build trust and they're more effective. Have you found this to be true in any of the research? Or have you looked into that at all?

Rachel White:

Yeah, I think there's lots of research around the importance of community engagement, coming in as a leader and being inclusive in your decision making processes, being culturally responsive and respectful of the local communities, you know, values and culture. And I think those are all things, you know, in higher ed, particularly as we're preparing superintendents, I think we really try to focus on right. You can't come in like a bull in a china shop and just say this is the right thing to do, you know? And sometimes you do have to come in, and that district does need to take a hard look at itself and think about it. Maybe there's like one thing right that the board really wants you to focus on, and the community seems really resistant to it, and you got to get them on board, right? But I do think that there's plenty of research to show that collaborative approaches to governance and to leadership, and then ones that really respect the local community and local culture are the ones that you know are gonna be more long lasting. I think that's also what's challenging. And what I've seen in sort of some anecdotes of superintendents who leave and then come back home, oftentimes, I call it the Lebron James effect, where they like, come back home and everyone's like, really excited that they're back, but then they face these really unique challenges, right? Because everyone does know them, and they're kind of seen as this, like, sometimes seen as the Savior who's coming back home, and maybe their values, you know, they learn some things, right? When they went out, they got a PhD, they were superintendent somewhere else, maybe two other places, for a number of years, and they come back, and they have these ideas that and this evidence of like, what really works, right? And the community might be resistant to that. So I think that those are actually some of the harder relationships to foster, collaboration and trust are the Lebron James effect relationships.

Chad Bolser:

Rachel, I can't tell you how excited I am about the Lebron James effect weaving itself into this podcast. This will make me smile for the rest of the season. But my question for you is, what are some of the most alarming or concerning findings that you have discovered through your research?

Rachel White:

I think for me, what's most concerning is honestly the inequities across districts and across gender and race. And so let me give you one example. This is really specific, but one of the things we can look at is Superintendent mobility across state lines, and we collect all the extra data on why, right? The qualitative stuff. And so there's not a whole the sample is not huge. There's not that many that move across state lines. But what we find is that white men are significantly more likely to retire and then move across state lines and get another position. So they are collecting their pension in their prior state and then collecting a second salary, right? We literally have two women in the last four years who have moved across state lines after retiring and are collecting a second salary. And I shared this data at a conference, and someone immediately like, raise their hand on their back. They're like, what do you think of that? Like, well, it's a good question. But I paused and I said, You know what? I think if this opportunity were actually available to everyone right, equally and equitably, maybe I wouldn't be so upset about it. But what I'm seeing is that it's not right? That there is one group of superintendents who somehow have more access to this and in part, it may be because men come to the superintendency much earlier in life, right? And so they have the opportunity sometimes to move to two different states, right? Because they're able to get to this position by the time they're 36, 37 years old, women often come to the superintendency, and leaders of color often come to the superintendency much later in their career, for lots of different reasons, for discriminatory reasons, because they kept a try and try and try for reasons that we've been socialized to think that we have to be overqualified before we're actually qualified for the job, and so we don't apply until we get more and more education and more and more experience. And so those may be some reasons, right, that by the time the woman has done her superintendency, she's like, I'm ready to like, real, for real, for real, retire. And so I think those things are the things that are concerning to me at the individual level of the superintendency, just the differential treatment concerned a little bit with the superintendent search process. It's a big black box that's really hard to uncover in terms of who's applying, who's making it to the finalist rounds, those types of things. But we need a lot more work in that area to understand where the biases are coming in, and where we can better support and mentor aspiring superintendents. And then the last thing would just be the inequities across districts. And so what we find in the attrition research is that districts leading larger proportions of students living in poverty, larger proportions of students of color, are significantly more likely to experience multiple superintendent turnover events in a short amount of time. And so we know how important stability and leadership is to work towards the vision and to as we just talked about develop relationships and trust with community. And if we just have a spinning door of superintendents coming through every couple of years, that's really hard to do. And so I think we really need to think about, how do we stabilize the superintendency and districts that are serving students of color and serving larger populations of students living in poverty.

Sarah Williamson:

Yeah, that's interesting. Rachel, one of the things Doug Roberts from the Institute for Education for Innovation, is always trying to talk about and prove is a long superintendent tenure is equal to increased student outcomes. And that's an interesting correlation to make. I know that's not something that's readily available, but it would be nice to see that data over time.

Rachel White:

Yeah, yeah. I think that's one of the things. If we go back, we circle all the way back up to the start of the conversation where talking about humanizing the superintendency, I think that's one of the biggest examples of the way that we really try to humanize the superintendency. Is like, what data are we connecting the NLSD to? And so we've actually been asked multiple times to connect the NLSD to student outcome data, and I have not done that yet, and kind of told myself when I built the data set that I wouldn't do it. Because I think when we hear the term student outcome oftentimes, we immediately go to stay standardized test scores, right? And for me, I just will not connect my data set to state standardized test scores, to a student taking a single test on a single day with no understanding of whether or not they slept in a warm bed last night. They had a warm meal that morning, like we don't understand, right? And so I think if I do think that we can connect this data to other types of outcomes that are really important and that can get at, you know, students experiences in schools. And in doing that, though, I always think about what's in the locus of control of a superintendent, what is their like zone of proximity? So some of the work that I'm doing now is looking at the relationship between superintendent stability and principal stability, right? Because what we know is that principal stability impacts teacher stability, and we know teacher stability does impact students outcomes and educational experiences, right? So it's sort of like doing sort of a step wise process to get to what is the impact of Superintendent turnover. It's not just that the superintendent turns over and the test scores drop, right? Like, it's that what is the like logic between what's happening and so what I really want to do with this data set is connect it to those types of things, potentially, right? Connecting superintendent turnover, like when a new superintendent comes in, do we see changes in how they're spending, how they allocate resources, right? Like, that's something that is very much in the control of the superintendent, oftentimes pending School Board approval, that no impact student outcomes. And so how do we connect this data set to those types of things, but doing it in a way that's really respectful of like, what can the superintendent control and what's in their zone of proximity.

Sarah Williamson:

Okay, amazing. Well, I look forward to that data, so let us know. We can't wait to see it.

Rachel White:

Yeah.

Sarah Williamson:

So I'm curious. We have to ask this question, how do you think the new administration is going to impact K 12 leadership?

Rachel White:

Oh, goodness,

Sarah Williamson:

Sorry.

Rachel White:

Good question. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I've been reading a lot about this stuff on, you know, the US Department of Education, whether or not, sort of dismantling that is even feasible, you know, in the current political environment, seems challenging at this point. But, you know, people are definitely saying he could shift some things like OCR over to the Department of Justice. He could shift the student loans, you know, over to Treasury, those types of things. I do know in his last administration that a lot of positions at US, Department of Ed just went unfilled, and so, like, capacity may drop. And so I think about, you know, how that impacts the work of the superintendency. I think if anything, like, first and foremost is there's a bit of unsureness right around the federal funding, around the federal role in protecting students. Right? The federal role, really, when I think about it, is around protecting students rights, protecting students with disabilities, protecting students who are identified as English learners in our communities, protecting students who are living in poverty through title one funding right, and the responsibility is that we as public school districts have to serve every single one of the kids that walks through our doors. I just I think about the ways that any sort of changes at the federal level may mean that superintendents really have to step up right and make sure that we continue to say we are going to serve every kid that walks in our door, and we're going to do whatever it takes to do that, I think, related to a lot of the work that I do around politics and conflict, I will say like I am concerned that over the last few years, superintendents have increasingly been experiencing politicized attrition, and now you know, are experiencing harassment, threats, are fearful for their lives, and it's really hard for me, I think, to be optimistic that those things will change for the better, because we just selected someone in office who has used derogatory terms towards women and and leaders of color, and when the President of the United States has said those things, that emboldens people to say those same things in their local communities. And so I worry for the safety of superintendents, particularly women superintendents and black, Hispanic, Asian, American superintendents, superintendents identify as LGBTQ community members, superintendents with disabilities. I just worry for their safety, and so I'm hopeful that, you know, we as a nation are better than that, but I've seen it unfold over the past. You know, few years when someone leading our nation was not saying those things, and we saw immediately, in the aftermath of the election, people already being emboldened to use hateful and violent rhetoric. And so yeah.

Chad Bolser:

So one of the things when we talk to folks on this podcast, we find ourselves being more fan, you know, bigger fans of superintendents and school leaders and those folks that think and do this work all the time. What can we do on the ground, folks that are not in those positions, that are maybe not researchers like yourself, that can do on the ground to be a better support system, things that we can do for our school leaders at the community level?

Rachel White:

Yeah, yeah, that's a really good question. Thank you for asking that. I think I tell superintendents this when I'm talking about, like, how they engage in state policy context, but I would say, I would say the same thing to parents and community members and how they engage in local policy context is, don't just be the no person and don't just be the complainer. So when a superintendent does something right, great, does something that you appreciate, or like a quick email or a note to them is, you know, that takes 30 seconds out of your day, and it is something really simple, but oftentimes all superintendents get are complaints. And so just a note to say, you know, thank you for doing all that you do, I think is really, really helpful. And so I think the other things that we can do to support superintendents is be present. I think so much of what superintendents are dealing with right now is misinformation and disinformation. We actually trying to pull this up. So in our cost of conflict study, we asked superintendents how often they were dealing with misleading, inaccurate or false information about district policies and practices, and 95% said they had dealt with at least one time last year. About a quarter of them said they were dealing with it on a weekly basis, or more frequently. And so I think just reading, being in the know, not going out on social media, and spreading information that you don't have factual evidence is true can go a really long way right now for superintendents. I think that is in the interviews that we've done that is one of the biggest things that they're dealing with is just constantly trying to put out fires, because community members are going on Facebook and saying, look, look what I think happened, right? And then people take that for fact, and so being really cognizant of being informed and not spreading misinformation.

Sarah Williamson:

Yeah, that's a good suggestion. And I'm curious. Okay, we've talked about a lot of doom and gloom today, but there are reasons to be hopeful. What are you hopeful about through your work that you're doing at the superintendent lab and tell us about it?

Rachel White:

Yeah, yeah. So I'm hopeful that my hope as a researcher, and why I do this work, is that by just bringing these issues to light, we can actually have data and evidence and informed conversations that then can lead to, you know, positive change. And so I think we haven't had this data before on the nature of turnover. We haven't had a national database that allows us to really be tracking what states are closing gender gaps. What states are gender gaps widening in? Are there certain policies in those states that maybe are contributing to that. And so I don't think that we can necessarily make great policy change unless we know what's happening. And so I am, you know, hopeful and optimistic that by having the data, we're actually able to make some sort of positive change by saying, here's what we can see is happening, here's the trends, here's the voices of superintendents, right telling us how and why this is happening, and then we can actually think about what are some of the policy or practical changes that we need to make, as opposed to just sort of guessing what the issue is. And so my one example of this is in Wisconsin. It was a year ago. Wisconsin had a lot of Superintendent turnover happening, and a legislator felt that potentially one of the reasons why there was so much turnover is because the certification and education requirements were too high, right? And so they removed the requirements around superintendent certification in the state, and I don't think there's any evidence at all out there to support that. The reason why superintendents are not going into this profession, or people are not going into the profession, or are leaving the profession, is because the certification requirements are too high. Can we be better at preparing superintendents? Can we improve our superintendent certification training. I am sure we can, but I don't think that's the reason why we're struggling to find people to apply to Superintendent jobs, and why superintendents are leaving their jobs. And so I'm hopeful that this data can actually inform those conversations and inform legislators and policy makers to say, here are some of the things that we know actually are contributing to these things, and so how can we think about policies that are evidence and data informed?

Chad Bolser:

Well, I'm certain that folks that are listening wish that we had spent two hours talking to you, because the amount of information here is great and brings up a lot more questions, but we are at the end of this. So where can our listeners learn more about you and connect to you directly?

Rachel White:

Sure. Yeah. So I am a faculty member here at University of Texas at Austin Public University, so you can Google me and find my email address and send me an email. I try to be pretty responsive to email, so feel free to reach out to me at any time there. Also, the Superintendent Lab has a website, really easy thesuperintendentlab.com we have tons of data visualizations. We have lots of infographics on things like gender gaps, attrition and mobility. Interim superintendents, like the proportion of women and men that are serving those positions has changed over time, and we are also collecting the 23-24 data. We're wrapping that up right now, so we'll have lots of new stuff rolling out in January of 2025 with all the updated data. So definitely check out the Lab website, and you can feel free to contact me through the website as well.

Sarah Williamson:

Amazing. Thank you so much, Rachel. We appreciate your time.

Rachel White:

Yeah, of course. Thank you.

Chad Bolser:

Thanks for tuning into the Build Momentum for Education Podcast. If you enjoyed listening today, we would love to hear your feedback, and we'd be grateful if you could leave us a review.

Sarah Williamson:

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