Dive Brief:
- An overwhelming 90% of superintendent said their district's long-term goals included improving academic achievement, followed by 80% who cited improving instructional quality and 78% who listed creating a safe and welcoming school community, according to a recent report by the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
- To achieve some of those goals, most district leaders said substantial change is needed in various areas, including how districts use artificial intelligence and how teachers instruct. Many superintendents also wanted to see small changes in giving students more say over their learning and how their districts use data to make improvements.
- Though most superintendents agreed on some common goals and areas for change in their districts, they disagreed on whether to strengthen existing systems or overhaul them. The survey, which focused on New England districts, brought 307 responses across six states.
Dive Insight:
While superintendents are split on whether to strengthen or overhaul their systems, even those who say they want transformational change are sometimes unable to achieve it because of capacity restraints, stakeholder appetite, and other reasons.
As a result, most districts are likely to pursue incremental changes to improve academic performance — even though system overhauls "will be increasingly necessary," CRPE said in its July report.
"Today’s school systems were never designed to deliver equitable outcomes at scale," the report said. "They still reflect gaps in achievement and engagement that are actively widening."
Results from the Nation’s Report Card released in 2025 showed that the gap between higher and lower-performing students in high school widened in most academic areas, including in 12th grade math and reading. The gender gap in 8th grade science also re-emerged following the pandemic.
According to the CRPE report, superintendents who leaned toward transformational rather than incremental change still had limited capacity to pursue ambitious and systemic reforms.
"Maintaining basic stability and instructional quality is absorbing leaders’ time and attention," the report said.
Many superintendents said they relied on other administrators, such as curriculum directors or assistant superintendents, to lead their districts' long-term priorities.
District leaders sometimes reported that stakeholder engagement made “more cautious” incremental change more doable than overhauls.
If superintendents want to successfully transform systems, CRPE’s report said, that would require:
- Leadership development, including on-the-job coaching, to build the political and strategic skills necessary to engage with stakeholders and redesign systems.
- School boards and state policymakers to make changes that would reduce the time superintendents spend on compliance, operational and financial issues.
- School boards, leadership associations, and state policymakers to reshape incentives in a way that shifts the superintendency from a "politically constrained manager of competing stakeholder interests" to someone who can more freely lead changes.
- Funders, advocates, and community and business leaders to partner with districts and take a more active role in building public buy-in.
