James J. Bird

The Superintendent's Leadership Role in School Improvement: Relationships Between Authenticity and Best Practices

Abstract The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between superintendent leadership and the operational processes of school improvement. School district superintendents (N = 226) from six southeastern states were surveyed concerning their leadership authenticity and school improvement practices. Descriptive statistics, analyzes of variance, Pearson correlation coefficients, and structure equation modeling were used to analyze the data. A significant and positive relationship was found between superintendent levels of leadership authenticity and their districts’ use of best practices in the school improvement process. Implications for practice in academic professional preparation programs, for practicing administrators, and for governing boards are discussed.

Building Budgets and Trust through Superintendent Leadership

In this study, we surveyed school district superintendents in a southeastern state about their budget-building strategies. The majority of responding superintendents had worked with their most senior principals and business managers for less than three years. Patterns of variance along the openness of budget-building processes, information management, and school settings had no relationship to superintendent rate of rise to authority, career path, or cohesiveness of staff. There was no relationship found between professional preparation and budget-building processes. Cohesiveness of staff had a negative and weak relationship with information management but the openness of processes had a significantly positive relationship to information management. The responding superintendents relied heavily on their on-the-job training and currently operate much differently than when they started their superintendency. We discuss these outcomes with regard to professional preparation programs and superintendent professional development activities.

Dollars and Sense: A Budget-Building Framework of Transparency for Superintendent Leadership.

School superintendents annually need to gain affirmative votes from their governing bodies to approve their district budgets. This paper proposes a framework through which the superintendent can express the district’s educational needs and concomitant resource allocations in conceptual terms rather than in multi-columned ledgers. The framework calls for transparency, the involvement of all stakeholders and simplicity. It posits the superintendent in the vital leadership position of being the catalyst for orchestrating change for continuous improvement across the district. Components of the framework include repositories for concepts including: staffing, programme improvement, curriculum development and capital outlay.

Building budgets and trust through the alchemy of superintendent leadership

Superintendents have the burden and the opportunity to exert leadership through the budget-building process. This article details a dozen tenets which can be implemented by practicing superintendents. Doing so increases the chances of building trust among the stakeholders of administrators, staff, community, and school board members. The district superintendent of schools occupies the only positional office in the organization capable of orchestrating this process.

Superintendents’ perceptions of the school improvement planning process in the southeastern USA:

The purpose of this study of school improvement planning in the southeastern USA was to establish the current view of the process through the eyes of the district superintendents. The answers to the questions were consistently mixed. Generally, the presence of school improvement planning is prevalent in the large majority of districts. However, the data indicate a lack of fidelity to the process between superintendents’ beliefs regarding the process and how they perceive those tasked with development and implementation of the process. Given that school improvement planning is an internationally accepted process, the findings have implications not just for the USA but for international audiences as well. The authors make two recommendations: (1) significant further research into the effects of the process on student learning, and (2) continued research into the reasons for the lack of congruency indicated here between district expectations and school development and implementation.

Superintendents describe their leadership styles: Implications for practice

Superintendents from eight southeastern United States school districts self-described their leadership styles across the choices of autocratic, laissez-faire, democratic, situational, servant, or transformational. When faced with this array of choices, the superintendents chose with arguable equitableness, indicating that successful leaders can display any of these styles. Their choices, however, seem unrelated to any discernible personal, professional, or district demographic variable. The authors propose that, regardless of leadership style, authenticity within the style may be needed for effectiveness. They discuss the implications for this in terms of professional preparation programs, administrative careers, and selection, professional development, and assessment processes for governing boards.