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  • Threats, stress and politics pushing school superintendents out the door

    Threats, stress and politics pushing school superintendents out the door


    Former Temecula Valley Unified Superintendent Jodi McClay mouths “thank you” to the supporting crowd at Temecula Valley High School on June 13, the night she was fired.

    Credit: Anjali Sharif-Paul/MediaNews Group/The Sun via Getty Images

    The number of California school superintendents leaving their jobs is climbing, despite increased salaries and benefits. Some have reached retirement age or are moving to less stressful jobs. Some are being pushed out by newly elected school board majorities. A new crop of less experienced district leaders is taking their place. 

    Superintendent turnover in California grew from 11.7% after the 2019-20 school year, to 20.9% after the 2020-21 school year. Just over 18% left after the 2021-22 school year, said Rachel S. White, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who runs a research lab that collects data about school superintendents. 

    Turnover is particularly high this year because many superintendents who stuck it out during pandemic school closures, and the tumultuous years since, have had enough, White said.

    “This year, before the 2023 school year, I think people finally broke,” she said.

    Chris Evans, 52, decided to step down as superintendent of Natomas Unified in Sacramento at the end of last school year. He stayed on to help the new superintendent transition.

    “The job was always hard to begin with, and it’s become infinitely harder,” said Evans, who led the district for 11 years.

    “There are a number of folks in their 50s and 60s who are saying they are done,” he said.

    Pandemic made top job more difficult

    Superintendents’ jobs changed dramatically after the pandemic closed schools in March 2020. Instead of focusing on academics, strategic planning, school finances and community relations, superintendents were charged with navigating pandemic mandates and negotiating these changes with district unions. Superintendents also were tasked with ensuring there were enough computers and connectivity for students and staff to support virtual learning, all while dealing with parents who were angry their children were not in school.

    The reopening of schools did little to turn down the heat at school board meetings, which were politicized over issues such as the teaching of critical race theory and its tenets of systemic racism, and LGBTQ+ topics. School superintendents often found themselves the focus of community and parental ire — so much that some school districts paid for security for their superintendent.

    I can’t ever remember hearing of a superintendent that had gotten a death threat before. Now, I know personally four or five.

    Gregory Franklin

    Gregory Franklin, the former superintendent of Tustin Unified School District in Orange County, said he has never been threatened, but he knows other superintendents who have.

    “I can’t ever remember hearing of a superintendent that had gotten a death threat before,” said Franklin, who left Tustin Unified at the end of 2021 for another job. “Now, I know personally four or five. It’s just kind of shocking. So, I think, all of that being said, that when other possibilities present themselves, people are taking them.”

    Job turnover is a national problem

    The superintendent turnover problem is not California’s alone, according to the Superintendent Research Project. Nearly half of the country’s 500 largest school districts have changed leadership or are undergoing leadership changes since the pandemic began in March 2020. The study compared the two years before the pandemic to the first two years of the pandemic and found a 46% increase in superintendent turnover nationally.

    “What we are seeing is that the challenges are greater than ever before and the political environment is creating great instability in the institution, which is resulting in shorter tenure for superintendents,” said Dennis Smith, managing search partner for Leadership Associates, a recruitment agency that does many of the superintendent searches in California.

    Superintendents needed: many openings

    California school districts searching for superintendents include Sacramento City Unified, Eureka City Schools, Palm Springs Unified, Eastside Union, Pasadena Unified, Pajaro Valley Unified, Pacific Grove Unified, Culver City Unified, Newman-Crows Landing Unified, Solana Beach School District, Culver City Unified, Dixon Unified, Millbrae Elementary, Woodlake Unified, Hillsborough City, Merced City, Black Oak Mine Unified, North Monterey Unified and Dos Palos-Oro Loma Joint Unified. 

    The California School Boards Association projected a superintendent shortage five years ago, said Susan Heredia, CSBA past president. It began as baby boomers started to retire, she said.

    In the 15 months since Brett McFadden began work as a deputy superintendent at the Monterey County Office of Education, a quarter of the county’s 24 school districts have changed superintendents, he said.  McFadden was the Nevada Joint Union High School District superintendent until last school year.

    “If you look at the last 100 superintendents that had to leave their positions or their districts, you would be very hard-pressed to find any one of them that left because of test scores or left because of educational issues,” McFadden said. “They leave because of local politics, board relations, labor relations, a facility bond matter or a budget thing.”

    McFadden calls the Covid-19 pandemic the kindling that ignited the rise in single-issue adult-driven disputes, like those around masking and vaccinations, at school board meetings. 

    Demand is so high for superintendents that McFadden is already getting calls from search firms hoping to entice him to apply for jobs.

    “You know the paint on the door isn’t even dry yet with my name on it,” he said. “These search firms are now just aggressively looking for candidates.”

    Of the 30 candidates that apply for each candidate search, maybe eight to 10 meet the district’s qualifications, Evans said. Of those, there are only maybe three or four that could potentially be hired for the job, he said. 

    The high demand is driving up salaries and benefits packages, with total compensation surpassing the $500,000 mark in some cases.

    Firings making applicants wary

    Another factor pushing superintendents out the door is board members elected with the promise of firing the incumbent. The election of school board members who are determined to make significant changes in school districts has resulted in the firing of an unprecedented number of superintendents since the pandemic began in 2020, Smith said.

    The school board meetings, broadcast live, have been watched throughout the state — especially by other superintendents. 

    McFadden remembers watching Pajaro Valley Unified school board meetings in 2021 when the board fired Superintendent Michelle Rodriguez without notice and then reinstated her days later after a public uproar. Rodriguez left to lead the Stockton Unified School District this year.

    “You’d expect this in a Spanish novella or something, but you don’t expect it in your neighboring district,” he said.

    School boards can waive state credential requirement

    School boards largely determine the qualifications required for a superintendent in their district. Although the state of California requires school district superintendents to have both a teaching credential and an administrative credential, the school board can waive the credential requirement.

    At least six California school district superintendents did not have both a teaching and administrative credential in the 2022-23 school year, according to data reported to the state. The districts that waived the requirement that year included Visalia Unified, Los Angeles Unified, Mountain View Whisman Unified, Sacramento City Unified, Kingsburg Joint Union High School District and San Marino Unified, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

    Since there is no mandate to report this information in CALPADS, the state data system, there could be more superintendents without both credentials, said Anita Fitzhugh, California teaching credential commission spokesperson.

    Superintendents are watching these meetings and paying more attention than ever to whether they fit well with the community of the district before they apply for a job, said White, of the University of Tennessee.

    “I think it’s just a heightened awareness right now,” White said. “Especially if I’m going to pick up and move my entire family and start a position in a new place. I don’t want to be fired in two years.”

    Temecula Valley Unified has been a hotbed of controversy since a trio of conservative trustees took control of the board a year ago. The board fired Superintendent Jodi McClay in June and banned the teaching of critical race theory, passed a parental policy requiring staff to notify parents if students are transgender and removed social studies material because it included a section on LGBTQ+ rights activist Harvey Milk. 

    Although the search for a candidate ended on Nov. 13 with the hiring of Gary Woods, a former Beverly Hills Unified superintendent, the search firm indicated to one board member that there were fewer candidates than in the past. Quite a few candidates did not meet the requirements outlined by the district in a job description and some weren’t even from the education field, board member Allison Barclay told EdSource in early November.

    “I would assume that if you’re looking for a position anywhere, any company, any school district, you’re really going to look at what the situation is you’re walking into financially, culture-wise, all of those things,” Barclay said. “And so, having a school district that is making national news is probably not appealing to as many people as might be attracted to it when it wasn’t making national news and was just simply known as an award-winning school district. So, I can’t imagine that that’s been helpful.”

    State legislators responded to the spate of firings by passing a bill creating a cooling-off period, prohibiting school boards from firing a superintendent or assistant superintendent within 30 days of new board members being seated or recalled.

    The law also prevents school boards from firing school leaders at special or emergency board meetings, which require only 24 hours’ notice, instead of at a regular meeting, which requires the public to be informed of a meeting at least 72 hours in advance. The bill was signed by the governor in October.

    “People are recognizing it’s just not healthy for an organization to go through these flip-flops where you might have a 3-2 majority that keeps a school or a superintendent, then have an election where the 3-2 flips and then the superintendent is looking for a job,” Franklin said.

    Less experienced leaders hired

    Assistant or deputy superintendents in larger districts are moving into the lead role in smaller districts, or superintendents in smaller districts are taking the opportunity to move to more lucrative jobs in larger districts. Newer, younger superintendents are becoming more common, Smith said.

    To meet their administrative needs, many districts are also grooming their own talent, said Molly Schwarzhoff of Ray and Associates, a national education search firm.

    ‘I’m seeing different, perhaps less-seasoned individuals coming into the roles,” McFadden said. “That doesn’t mean they are less talented or more talented.”

    To help new superintendents prepare for their new role, the Association of California School Administrators offers a new superintendents seminar series, a superintendents academy and a new superintendents workshop before its annual Superintendents Symposium. 

    The 2023 Voice of the Superintendent Survey, conducted by education consulting firm EAB, recommends that school boards find ways to help superintendents feel successful in their role and allow them time to connect with students and collaborate with peers to staunch turnover. Superintendents surveyed for the report overwhelmingly said they need help navigating challenging conversations with the community. 

    Superintendents report directly to the school board, something first-time superintendents have never done before, said James Finkelstein, professor emeritus of public policy at George Mason University in Virginia. The new superintendent now has multiple bosses, often with divergent interests. They also have to deal directly with parents and external interest groups.

    “No amount of academic training or a certificate can prepare someone for this trial by fire,” Finkelstein said. “The bottom line is that there is no substitute for experience. But the catch-22 is that the only way to get the experience is by doing the job. Every school district would like an experienced superintendent who has demonstrated success in their previous position.  But finding those individuals is increasingly difficult, especially given the dramatic turnover since Covid.”





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  • Trump Wants to Erase the History He Doesn’t Like, But Historians Are Pushing Back

    Trump Wants to Erase the History He Doesn’t Like, But Historians Are Pushing Back


    Petula Dvorak of the Washington Post wrote about the efforts by the Trump administration to rewrite American history. Trump wants “patriotic history,” in which evil things never happened and non-white people and women were seldom noticed. In other words, he wants to control historical memory, sanitize it, and restore history as it was taught when he was in school about 65 years ago (1960), before the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and other actions that changed what historians know and teach.

    Dvorak writes:

    A section of Arlington National Cemetery’s website highlighting African American military heroes is gone.

    Maj. Lisa Jaster was the first woman to graduate from Army Ranger school. But that fact has been scrubbed from the U.S. Army Reserve [usar.army.mil] and Department of Defense websites. [search.usa.gov]

    The participation of transgender and queer protesters during the LGBTQ+ uprising at New York’s Stonewall Inn was deleted from the National Park Service’s website [nps.gov] about the federal monument.

    And the Smithsonian museum in Washington, which attracts millions of visitors who enter free each year, will be instructed by Vice President JD Vance to remove “improper ideology.”

    In a series of executive orders, President Donald Trump is reshaping the way America’s history is presented in places that people around the world visit.

    In one order, he declared that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts “undermine our national unity,” and more pointedly, that highlighting the country’s most difficult chapters diminishes pride in America and produces “a sense of national shame.”

    The president’s orders have left historians scrambling to collect and preserve aspects of the public record, as stories of Black, Brown, female or LGBTQ+ Americans are blanched from some public spaces. In some cases, the historical mentions initially removed have been replaced, but are more difficult to find online.

    That rationale has galvanized historians to rebuke the idea that glossing over the nation’s traumas — instead of grappling with them — will foster pride, rather than shame.

    Focusing on the shame, they say, misses a key point: Contending with the uglier parts of U.S. history is necessary for an honest and inclusive telling of the American story. Americans can feel pride in the nation’s accomplishments while acknowledging that some of the shameful actions in the past reverberate today.

    “The past has no duty to our feelings,” said Chandra Manning, a history professor at Georgetown University.

    “History does not exist to sing us lullabies or shower us with accolades. The past has no obligations to us at all,” Manning said. “We, however, do have an obligation to the past, and that is to strive to understand it in all its complexity, as experienced by all who lived through it, not just a select few.”

    That is not to say that the uncomfortable weight of difficult truths isn’t a valid emotion.

    Postwar Germans were so crushed by the burden of their people’s past, from the horrors of the Nazi regime to the protection of war criminals in the decades after the war, that they have a lengthy word for processing it: vergangenheitsbewältigung, which means the “work of coping with the past.” It has informed huge swaths of German literature and film and has shaped the physical way European cities create memorials and museums.

    America’s version of vergangenheitsbewältigung can be found across the cultural landscape. From films to books to classrooms and museums, Americans are learning more details about slavery in the South, the way racism has affected everything from baseball to health care, and how sexism shaped the military.

    Trump, however, looks at the U.S. version of vergangenheitsbewältigung differently.
    “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” said the executive order targeting museums, called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

    That is what “fosters a sense of national shame,” he says in his order.

    Historians take exception to that. “I would argue that it’s actually weird to feel shame about what people in the past did,” Georgetown history professor Katherine Benton-Cohen said.
    “As I like to tell my students, ‘I’m not talking about you. We will not use ‘we’ when we refer to Americans in the past, because it wasn’t us and we don’t have to feel responsible for their actions. You can divest yourself of this feeling,’” she said.

    Germans also have a phrase for enabling a critical look at their nation’s past: die Gnade der spät-geborenen, “the grace of being born too late” to be held responsible for the horror of the Nazi years.

    Benton-Cohen said she honed her approach to this during her first teaching job in the Deep South in 2003, when she emphasized the generational gap between her students and the history they were studying.

    “They could speak freely of the past — even the recent past, like the 1950s and 1960s, because they weren’t there,” she said. “They were free to make their own conclusions. It was exciting, and it worked. Many told me it was the first time they had learned the history of the 1960s because their high schools — both public and private — had skipped it to avoid controversy. We did fine.”

    Trump hasn’t limited his attempt to control how history is presented in museums or memorials. Among the first executive orders he issued was “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” Another one sought to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion in the nation’s workplaces, classrooms and museums. His version of American history tracks with how it was taught decades ago, before academics began bringing more diverse voices and viewpoints into their scholarship.

    Maurice Jackson, a history professor at Georgetown University who specializes in jazz and Black history, said Black Americans have fought hard to tell their full story.

    Black history was first published as “The Journal of Negro History” in 1916, in a townhouse in Washington when academic Carter G. Woodson began searching for the full story of his roots. A decade later, he introduced “Negro History Week” to schools across the United States, a history lesson that was widely cheered by White teachers and students alongside Black Americans who finally felt seen.

    “Black history is America’s history,” Jackson said. And leaving the specifics of the Black experience out because it makes some people ashamed gives an incomplete picture of our nation, he said.

    After Trump issued his executive orders, federal workers scrambled to interpret and obey them, which in some cases led to historical milestones being removed, or covered up and then replaced.

    Federal workers removed a commemoration of the Tuskegee Airmen from the Pentagon website, then restored it. They taped butcher paper over the National Cryptologic Museum’s display honoring women and people of color, then uncovered the display.

    Mentions of Harriet Tubman in a National Park Service display about the Underground Railroad were removed, then put back. The story of legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson’s military career was deleted from the Department of Defense website, then restored several days later.

    Women known as WASPs risked their lives in military service — training and test pilots during World War II for a nation that didn’t allow them to open a bank account — is no longer a prominent part of the Pentagon’s digital story.

    George Washington University historian Angela Zimmerman calls all the activity. which happened with a few keystrokes and in a matter of days, the digital equivalent of “Nazi book burnings.”

    In response, historians — some professional, some amateur — are scrambling to preserve information before it is erased and forgotten.

    The Organization of American Historians created the Records at Risk Data Collection Initiative, which is a callout for content that is in danger of being obliterated

    This joins the decades-long work of preserving information by the Internet Archive, a California nonprofit started in 1996 that also runs the Wayback Machine, which stores digital records.

    Craig Campbell, a digital map specialist in Seattle, replicated and stored the U.S. Geological Service’s entire historical catalogue. His work was crowdfunded by supporters.

    “Historical maps are critical for a huge range of industries ranging from environmental science, conservation, real estate, urban planning, and even oil and gas exploration,” said Campbell, whose mapping company is called Pastmaps. “Losing access to the data and these maps not only destroys our ability to access and learn from history, but limits our ability to build upon it in so many ways as a country.”

    After astronomer Rose Ferreira’s profile was scrubbed from, then returned, to NASA’s website, she posted about it on social media. In response, an online reader created a blog, Women in STEM, to preserve stories such as Ferreira’s.

    “Programs that memorialize painful truths help ensure past wrongs are never revived to harm again,” Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nevada), said on X, noting that presidents are elected to “run our government — not rewrite our history.”

    Authoritarian leaders have long made the whitewashing of history a tool in their regimes. Joseph Stalin expunged rivals from historic photographs. Adolf Hitler purged museums of modernist art and works created by Jewish artists, which he labeled “degenerate.” Museums in Mao Zedong’s China glorified his ideology.

    While this may be unfamiliar to Americans, Georgetown University history professor Adam Rothman says that in the scope of human history, “these are precedented times.”

    It’s not yet clear what the real-world effect of Trump’s Smithsonian order will be or exactly how it will be carried out. Who will determine what exhibits cause shame and need to be removed? What will the criteria be? Will exhibits that discuss slavery, for instance, be eliminated or altered?

    “Our nation is an ongoing experiment,” says Manning, the Georgetown history professor, who has written books about the Civil War. “And what helps us do that now in 2024 compared to 1776 is that we do have a shared past.

    “Every single human culture depends upon, grows out of, and is shaped by its past,” she said. “It is the past that has shaped all of us, it is our past that contains the bonds that can really hold us together.”

    It’s what makes the study — and threat to — American history unique among nations. Benton-Cohen said that is what she sees happen with her students.

    “The American striving to realize the democratic faith and all the difficulties it entailed and challenges overcome should inspire pride, not shame,” she said. “If you feel shame, as the kids would say, that’s a ‘you’ problem. That’s why I still fly the flag at my house; I’m not afraid of the American past, I’m alive with the possibilities — of finding common cause, of fighting for equality, of appreciating our shared humanity, of upholding our freedoms.”



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