A New Leadership Paradigm: Superintendent as Civic Leader
September 01, 2026
Uniquely positioned to restore public trust and reimagine public schooling’s next era
As faculty chair of Harvard University’s Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader, Jennifer Cheatham is working to reimagine leadership work in the superintendency.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BLOOMBERG CENTER FOR CITIES
Russell Booker, who spent 10 years as superintendent in Spartanburg School District 7 in South Carolina, remembers clearly the moment he realized his role had changed.
When the school board recruited Booker from a nearby district to lead the schools in his hometown, the mayor was one of the first people he was asked to meet with. When they sat down, the mayor said, “Russell, you have the chance to do something really special in this community. We need you to be more than just a school superintendent here. As the city goes, so goes the school district. As the school district goes, so does the city.”
Adrienne Battle, who is in her ninth year as superintendent in the Nashville Public Schools in Tennessee, realized her leadership role had changed when she was asked to do a press conference with her mayor during the COVID pandemic. Her original response was, “What does this have to do with me?” A hundred press conferences later, she realized just how crucial her presence was as a community leader.
Michael Matsuda, who recently left the superintendency of the Anaheim Union High School District in California after 11 years, similarly experienced the pandemic as a turning point. With so much turmoil, he found himself asking: Who would parents, students and teachers actually listen to?
Following a suggestion from a community organization partner, the district and its partner pivoted to a “promotora” model — engaging trusted community members as credible conduits of information. Matsuda realized the real power of the superintendency lies in deep relationships with the community.
For AASA’s “2025 American Superintendent Study: Mid-Decade Update,” the survey authors asked superintendents to indicate which role typology best matched how they spend their time. The results were revealing. Superintendents ranked “communicator,” “statesman” and “manager” as their predominant roles. “Social scientist” and “instructional leader” played more supportive roles.
Given shrinking student cohorts, generative AI, new competitors for public dollars and organized attacks on public education, it makes sense that conceptions of the role have shifted toward the political and managerial.
But that doesn’t mean that teaching and learning aren’t at the center of what superintendents do. As my co-authors and I describe in our new book, Superintendent as Civic Leader: Stewarding the Future of Public Education, superintendents are uniquely positioned to restore public trust and help communities imagine and build the next era of public education. Superintendents must perform all of their functions — instructional leader, manager, communicator and statesman — as civic leaders who are responsible for building a powerful coalition in support of a community’s children.
Instructional Leader: Superintendent as Steward of the Vision for Success
Superintendents still need deep instructional expertise and a focus on data to know what work to prioritize, but their central task is to develop a shared public vision for student success that resonates with local stakeholders. Before identifying problems and proposing fixes, they must understand a community’s hopes and aspirations. Only with a compelling, locally grounded vision can leaders accurately identify the challenges that stand in the way of progress and mobilize support for the changes that matter most.
Matsuda, for example, worked with the Anaheim community as superintendent from 2014 to 2025 to move away from typical test-based indicators of success in their high schools. They focused instead on a set of durable skills — what he called the “Five C’s”: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity and compassion. They recognized these as skills that would set up students for civic engagement and the world of work. While educators in Anaheim still ensure students are learning basic skills, parents most want to know their children are acquiring the skills to thrive as adults after graduation.
Similarly, Battle came to understand the Nashville community wanted more than test score gains. They wanted to see movement on the district’s outputs, but they also wanted to see evidence of impact.
Outputs could be measured by literacy and math test results as well as graduation rates, but impact had to be measured by things that have typically been considered out of a district’s direct control, like postsecondary enrollment and economic mobility. As a native of Nashville, Battle explains, “We are going to not only make sure we are hitting the marks but creating a stronger community.”
Instructional leadership, when done through a civic leadership lens, is no longer just about designing strategies that move test scores but about visioning in ways that connect to a community’s deepest values and broadest aspirations. It is about helping people see teaching and learning not as a technocratic exercise but as the means by which we prepare young people to participate in and improve their communities.
Manager: Superintendent as Steward of Limited Resources
In the past, budget, transportation, facilities, staffing and technology decisions often were treated as technical matters, handled behind the scenes and shared with the public only at key junctures. That is no longer sustainable as demographic shifts, rising benefit costs, deferred maintenance and competition from new schooling options create structural pressures that cannot be solved with marginal cuts or accounting maneuvers. Public education is experiencing tectonic change, and communities are being asked to make real choices about what they value most.
In this context, superintendents must act as public stewards of trade-offs, not just managers. They need to explain complex fiscal realities in plain language, connect budgets to the community’s stated priorities and bring people into the process of deciding what to protect, what to grow and what to let go in alignment with a community’s vision for success.
Both Battle and Booker, in Nashville and Spartanburg County, respectively, had to lead painful school closures early in their tenures, engaging their communities transparently around trade-offs and long-term sustainability. The key is that they did it proactively and followed through on their promises. For Battle, that meant that if a child had to be moved to a different school, it was guaranteed to be a “thriving school” as evidenced by key indicators of success.
Matsuda explains that in an era of declining resources, his district in Anaheim shifted from a mindset of cutting to one of reinvesting in the social assets of their community. Rather than adhering to a traditional staffing model during enrollment declines, district leadership repositioned some teachers into shared roles in community organizations such as operating an urban farm or leading community-based mentorship programs. These were promoted as “value-adds” for students and families that demonstrate budget management as strategic reinvestment with community partners.
Managerial and operational leadership, in this sense, is civic leadership. It requires political mapping — understanding who stands to gain or lose from different options — as well as communication and mobilizing skills. The goal is not to make everyone happy. It is to help a community grapple honestly with trade-offs in service of its children.
Statesman and Communicator: Superintendent as Steward of Relationships
For roughly four decades, from the 1980s onward, a relatively centrist education reform coalition held. Governors of both parties, business leaders and civil rights organizations supported accountability, standards, disaggregated data and gap-closing. That consensus has frayed. In its place, partisan conflict has rushed into the vacuum, often using schools as the stage for broader ideological battles.
But superintendents are extremely well positioned to build bridges. “I’m not the Black superintendent,” Booker says. “I’m not the superintendent for the north side, south side, east side. I’m not the Republican superintendent or the Democrat. I’m everyone’s superintendent.” The key is building relationships, one person at a time.
Battle agrees. “Even when there is disagreement, we must be part of the conversation,” she says. “If we position ourselves as being unwilling to engage in discourse, if we are unwilling to share our perspective, we won’t be invited to the conversation.” This willingness to show up, even in spaces where values don’t always align, has paid off.
The superintendent of Nashville wouldn’t typically participate in state-level conversations about the future of education, given that Nashville is a blue city in a red state. But Battle decided early on she needed to show up. She was honored recently as the 2026 Mid-Cumberland Superintendent of the Year by the Tennessee Organization of School Superintendents, selected by her peer superintendents across the region. “They now see me as a thought partner,” she says, “someone who can see both sides to things and to find the things that are worth locking arms on.”
Civic leaders in education work on behalf of their local communities to make the changes those communities seek, while striving to exemplify the values that build inclusion and social cohesion in a multicultural, pluralistic democracy.
Building the Capacity of Others
In a politically volatile environment, no superintendent can single-handedly carry the weight of civic leadership. They need a strong, diverse leadership team — and distributed leadership throughout the district — capable of engaging with conflict, advancing equity, sustaining trust with families and staff and nurturing a leadership culture.
Battle recently hired her first deputy superintendent, knowing she has to be out in the community. At the same time, she needs central-office leaders and principals to lead with a civic leadership lens as well. Their work on instruction won’t be successful if people don’t also learn how to navigate the politics of change. In practical terms, she looks for a “with-it-ness” in her leaders. Do they know what we are trying to do? And how to show up?
As Booker explains, “Principals especially have to embrace this paradigm because they are closest to communities.” He even paid for them to join local civic organizations, knowing how crucial that engagement was.
Reimagining the Superintendency for Democracy
The frame of “superintendent as civic leader” can be a powerful tool. It offers a way to have a candid conversation with your board of education about what the job actually requires in this moment: how you spend your time, which responsibilities you must personally carry and which should be delegated to a strong team. And it can open space with your own team to name the political realities you are navigating together, rather than treating them as an unfortunate distraction from the “real” work.
As Matsuda describes, “With increasing job volatility, the disruptive potential of AI and declining confidence in the college-fueled American Dream, everything in education is on the line. This is the time to ask community leaders to lean in and help define the purpose of a K–12 education and give input on redesigning the whole enterprise.”
Public education remains one of our most ambitious civic projects, a place where we can still practice doing hard things together in the interest of our children and our democracy. Whether that project survives and renews itself in the years ahead will depend in no small part on whether superintendents are prepared and supported to act as civic leaders: to navigate conflict, build coalitions and sustain a sense of shared purpose in turbulent times.
If we embrace a new paradigm of civic leadership and align preparation, support, and expectations accordingly, we can give this generation of leaders a chance to do what they came into the work to do: ensure access, excellence and equity for every child.
Jennifer Cheatham, a former superintendent, is senior lecturer and faculty chair of the Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass.
Author
Jennifer Perry CheathamThe Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader
Superintendents are more than organizational leaders. They are civic leaders, responsible for stewarding the future of public education in America. At a time when public education stands at a generational crossroads, superintendents are being called to lead with civic imagination, democratic purpose and political skill.
The Harvard Graduate School of Education’s was created to meet that need. ISCL integrates research, practice and public voice to ensure that superintendents are equipped to rise to this moment and shape the future of public education. It serves as a field catalyst and hub for partnership, connecting efforts across the country to elevate civic leadership as a core competency of the superintendency, strengthen the leadership pipeline and support stable, values-aligned leadership in communities.
Our goal is to build the capacity of superintendents — and those who support them — to lead proactively in complex environments. We partner with university-based preparation programs, professional associations, state and regional networks and other intermediaries.
Practical Tools
One aspect of our work is to function as a design lab and knowledge engine, incentivizing the creation of research-based tools that modernize superintendent preparation and support through the initiative’s Catalyst Fund.
To that end, we have developed several tools with partners to strengthen superintendents’ proactive political leadership. All are open source and available through our website at https://scl.gse.harvard.edu (see the Tools & Resources section).
Here are two examples:
Case Catalogue. Developed in collaboration with the Graduate School of Education, Âܲ·AVĘÓƵand PDK International, the cases are fictionalized accounts drawn from real superintendent experiences, with a focus on navigating change in complex and often polarized contexts.
Every case comes with a tested 90-minute lesson plan and instructional materials for use in superintendent preparation programs or in professional learning for sitting superintendents focused on proactive political leadership. Cases also can be used for developing district leadership teams.
Simulation Series. Created in partnership with colleagues at Harvard, the University of Southern California and the University of Texas at Austin, the interactive, online simulations place superintendents in realistic, high-pressure scenarios where they must balance education priorities, community expectations and political realities.
The simulations are accompanied by a tested 140-minute lesson plan and related supports for use with aspiring or sitting superintendents. Current topics include school discipline and safety, school closures and consolidations, and teacher turnover and retention.
Across these tools, our initiative’s aim is to help superintendents embrace a realistic, future-focused vision of their role — not only as instructional leaders, but as civic leaders who can build coalitions, deepen trust and expand opportunity for a community’s young people through public education.
— Jennifer Cheatham
Cross-Sector Collaboration: Meeting Problems of Scale with Solutions of Scale
By Rob Watson Jr.
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Rob Watson Jr.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BLOOMBERG CENTER FOR CITIES AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Decades of evidence demonstrate that educational attainment is shaped not only by what happens inside schools but also by factors outside them: housing instability, residential segregation, community violence, access to healthcare, social capital and economic opportunity.
Across every major public school system in America, the data reveal the same sobering conclusion: Our nation has yet to demonstrate that high-poverty districts can consistently deliver high levels of academic achievement for all students.
For superintendents, these problems of scale as reality underscore a fundamental truth: A schools-alone approach to accelerating student achievement in high-poverty communities is a losing proposition, particularly when young people spend only 20 percent of their K–12 years in school versus 80 percent in their community. A 3rd-grade reading score can be just as much about eviction, trauma and malnourishment as it is about classroom instruction.
Thankfully, a different approach can meet the scale of the problem: joint problem-solving and power sharing through cross-sector collaboration. Rather than asking schools to shoulder the entire burden of the failings of our nation’s social safety net, local leaders are building civic infrastructure that aligns youth- and family-serving systems across education, healthcare, housing, higher education, workforce, philanthropy, government and faith-based and community-based organizations toward shared outcomes for children and families.
These place-based partnerships are supported by a backbone organization responsible for coordinating partners, sharing data and aligning programs, systems and resources with a relentless focus on results. The underlying premise is simple: Do for all children what affluent families do for their own — deliver a comprehensive system of relationships, opportunities and supports that follows a child from cradle to career.
Integrated Supports
A recently published landmark Harvard-Cornell study of Communities In Schools, the nation’s largest integrated student supports model, found that deploying navigators in high-poverty schools to provide low-income students with relationship-based personalized supports led to significant reductions in chronic absenteeism, gains on standardized tests and increased graduation rates, postsecondary completion, adult earnings and tax revenues. The findings offer a critical lesson: When districts and communities come together to address the upstream effects of poverty, students can excel in school and in life.
At the community level, places like Spartanburg, S.C., illustrate a path forward. Harvard Senior Fellow Russell Booker, formerly the district’s superintendent, leads the Spartanburg Academic Movement and its Movement 2030 initiative, aligning civic leaders and key anchor institutions around shared outcomes.
SAM and one of its community partners, the Northside Development Group, have spearheaded one of the most captivating neighborhood transformations in the country, pairing educational improvements with neighborhood revitalization that has produced seismic gains in literacy, reductions in violent crime, new mixed-income housing, economic development and the creation of state-of-the-art early learning and community centers in Spartanburg’s Northside neighborhood.
These efforts are bolstered by StriveTogether and Purpose Built Communities, national organizations that provide capacity-building support to cross-sector coalitions committed to economic mobility.
A Ready Next Wave
Dozens of superintendents nationwide are beginning to embrace this paradigm shift. Over the last several years, my organization at Harvard, the EdRedesign Lab, has supported a new national fellowship program for K–12 leaders led by the William Julius Wilson Institute at Harlem Children’s Zone. The fellowship program enrolls dozens of small- to big-city superintendents and their districts serving millions of students to commit to cradle-to-career place-based strategies.
This emergent field has inspired us at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to establish a new master’s-level concentration on cross-sector collaboration to ensure the next wave of educators embrace their role as civic leaders.
Today’s superintendent has never been asked to do more. In an era defined by problems of scale, cross-sector collaboration offers public education something it desperately needs: solutions of scale.
Rob Watson Jr. is executive director of the EdRedesign Lab and lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass.
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