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Superintendents’ agency in the US is shaped by governance systems within education systems. These Education Governance Systems have been in a state of flux and experienced turbulence for twenty years. The professional challenge this research addresses is how do 14 credentialed educational professional African American women superintendents with doctorates and track records of school improvement, navigate the turbulence to empower families, and Empower Young Societal Innovators for Equity, Renewal (EYSIER), Social Mobility, and Peace.

This chapter identifies three aspects of a theory of knowledge to action to emerge from the empirical evidence presented. First, African American women superintendents need to know how to access policy and legislation, how to stay up to date with policy and need to be empowered to challenge policy. Policy has the back of African American women fighting institutionalised racism. Second, African American women superintendents need role models, and mentors with wisdom who can create proactive and mobilising networks across the state and the nation to advocate for and to support the teachers’ and leaders’ professional learning to be the best teachers, leaders and superintendents they can be. Finally, the African American women superintendents who have been self-selecting, or identified as potential future superintendents by current superintendents and schoolboards, need to be part of succession planning that transcends the short elected lives of district school boards. Newly incumbent African American women superintendents need to be empowered by Education Governance Systems to enable them to deliver on their manifestos and track records of outstanding school improvement with the impact strategies they were employed to implement. The impact strategies include promoting high-quality home–school engagement and ensuring all students learn how to learn, are culturally sensitive, ask good questions and solve problems as Young Societal Innovators for Equity and Renewal. The chapter recommends a network of African American women superintendents implements this theory of knowledge to action and that their work is documented, and if successful in optimising students’ learning, and outcomes, disseminated to build capacity for EYSIER.

The dual purpose of this paper is to determine how superintendents in US school districts work with stakeholders in the decision‐making process and to learn how different choices superintendents make affect decision outcomes.

This multiple case study of three school districts employs qualitative methodology to address specific research questions. Interview and observation data are analyzed using data codes applied to text through NVivo8.

The paper finds that superintendents respond to accountability pressure by working with committees in different ways, yet all three tend to achieve the strategic decision outcomes they favor. Despite superintendents' substantial efforts to engage in collaborative strategic decision making, collaboration virtually ends once the decision is made and these districts shift into implementation.

The multiple case study approach employed here is useful for understanding the details of strategic decision making, but the results are specific to the school districts studied. Rather than generalizing from these school districts, researchers could generalize to them based on the degree to which they are typical.

Empirical results reported here fill in gaps in the education leadership literature regarding how decisions are made. The tendency of committees to engage in collaborative processes for their own decision making and to issue directives to the wider school district likely places implementation at risk.

Very few studies of decision making address the process from a real‐time perspective, and the handful that do were not conducted in educational settings. This article examines school district decision making as it occurs.

The purpose of this paper is to probe the extent to which principals, as boundary spanners, manage with the influence of the local educational authority (LEA) and the superintendent over school matters.

The study is based on sequential quantitative→qualitative explanatory mixed research design. It is based on a sample of 161 Hebrew elementary school principals in two school districts in Israel who completed a questionnaire and on in-depth interviews with four school principals.

The findings indicated that school principals initiate assistance from the superintendent and the LEA depending on the influence they have in schools. However, they utilize their relations with each external agency differently. With the LEA, they established mutual exchange relations whereas school principals engage with the superintendent in order to negotiate more effectively with the LEA. By doing so, principals can control external agencies’ involvement in schools along with strengthening the power of the central educational authority.

The study makes a unique contribution to the literature on school principals’ role with external agencies by revealing their navigation and balancing among the various factors that influence schools. The study highlights the agential role of school principals.

Leadership tenacity for school superintendents rests largely upon experience, grit, and subsequently resilience as they balance the pressures of the operational challenges of school operation with the instructional needs of the children they serve. Through this study, the authors identified the critical aspects of how effective superintendents may have developed and whether deliberate practice was evidenced in their experience. The superintendent’s perseverance to doing what matters over an extended period of time and under challenging conditions contributes to leadership grit and resilience. Viewed through the lens of these superintendents, experience, grit, and resilience influence leadership tenacity interdependent, but not limited to the theory of deliberate practice and transformational leadership.

Because administration is the process of making decisions and because values are an important part of administrative culture, values are important in administrative work. The value orientations of American public school superintendents are described. Interviews with 15 Midwestern superintendents provided the data for the study. Responses to explicit questions about values are reported regarding the qualities valued in subordinates, the factors that have limited professional success, and criteria used to determine successful problem resolution. Superintendents were also asked to describe the most serious problems they had faced in their careers and their greatest achievements. Analysis of the data indicated that superintendents as a group valued human skills over either technical or conceptual skills. Though superintendents said that they value individual discretion among subordinates, they see it as a limited and qualified opportunity. Those interviewed demonstrated a selective management memory, finding it easier to describe their past accomplishments than serious problems they had encountered during their careers. In general, they did not focus on limitations, problems or failures. Most of those interviewed showed little inclination to retrospective analysis of administrative actions, contrary to contemporary calls for more reflective practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the importance of lifestyle factors including geographical relocation, accommodation for dual earner careers, and availability of family or non-family domestic help on the career choices of women assistant superintendents and superintendents in school districts in the USA. Women’s access to the superintendency continues to make slow progress, a trend traditionally attributed to gender bias. However, working women increasingly make career choices based on perceptions of lifestyle and domestic responsibilities that may self-limit their access to positions that would further their careers.

The study is set in Pennsylvania, where women occupy 26 percent of superintendents’ positions. Women superintendents and assistant superintendents in 2011-2012 were surveyed regarding their perceptions of the compatibility of the requirements of the position of superintendent with their lifestyle priorities.

The responses of 109 respondents suggest that the importance they attach to lifestyle factors limit the positions to which they apply. Most respondents would not consider family relocation or long commutes to access positions that would further their career goals. Consideration of partners/spouses work and career needs was rated as of high importance in making career decisions, and the respondents managed domestic household themselves with little expectation or recourse to extended family support or paid domestic help.

The findings suggest that the current demands and characteristics of the superintendency are at odds with lifestyle preferences of women qualified to hold the position, further exacerbating the effects of gender bias that maintain the lack of gender balance in educational decision making at the local level in the USA.

The purpose of this paper is to help the researchers sought to take a closer look at the technology challenges facing district superintendents in today’s leadership climate.

The authors chose semi-structured interviews as the data collection method. Through 45 min, one-on-one, semi-structured telephone interviews, the researchers were able to collect data about overcoming the challenges of being a modern technology-savvy superintendent.

Through the analysis, the authors identified four themes related to the challenges faced by these district leaders, including meeting the needs of stakeholders, supporting professional development, fostering mindset changes and addressing a fear of the unknown.

This study only relied on interviews and did not examine evidence from the field, such as site visits or artifact examination.

This study provides the field with insights into the role of the change-ready district leaders who foster lasting technology-infused transformation.

While challenges for any district leader wishing to make long-lasting change exist, there are district leaders today who embody second-order change leadership when overcoming the challenge of school technology leadership. These technology-savvy superintendents play an important role as whole-system change agents.

This study highlighted that there many district leaders today who embody second-order change leadership in helping move their districts forward.

This study investigates the performance of Indiana’s new principals per the Educational Leadership Constituent Council (ELCC) and the Indiana Content Standards for building-level leader preparation. Using quantitative survey methodology, information was collected from Indiana superintendents regarding the effectiveness of principals who had recently completed university administrative preparation programs. Analysis of responses revealed that superintendents viewed their new principals as “proficient” in almost every area, with the highest mean observed in the category of Integrity. In contrast, the mean response for “financial management” was found to be in the “basic” range, creating implications for an area of potential development in school leadership education in the state.

The ever-increasing pressure for school improvement has led to a related increase in research-practice partnerships (RPPs) that address problems of practice. Yet, little research has centered on how the myriad challenges to such partnerships can be overcome, such as bridging the cultural divide between universities and their school-based partners. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine how social capital was developed among the members of a steering committee in a RPP between a university and a 12-district consortium of predominantly rural, high-poverty school districts to develop and implement a professional development initiative for rural school leaders.

Data for this phenomenological single case study were collected over a one-year period through participant observations, document analysis and semi-structured interviews with ten steering committee members. Data were inductively and deductively coded through multiple rounds of analysis, which drew on the structural and cognitive elements of social capital (Uphoff, 2000). Findings were triangulated and member checked for trustworthiness.

The analysis of the data revealed three key ways in which social capital was developed among members of the steering committee to overcome the cultural challenges of RPPs to develop and implement a professional development initiative for rural school leaders: providing an open but focused structure, ensuring inclusive and respectful discussion and negotiating roles and ideas.

The findings provide a fine-grained illustration of how intentional efforts to develop social capital among members in a co-design team can assist in bridging the cultural boundaries often encountered in RPPs.

The purpose of this paper is to de‐construct the traditional bifurcation of logic and emotion in the preparation of educational leaders which, following regnant business planning and management models anchored in economics, focuses almost exclusively on social science methodology and the tenets of normative decision theory in formal university based‐preparation programmes in the UK and the USA. This dominant approach has many drawbacks and does not reflect how educational leaders actually engage in decision making.

The paper is a conceptual/logical analysis of the apparent weaknesses in traditional preparatory curricula as well as a report of preliminary qualitative research derived from a non‐probability, convenience sample of 13 interviews in the UK and the USA of middle‐level managers in institutions of higher education.

The major findings lie in the development of an initial schematic that challenges the dominant binary in considered decisions in educational leadership. The binary regarding the separation of logic and emotion simply does not exist as emotion is always a factor in decision making. The schematic proposes a way to make emotion an inclusive part of considering decision making.

Traditional notions of effective decision making should be revised to include how decision makers come to understand the role their own emotions play in rendering educational decisions on the job, and university providers should begin to revamp courses and curricula which more accurately portray them.

The originality of the paper is in the analysis of decision making which suggests that the role of emotion is in fact, logical and rational, as opposed to non‐rational in educational decision‐making contexts. The value of this position is that it restores to decision‐making preparation a more “real world” perspective which is often not present when so‐called non‐rational variables are factored out in problem‐solving training in university preparation programmes.