6 Dec 2007, Meredith Mountford
[This is an abstract of a paper given at the symposium School Board Research: Main Lines of Inquiry, in Des Moines, Iowa, September 14-15, 2007. The full paper is published in Relevancy and Revelation: The Future of School Board Governance, by Rowman and Littlefield, Spring 2008.]
The relationship between school boards and superintendents in American Public Schools has been fraught with controversy since their inception in the mid 1800’s. This relationship has been notoriously characterized as tense, conflict laden, and largely because of this, board/superintendent teams today are often characterized as dysfunctional. While board development programs and superintendent preparation programs continue to try and educate board members and superintendents on their roles and responsibilities, the problems associated with school boards and superintendents have continued to exist for the past 200 years. Such persistence suggests perhaps that training and education programs for board members and superintendents have only been addressing the symptoms of something else. And, until the source of those symptoms is identified and addressed head on, school boards and superintendents will likely remain largely dysfunctional.
This chapter briefly reviews the historical development of school boards and superintendents and their evolving roles and relationship over the last two centuries. Several historical and current sources of tension between school boards and superintendents commonly cited in the literature are also reviewed. Next, findings from a recent study suggesting the sources of tension commonly cited in board and superintendent literature are perhaps only symptoms of deeper, more underlying, psychological and sociological root causes. Ultimately, the purpose of this chapter is to elucidate some underlying root sources of tension between school boards and superintendents so that educational leadership and school board development training programs can begin to address some of the underlying root sources of the tension rather than just simply addressing the symptoms.