Superintendents Agree on the Destination. They Can't Agree on the Road.
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Ask a room of superintendents what they're trying to accomplish and you'll get remarkable consensus.
Ask them how to get there and the room splits.
That's the finding at the center of a July report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, covered this month by K-12 Dive: 90% of surveyed superintendents named improving academic achievement as a long-term district goal — and almost none of them agreed on the method.
The numbers: near-unanimous on goals
CRPE surveyed superintendents across New England districts and collected 307 responses across six states. The alignment on priorities was striking:
90% cited improving academic achievement as a long-term goal
80% cited improving instructional quality
78% listed creating a safe and welcoming school community
Three numbers that high, on three separate questions, is not a survey finding you see often. On the what, the field is effectively settled.
The split: strengthen the system, or replace it
The consensus ends there. Superintendents disagreed on whether to strengthen the systems they already have or overhaul them outright — and CRPE frames that disagreement as the thing standing between shared goals and actual transformation.
The report is blunt about why the question matters:
Today's school systems were never designed to deliver equitable outcomes at scale. They still reflect gaps in achievement and engagement that are actively widening.
CRPE's position is that overhauls “will be increasingly necessary.” The survey suggests most districts are not built to attempt one.
Why incremental keeps winning
The report identifies a set of forces that push districts toward small moves even when leaders want big ones.
Capacity restraints. There is only so much a district leadership team can carry at once, and transformation is additive to everything already on the calendar.
Stakeholder appetite. Cautious, incremental change is simply easier to get community buy-in for. Overhauls require a political case that most superintendents don't have the runway to build.
The compliance load. This is the quiet one. As CRPE put it: “Maintaining basic stability and instructional quality is absorbing leaders' time and attention.” The operational, financial, and compliance work of keeping a district running consumes the exact bandwidth strategic redesign would require.
Delegation of the long game. Many superintendents reported relying on other administrators — curriculum directors, assistant superintendents — to lead the district's long-term priorities. The strategic work gets handed down while the superintendent handles the immediate.
None of these are failures of will. They're structural conditions, and CRPE treats them as such.
What this looks like in practice
CRPE's report doesn't single out individual districts, but the pattern it describes is recognizable in almost any central office.
The strategic plan exists. It says the right things — the same things 90% of superintendents said. But the week is spent on a bus contract, a facilities issue, a state reporting deadline, and a board member's question about a single school's data. The transformation work is real, and it's assigned to someone two levels down who also has a full job.
Meanwhile the case for urgency keeps getting stronger. Results from the 2025 Nation's Report Card showed the gap between higher- and lower-performing high school students widened in most academic areas, including 12th grade math and 12th grade reading. A gender gap in 8th grade science re-emerged after the pandemic. The trend lines are not waiting for districts to free up capacity.
What leaders should actually do
CRPE lays out four conditions it says have to be in place for transformation to succeed. Ordered here by how quickly a district can act on them:
1. Decide, out loud, which camp you're in. Strengthen or overhaul is a real fork, and leaving it unnamed means defaulting to incremental by accident. Put the question directly to your cabinet and your board. Ambiguity here is what CRPE identifies as the blocker.
2. Audit where the superintendent's time actually goes. CRPE calls on school boards and state policymakers to reduce the time superintendents spend on compliance, operational, and financial issues. Some of that is a state-level fix — but a board can hand real operational decisions to a deputy this quarter without waiting on anyone.
3. Invest in leadership development with on-the-job coaching. CRPE specifically frames this as building the political and strategic skills to engage stakeholders and redesign systems, not general management training. The skill gap it names is the ability to make a public case for change.
4. Push to reshape the incentives around the role. CRPE asks school boards, leadership associations, and state policymakers to shift the superintendency away from being a “politically constrained manager of competing stakeholder interests” toward a role that can lead change. That's a longer play, and it belongs on association and legislative agendas.
5. Recruit outside partners into the buy-in work. The report calls on funders, advocates, and community and business leaders to partner with districts and take an active role in building public support. Superintendents cannot manufacture stakeholder appetite alone — and the survey suggests the ones trying to are the ones stalling.
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Source & credit
This post summarizes and builds on “Superintendents agree on goals, but not necessarily how to achieve them,” by Naaz Modan, Senior Reporter at K-12 Dive, published August 7, 2026. All survey figures — the 90%, 80%, and 78% priority findings, the 307 responses across six New England states, the CRPE quotes, and the four recommendations — come from Modan's reporting on the Center on Reinventing Public Education's July “District Transformation” report. The 2025 Nation's Report Card details are likewise drawn from that article. The commentary on what districts should do with these findings is ours.
Thank you to Naaz Modan and the K-12 Dive team for the reporting.
