9 North Texas superintendent resignations equals 9 opportunities for public school innovation

Hundreds of thousands of students sitting in classroom seats across North Texas will be without superintendents in the coming months.

Recent announcements from Dallas and Fort Worth ISD superintendents bring the total in our area to nine districts that will be searching for superintendents. This enormous decision — perhaps the single most important job of school boards — will come with pressure to get the decision right, for the benefit of all the students who count on them.

It’s an understatement to say that these last few years have been hard for educators. Whether teachers, principals, support staff or superintendents, the trend is the same: an increasing number of vacancies and a decreasing number of people who want to fill them. Increasing partisanship and a race to political extremes have begun to tear at the fabric of the education system — a foundational pillar of our democracy — and put increasing pressure and stress on educators.

Beyond this, we are slowly but surely climbing our way out of a global pandemic that laid bare our systemic woes and exposed long-standing inequities such as food insecurity and the digital divide. School systems stepped into the gap to help provide necessary support to students and families.

This confluence of crises has combined to create a perfect storm of conditions that is, at least in part, contributing to this turnover of superintendents and educators. The North Texas districts that lost superintendents are Dallas ISD, Richardson ISD, Fort Worth ISD, Mesquite ISD, Northwest ISD, Hurst-Euless ISD, Lewisville ISD, Plano ISD and my own district, DeSoto ISD.

However, out of crisis comes opportunity.

This next group of superintendents have a tough task ahead of them. They will contend with significant student learning loss that is clear across North Texas and the state, increasing burnout and unsustainability of the role of educators in our systems, and exacerbated mental health and social-emotional needs of students and adults alike. While these challenges are great, no doubt, their enormity underscores the desperate need for innovation and a willingness to forge a new path forward.

The districts that new superintendents will inherit have been resilient in the face of this pandemic. Educators have innovated like never before over these last two years, flipping classrooms online at a moment’s notice, finding ways to provide more individualized support for students and families, and experimenting with new school calendars that have the potential to benefit students and their families long term.

There is no option for districts to “return to normal” because “normal” was not working for most students, anyhow. In fact, prior to the pandemic only 39% of third- through eighth-grade students were on level in the Dallas-Fort Worth area (Region 10), meeting standards for reading and math. While major strides have been made in Dallas and the surrounding area, we still have a long way to go before every student in our region has access to an excellent education.

The opportunity in front of us now is to find leaders who will build on the lessons from this pandemic and build a better system that works for all students.

As school boards and communities set out to find visionary and collaborative leaders who can bring their expertise to help create the systems that we all want for students, school boards must also be willing to look in the mirror and put in the work to create the conditions for this success. This includes community members and school boards pushing to:

1. Adopt meaningful student outcome goals that showcase what the board, and community, expect their superintendent to achieve.

2. Set clear community values that the superintendent is not to ignore in the relentless pursuit of achieving the goals. For example: if one of the identified values is positive student culture, then the superintendent should not make decisions that may achieve the goals at the expense of that positive student culture.

3. Stand up for and stand by their superintendents, united in pushing back on vitriol, pessimism, politicking, special interests, fear of innovation and other distractions from the goal of improving outcomes for all students.

If communities and school boards come together to be clear about their hopes and values for the future of their respective districts, it will create more trust and stability for incoming superintendents who have a monumental, but critical task ahead of them.

These next superintendents will lead our districts into the next decade. It’s on us as a community to set the charge for them. Will we ask them to drive us forward or backward?

I hope we choose to embrace the opportunity and move forward to build an education system that works for all students.

Ben Mackey is chief of research, evaluation and design in DeSoto ISD and a trustee for Dallas ISD. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.