The whipsaw firing and “unfiring” of Clark County Schools Superintendent Jesus Jara seems to be another example of escalating tensions between administrators and local school boards that are becoming increasingly politicized.
From coast to coast, superintendents are either being pushed aside or walking off the job. This year alone, the top school officials in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Broward County and Palm Beach, Fla., have called it quits.
Of the country’s 25 largest school districts, 10 have seen new leaders this year.
Part of the problem recently is the job is “such an increasingly political position,” said Jeffrey Young, a professor at the Teachers College at Columbia University in New York and co-director of Columbia’s Urban Education Leaders Program.
Parents are showing up at school board meetings raging about mask mandates, vaccines and critical race theory. The situation has gotten so out of control in some places that federal authorities have been alerted to watch out for threats against school officials.
“To be an effective superintendent you need to be able to work with many diverse stakeholders and stakeholder groups,” Young said.
In Clark County, the school board voted last week to reverse an earlier decision to fire Jara, although it’s not clear if even still wants the job. He said late Friday afternoon that he was exploring with his legal counsel the board’s latest action.
The reversal of Jara’s termination, approved 4-3 by a deeply divided board, was punctuated with a similarly split decision to investigate allegations of a hostile work environment — allegations raised by Jara after he was fired in late October.
The district has had five superintendents, not counting interim leaders, in the last 20 years. The board is to blame, said Trustee Irene Cepeda, the linchpin of the termination reversal.
On Oct. 28, Cepeda voted to fire Jara, but in the weeks after, she had a change of heart and a meeting that began Thursday and continued into the early morning hours Friday was the swing vote to reverse the termination.
“It’s very clear that we have a relationship problem,” she said Thursday before being one of the four votes needed to begin searching for an outside investigator.
Institutionally, “it’s a culture problem” and the board hasn’t done anything about it, she added.
Research shows the dynamics of superintendent turnover are varied and complex.
More recently, it’s morphed into a political position, said Young, the Columbia professor.
Young, who has served as a superintendent for 27 years in several districts in the Boston area, said “hammering” was a fair way to characterize taking on the competing interests from teachers, unions, governance structures, families and community. This would be true even without the continuing pandemic and resulting burnout, he said.
In 2006, the average tenure nationally was five to six years and the annual turnover rate for superintendents was between 14-16%, according to The School Superintendents Association.
EdSource, an educator industry publication, cited a range of reasons for the high turnover: conflicts with school boards about carrying out reforms, culture clashes within the district, a surge of retirement by baby boomers, and an opportunity for more money and prestige by taking a position in a bigger district.
They also reported it takes time on the job — some say at least five years — to bring about lasting change in a large urban district such as in Las Vegas.
“Superintendents are hired to be fired,” Santiago Wood, former superintendent of districts in Fresno and San Jose, Calif., told EdSource.
When Auston Beutner, the immediate past superintendent in Los Angeles, chose not to renew his contract this spring, he told EdSource he was supportive and polite toward his former employer and didn’t blame the board. He was candid, though, about how complex the challenges of Los Angeles Unified were, from academics to poverty, food insecurity and mental health.
A 2012 study in the American Educational Research Journal found that between 2006 and 2009, 71% of superintendents in California’s largest districts and 45% of all superintendents in the state left their jobs.
The Broward County, Fla., school board accepted the resignation of then-Superintendent Robert Runcie, who faced harsh criticism over school safety protocols in the wake of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in his district. Runcie resigned after a grand jury indicted him on perjury charges.
The alleged perjury was related to mismanagement of funds reportedly uncovered while investigating school safety protocols, not to the shooting directly. Runcie has pleaded not guilty and said the criminal charges were politically motivated.
Richard Carranza, a one-time regional superintendent at CCSD, resigned his post leading the New York City Department of Education, the country’s largest school district with more than 1 million students, in March. He was less than three weeks shy of his third anniversary.
An article in New York Magazine draws a portrait of a man broken by the stresses of his job; it titled the story “Richard Carranza’s Last Stand: De Blasio hired an ‘equity warrior’ as schools chancellor. How parental politics — and the pandemic — left him defeated.”
New York City’s governance structure is markedly different from CCSD’s. Though the school board is elected, the mayor appoints the schools chancellor. New Yorkers just elected a new mayor this month.
Changing of the guard could be part of the cause in the Clark County School District, as staggered elections have the potential to regularly replace board members — three of the seven trustees joined the CCSD board in 2020. Lola Brooks and Linda Cavazos are currently Clark County’s senior-most members, joining in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Jara started at CCSD in June 2018.
These moving parts contribute to the political intensity, “and why it’s so important to be really intentional about building a good superintendent-board relationship,” Young said.
Young doesn’t know Jara or the details of CCSD’s conflicts.
He does know about how families value their children, becoming emotional. Fear, that their child may be harmed or left behind in school, is an emotion that can turn to anger. People like scapegoats, and superintendents are the face of a school system, he said.
“We like to have people we can blame,” Young said. “It’s good to attach our pain to someone else so that we don’t have to own it ourselves.”