Linda Dawson is IASB director of editorial services and Journal editor.
In the July/August issue of The Illinois School Board Journal, results from the 2008 survey of school board members revealed many board members are putting in more hours on the job but they are not serving for as many years as compared with board members surveyed over the past 15 years.
Comparing the 1998 and 2008 surveys of district superintendents shows they also are spending more time on board work and not staying in the same district for nearly as long. But across the board, they still report excellent job satisfaction numbers.
In 1998, 60 percent of superintendents reported spending 10 hours or less each month with school board meetings and other interactions with the board. Just 18 percent said they spent more than 16 hours on board work a month. The other 22 percent said they spent between 11 and 15 hours a month on board work.
By 2008, those numbers were dramatically different. Just 7 percent of the 404 superintendents who returned surveys said they spent under 10 hours a month on board meetings and interactions with board members. The number spending 11 to 15 hours was nearly constant at 21 percent, but the number who said they spent more than 16 hours a month with board dealings skyrocketed to 72 percent.
These calculations take into consideration a slight difference in wording for the questions. In 1998, superintendents were asked about their hours beginning with increments of five hours or less a month, six to 10 hours, 11 to 15 hours and then 16 or more hours. And they were also asked separately about "meetings" and "other interactions."
In 2008, superintendents were queried about hours with increments of 10 hours or less, 11 to 15 hours, 16 to 20 hours, 21 to 30 hours and more than 30 hours in a single question. To make the comparison valid, responses from the two 1998 questions were combined, divided by two and then percentages were computed based on the 577 respondents in that survey.
Mobility issues
As to their longevity with districts, superintendents seem to be more mobile than 10 years ago, while the age of serving superintendents is still edging up.
In 1998, 48 percent of superintendents said they had been with their current district more than five years. That dropped to 28 percent in the 2008 survey. The number of superintendents who reported less than a year in their current district jumped from 11 percent to 21 percent. Those who had been on the job between one and five years grew from 41 percent to 51 percent.
This also could reflect the number of superintendent retirements that have occurred during the past 10 years.
As to the age of those superintendents, approximately the same percentage are younger than 30 (.2 percent in 1998 and .3 percent in 2008). The number of superintendent respondents who said they were between 30 and 39 grew from 2 percent to 7 percent, but the number of superintendents who indicated they were older than 60 nearly tripled, going from 6 percent to 17 percent.
This continues a trend that was evident in the 2003 superintendent survey as well. In 1998, nearly 30 percent of superintendents were between 40 and 49 years old and 62.5 percent were 50 to 59. By 2003, an aging population shifted the numbers to 17 percent in the 40-49 category and 73 percent who were 50-59. By 2008, 21 percent of superintendent respondents said they were 40-49 and 55 percent said they were between 50 and 59.
While the numbers were static in the lower two age brackets (under 39) between 1998 and 2003, the 30-39 age bracket was on the rise again in 2008 to 21 percent after falling from 29.4 percent in 1998 to 17 percent in 2003.
What might this mean for school districts? Initially, they have a lot of years of experience to draw from when it comes to superintendents who may be available if they need a new one. However, districts may face a monumental challenge in the next five to 10 years as those superintendents in that ballooning upper age bracket start retiring.
Job satisfaction
The 2008 survey of superintendents shows that the majority of superintendents continue to be very happy with the jobs they have chosen. Those who reported being "very satisfied" with their experience on the job was constant at 60 percent between 2003 and 2008.
The number reporting that their job was moderately satisfying showed a slight decline from 32 percent to 27 percent, while the "not as satisfying as expected" response had a slight up-tick from 6 percent to 7.7 percent. Both the "downright disappointed" and "undecided" responses showed little change with both hovering around 1 percent.
When analyzed by age, the older the superintendent the more likely they were satisfied with their job. Of the 67 respondents who were 60 or older, 98 percent found their job "very" or "moderately" satisfying. Those responses dropped to 89 percent for those 50 to 59, 88 percent for those 40 to 49 and 80 percent for those 30 to 39. The one lone respondent who was under 30 and from a district with between 500 and 999 students reported the job as "downright disappointing."
As superintendents were asked to choose whether certain sources of disappointment were relevant to their feelings about their jobs, few changes were apparent between the 2003 and 2008 surveys. Usually less than five percentage points of difference appeared, with some even less.
However, one notable increase appeared when superintendents were asked about "partisan or personal politics" being a cause of "serious disappointment." While just 38 percent answered "yes" in 2003, the number jumped to 47 percent in 2008.
When looking closer, politics seemed to be more of a disappointment for superintendents with more than 2,500 students in their districts and for those who had served one to five years, as well as respondents in the North and Central regions. In addition, when the question was analyzed by the type of community, 10 of the 11 respondents, or 91 percent, from cities larger than 50,000 people expressed partisan or personal politics as a "serious disappointment."
Another notable change, this one a decline, came when the superintendents were asked whether having "inadequate resources" was a serious disappointment. The "yes" responses went from 77 percent in 2003 to just 56 percent in 2008. When coupled with the information that shows an aging superintendent profile, this significant downturn could mean that district administrators are getting accustomed to doing more with less and are not that surprised or disappointed when finances are scarce.
Job satisfaction questions were not part of the 1998 survey, so there are no comparisons to make from 10 years ago.
School improvement
Opinions about district performance vary little between superintendents and board members and those opinions also have been fairly constant over the past 10 years with two notable trends:
The level of satisfaction with community involvement in setting district policies and standards has shown a notable decline and the level of local tax effort for schools is edging back up again. (See Table A)
In the 1998 survey of superintendents, 60 percent said they were satisfied with the way their communities were involved in setting board policies and standards. That number fell to 55 percent in 2003 and fell again to 48 percent in 2008. That may signal that despite all of their school improvement plan efforts to involve community members, increasing the level of involvement may still be a hard nut to crack.
The same downturn of satisfaction was noted among board members during that same time span, although their levels were not as high to begin with. In 1998, 55 percent of board members thought their district performance was "satisfactory" in community involvement. That number dropped to 48 percent in 2003 and 44 percent in 2008.
In 1998, 71 percent of superintendent respondents thought the district performed satisfactorily with its local efforts to finance its schools. While that dipped to 58 percent in 2003, the number was back up to 64 percent in 2008. From board members' perspectives, the satisfaction index on tax effort went from 70 percent in 1998 down to 60 percent in 2003, but it was back up to 66 percent in the latest survey.
What's interesting to note is that elections in April 2002, just a year before board members and superintendents would complete their 2003 surveys, showed a "much better than average" of both local tax referenda and bond issues that were approved in Illinois, according to an article in the Illinois School Board Newsbulletin.
In the 2007 election cycle, voters rejected all three "limiting tax increase" measures in February, but passed 41 percent of the tax increases and 64 percent of the bond issues in April.
One might have surmised that voter approval rates on referenda and bond issues might have translated in both cases to a perception of good local tax support, but that seems to hold true only for 2008, not 2003.
Additional information
Superintendents and school board members were asked additional questions regarding their Internet use, contacting IASB and readership of various Association publications. If you would like to see the actual questions and response numbers from IASB school board member and superintendent surveys from all three
survey years, go to http://iasb.com/services/surveymenu.cfm.
Politics and regionalism in Illinois
While Illinois superintendents responding to a 2008 IASB survey showed an increase from 38 percent to 47 percent in those who saw partisan or personal politics as a "serious disappointment" in their job, it's difficult to make any additional assumptions because of inadequate data.
The question was not specific as to whether the politics were local, regional or state. Nor was there a differentiation between "partisan" and "personal" — it could have been either. But the increase is notable because a similar question posed for board members showed no significant change between 1998 and 2008.
Gerald R. Glaub, retired associate executive director for communications, said because the question did not differentiate between the two there is no way to know for sure which type of partisanship politics might have caused more superintendents to respond as they did. However, one might suspect that personal politics would have a bigger role for school districts because school board members are elected in a local, non-partisan race, at least as listed on the ballot, and may not see themselves as political.
Glaub, as editor of The Illinois School Board Journal, wrote about the issue in a 1993 article, "Politics and other regional differences." In it, he cited a study by Frederick M. Wirt, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, who wrote "The Social Origins of Regionalism."
At that time, Wirt described Illinois political culture as "individualistic, because it is marked primarily by the pursuit of individual interests through political parties." However, he described differences in regional culture between Southern Illinois and Northern Illinois because of the difference in those who settled the state: Uplanders from Kentucky and Indiana in the south and Yankee northern Europeans in the north.
Those influences have been diluted over the years by migration and mass communication, Glaub wrote, until you sometimes see two political cultures side by side in the same communities.
Taking this regionalism into consideration with the 2008 survey data that show superintendents in the Central region (54 percent) were slightly more disappointed to encounter "partisan or personal politics" than in other regions (Northeast, 45 percent; North, 48 percent; and South, 46 percent), what some superintendents may view as politics, board members may see as just a difference of opinion.