Caught in the Crosshairs

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Type: Article

Topics: Leadership Development, School Administrator Magazine

November 01, 2023

Appears in November 2023: School Administrator.

Reconceptualizing the superintendency with place at its center as a value-added leadership approach to contemporary contentiousness

Education researcher Kathryn Riley has spent a career studying the role school leaders play in helping students anchor themselves and find their place in the world.

In her books Leadership of Place: Stories from Schools in the US, UK & South Africa and Compassionate Leadership for School Belonging, she observes that divisions restrict young people’s views and perceptions and limit their possibilities.

I too have observed this phenomenon in my work in school leadership. Riley and others who study student alienation argue that division creates insiders and outsiders: those who feel safe and those who don’t. As more advanced stages of negative partisanship emerge during the approach of the 2024 presidential election, superintendents must strengthen their resolve and actuate their positional authority to ensure that schools are the one place that all students feel psychologically safe and included.

The division that has bled onto school campuses is caused by politically ideological differences, a chasm that has left a deep cleft in our national identity. Unlike the gaps we are accustomed to, which systems-thinking educators use to generate creative tension to catalyze progress and innovation, this gap generates emotional tension, which is of little or no utility as a mechanism for forward movement. (See related story.)

There are no school board policies, education code statutes or Constitutional assurances that protect kids from the forces of hateful rhetoric, exclusion and societal mistreatment at the hands of a few. Superintendents, distinguished by place, are finding we are caught between contradictory expectations — between the formal conception of the duty-bound superintendent stressing values that prioritize students’ well-being and promote their moral and social agency, and the post-truth America concept of the superintendent as lengthened shadows of their board majorities.

As a result, superintendents are reexamining their roles, specifically as moral agents given the nature of conflictual relationships with their ruling majorities.

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Author

Allan J. Mucerino

Superintendent

Alvord Unified School District, Corona, Calif.

‘Creative Tension’s’ Mismatch Between Theory and Reality

Strife within communities has manifested at board of education meetings coast to coast — from my home state of California, where a suburban Los Angeles board meeting descended into violence as dueling groups protested over the teaching of gender and sexuality and whether it has a place in the classroom, to Vermont, where one district’s use of gender-inclusive language in health class sparked a national backlash.

What may have started as civil discourse has degenerated into civil discord. Superintendents may have believed they could generate “creative tension” from the discord as The Fifth Discipline author Peter Senge characterized as the integrating principle of systems thinking. But school district leaders are rapidly concluding that creative tension cannot be generated from current reality alone.

As Senge contends in his work, creative tension is a natural tension that exists in the gap between an organization’s vision and its reality. Creative tension formed in public schools from pressure to improve as the threat of charter schools, choice and vouchers served as catalysts for public school reform in the era of the education consumer. The vision of what schools could be compared to their reality resulted in creative tension and encouraged schools to improve.

Policies, such as No Child Left Behind, also served to act as a reform mechanism. However, when a district’s vision conflicts with some members of its community’s political ideology, there’s only tension, not the creative energy Senge describes.

Other resolution perspectives that embrace tension generated by conflict may be found in the work of management author Patrick Lencioni, who makes a case for conflict of the healthy ideological variety, arguing it leads to a productive debate around ideas and concepts when guided by norms and rules of engagement. There currently are no rules of engagement for today’s dueling ideological conflicts.

Numerous organizational theories posit that ideological conflict grounded in ideas, concepts and methods aimed at improvement generates creative tension, which can lead to discussion and debate. Ideological conflict grounded in political divisiveness, on the other hand, does not generate creative tension. Consequently, it fails to serve as an instrument of improvement or resolution. If, as Scott Isaksen and Goran Ekvall posited in their widely cited 2010 study “Managing for Innovation: The Two Faces of Tension in Creative Climates,” there are two faces of tension — debate and conflict — then it stands to reason the type grounded in personal and emotional tension wears the face of conflict.

Over and over, in the practical and research literature on leadership, most frequently in the context of business and industry, creative tension is an organizational concept that can greatly benefit its users, but as a catalyst for resolving political conflict in the context of education, its usefulness is limited.

— Allan Mucerino

Inward Mindset vs. Outward Mindset

At our school district’s annual retreat this past summer, our 103-person leadership/management team engaged in mindset transformation work with the Arbinger Institute, our leadership development partners.

The focus of the retreat was developing into the best versions of ourselves, by not objectifying people, which happens to be at the heart of the ideological gap distracting educators from focusing on the achievement gap among student groups.

People who live and work with an inward mindset see people as objects rather than as people. They see people as vehicles to be used, irrelevancies to be ignored or as obstacles to be overcome, rather than as individuals with their own thoughts, feelings and perspectives. The thoughts and beliefs of the variety of community members whose opinions may not align with ours are equally as important and legitimate as our own opinions.

For a superintendent, those conflicts may reside as close to home as your school board. Spotting the red flags and acknowledging when we are engaging in inward thinking is a learned behavior and one that superintendents, school boards and team members would be smart to adopt and refine.