There Is an Alarming Amount of Misinformation About the Public-School Superintendent Hiring Process (Parts 1 & 2)
The “Misinformation Circus”
Watching the current misinformation circus surrounding the topic of the public-school superintendent hiring process (or it’s problems), I believe some of it represents a mean-spirited and cynical attempt to score political points on unrelated issues, such as the predictable operational deficiencies caused by our badly broken national immigration policies, which have little to do with the emotional or educational well-being of children.
But the other side of the misinformation problem, like so many so-called “educational news stories,” is driven by a lack of informed knowledge and by the inclination of some in the news media to seek out the most sensational aspects of a story, not to educate, but to capture the largest number of revenue-generating eyeballs.
I’m not angry with them, for as a lifelong public educator, I understand that electronic and print news services are business entities. Yet, they can also become powerful educational tools when employed in classrooms by professional educators guided by ethical, pedagogically sound, and learning-outcome-driven standards.
1. A Patchwork of Rules and Realities
As someone who has operated on both sides of the superintendent hiring equation—first as a candidate seeking and successfully securing a superintendency, and later as an executive search firm advisory consultant and informal advisor to school board members, I can perhaps shed a little light on what is often presented as a simple and straightforward process, when in truth, the opposite is the case.
Across the United States (and its territories) there are roughly 14,000 school districts, in addition to the school systems operated by the military. Each state establishes its own licensure and certification requirements for superintendents, and every district designs its own search and selection procedures within those parameters. Consequently, there is no national model, only thousands of variations shaped by state law, district culture, and governance structures.
Large urban systems such as New York City, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles add another layer of complexity: they are technically single districts under one state-recognized superintendent (often called a chancellor or CEO), even though they employ multiple community or area superintendents who must also hold valid state credentials.
2. Misunderstood Issues in Personnel Screening
Public confidence in the hiring process is often shaken by rare failures that attract headlines. Yet, as those of us who have worked inside the system know, Human Resources departments generally get it right. Each year they process thousands of new employees, ensuring background checks, references, university degrees, licenses and certifications are in place. There is, however, no good news story when Human Resources, considering the huge number of new employees they process each year, gets it right—as they overwhelmingly do—and those “unacceptable” prospective employees never set foot inside a school building or district.
Still, vulnerabilities exist. Because the U.S. lacks a national school system or a unified educator database, information about an employee’s misconduct may not always follow them across school districts or state lines. Staff who resign before disciplinary proceedings are finalized, or administrators who accept “no-fault” transfers or demotions, can leave behind incomplete personnel records for future background checkers. Further, differing state employee privacy laws often prevent districts from sharing negative employment information.
There is also the persistent problem of employees “pleading down” to much less serious charges—either within a district’s internal disciplinary process or through the legal system, where charges can be reduced below the level of a felony.
Compounding this is the absence of a consistent mechanism for districts to learn when an employee has been arrested for conduct occurring outside of school buildings, beyond the school day, or even outside the city, state, or country. This creates a deeply problematic situation in which most districts must rely on employees to self-report such “illegal” incidents, which can be problematic when there is an arrest and no indictment or conviction.
Unfortunately, law-enforcement agencies vary widely in their communication with school districts. Some are diligent and proactive in notifying school systems of employee arrests, while others are inconsistent—or fail to report such information altogether. In these cases, ironically, the news media often becomes the district’s first, and sometimes only, source of information regarding a school employee’s arrest.
3. The Limits of Detection: Why “Past Bad Acts” Can Go Undiscovered
Here lies a fundamental truth that the public rarely understands: a school district or executive search firm has almost no independent authority to uncover hidden misconduct if that information does not appear in an accessible, verifiable database.
Unlike medicine or law enforcement, education operates without a national professional registry that tracks disciplinary actions or license revocations across state lines. Because public education is a state—not federal—responsibility, each state maintains its own credentialing and revocation system. There is no single national repository where a search firm or district HR team could check whether a candidate had quietly resigned from another state under investigation or settled a disciplinary case out of view.
If the individual’s prior state education agency never revoked or suspended their license, and no criminal conviction was recorded, that history effectively disappears. To the receiving state or district, the candidate appears fully qualified. Even the most diligent search firm can only examine what is legally available: official state certification records, background-check clearances, and reference statements. When those sources are silent, so is the system.
This structural limitation is not due to neglect or incompetence by HR staff or executive search consultants; it is a direct consequence of our federalized educational framework. Since the United States does not operate as a single national school system, there is no centralized data clearinghouse comparable to national databases used in other professions. As a result, both districts and search firms must rely on trust in state-level credentialing agencies—and occasionally, luck—when verifying a superintendent’s professional past.
Understandably, given the enormous workload that often-understaffed state education departments and local school district HR offices must manage, annually certifying thousands of teachers and school-building administrators (and other non-public education professionals), maintaining a centralized list of “bad-behaving” superintendents is rarely a top priority. Yet the absence of a unified, nationwide status reporting and revocation database leaves even the most diligent search teams navigating in partial darkness. Each new superintendent search is forced to depend on its own creative, time-consuming, and sometimes incomplete background-research strategies, rather than drawing from a shared national system of verified information.
4. Licensure and Reciprocity: Who Decides Who Is Qualified?
A crucial, little-understood point is that school districts and search firms have no authority over superintendent licensure. That power rests solely with each state’s education department. When a superintendent relocates to another state, they must request reciprocal certification—a process that differs widely across jurisdictions.
Some states, informally referred to as “gold-card reciprocity states” (for example, New York), get readily accept by another state’s credentialing body: “If New York says you’re qualified, that’s good enough for us.” Others require partial documentation or coursework verification, but few re-investigate an applicant’s complete professional or legal history. Therefore, if a certification were ever granted in error or through lax verification, a hiring district would have no knowledge of it or have the power to overturn it once the state has officially issued the superintendency license.
5. Why Districts Use Executive Search Firms
Critics sometimes question why school boards spend public funds on search firms. The answer is straightforward: the applicant pool is enormous and the stakes are high. A single superintendent vacancy can draw hundreds of applications, many of them formally qualified on paper.
A reputable executive search firm helps the district’s governing body—school board, mayor, or trustees—clarify the leadership qualities, competencies, and values it seeks. These early sessions resemble strategic retreats, where the firm facilitates consensus before the public process begins. Once a clear profile emerges, the firm screens, recruits, and discreetly contacts both active candidates and currently serving superintendents who may be ready for a new challenge.
These non-public exploratory conversations allow both sides to determine fit without destabilizing the candidate’s current district. When news of a superintendent’s departure becomes public prematurely, morale and operations can suffer; hence the use of interim or “caretaker” superintendents while searches conclude.
6. The Bottom Line
The superintendent selection process is neither secretive nor simple. It operates at the intersection of law, policy, politics, and human judgment. Errors make headlines; accuracy does not. Understanding the limits of district authority, the complexities of state licensure, and the professional prudence of using search firms can help the public view these appointments with greater realism and less suspicion.
The goal, after all, is to ensure that the person leading a school district is not merely certified on paper, but genuinely capable of safeguarding and advancing the educational mission entrusted to them.
About the Author:
Michael A. Johnson is a former New York City superintendent, executive search consultant, and school leadership mentor. He has served as a site supervisor for graduate students in school-building leadership programs and as a district mentor to aspiring principals and assistant principals. His work focuses on strengthening ethical, equitable, and high-impact school-building leadership pipelines in public education.
