The superintendent of schools is a position of wide influence but one that is narrowly understood. This, in part, stems from its history. Rarely has a position of such centrality grown in such a tangled way. Consequently, there has not been much written or studied about the superintendency, and to this day, not much is known about how it functions and why some people do it well and others do not. Further, because of the tremendous pressure on public education in the twenty-first century, the superintendent's role is changing and moving toward an uncertain future.
The superintendency can be divided into three periods of history. The early period began shortly after the genesis of public education during the 1800s and extends to the early part of the twentieth century. The professional superintendent period covered the first half of the twentieth century and began to end in the 1960s. The modern superintendency is still in transition.
History
The position of superintendent emerged a decade or so after the creation of public schools. Initially there were no superintendents of schools. First, state boards ran schools, and then local lay boards, both without the benefit of professional help.
Public education is the responsibility of the state. The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution states that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Education was not mentioned in the Constitution, and when interest grew in providing education, the states assumed that accountability.
The state legislatures passed laws for public education and allocated small amounts of money to help local communities with their education needs. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the lawmakers saw the need to have an accounting system for these funds and appointed volunteer committees to over-see the use of state funds. These committees eventually led to the formulation of state and local boards of education to carry out this function. In fact, Massachusetts, which is considered the home of public education because of the work of the educator Horace Mann, still calls its school boards "school committees."
As the number of communities that received funds increased, the time required of the local committees became burdensome. A paid state officer was designated to handle the accounting activities of state education funds as well as an increasing number of other responsibilities. This led to a full-time job and New York is credited with appointing the first state superintendent in 1812. Other states soon planned for similar positions.
With few exceptions, the state superintendents were positions of data collecting and distribution of state funds and had little influence on educational issues. State departments of education evolved with similar functions–establishing and enforcing minimum standards and equalizing educational opportunities through the distribution of state funds.
Many small local school systems formed as the population grew and communities expanded to the west. The state officer was not able to visit, inspect, and oversee all the activities of the new schools, and these responsibilities were gradually delegated to local communities, again usually through county volunteer committees.
History repeated itself: the task of overseeing the daily operations became burdensome and led to the creation of paid county positions to conduct this work. Prior to the Civil War, more than a dozen states adopted the county form of educational super-vision and had created county superintendents.
The actual creation of local boards of education dates back to Thomas Jefferson, who in 1779 introduced a proposal in the Virginia Assembly that the citizens of each county would elect three aldermen who would have general charge of the schools. The aldermen were to create an overseer for every ten school districts in the county. The duties included appointing and supervising teachers and examining pupils.
The local superintendency developed simultaneously with the state and county superintendencies. It was established by local initiative, not by constitution or statute, as state and county superintendents were. Some local superintendents supervised a single school district and others oversaw multiple schools.
Buffalo, New York, and Louisville, Kentucky, are credited with establishing in 1837 the first local superintendents. While the idea did not spread quickly, by 1870 there were more than thirty large cities with a superintendent. Until the 1870s local boards without legal authority to do so hired the superintendents. It was felt that local boards had the authority to operate schools and by implication they had authority to hire an individual to administer them.
In 1865 the National Education Association created a Superintendent's Division to serve this growing profession. This later became the American Association of School Administrators, which serves superintendents in the twenty-first century.
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