Why a School Superintendent is not a CEO
After a decade of selling into K12, it never ceases to amaze me how my fellow sales professionals in K12 view school superintendents as CEOs. They’re not. In fact, one of the biggest mistakes that sales professionals make in K12 is to assume that school superintendents and CEOs are the equivalent and that they are just working in different verticals. The truth of the matter is that school superintendents and CEOs are cut from a different cloth and it begins with their career path.
The career path of a CEO usually runs one of two ways — either the CEO is the founder of a company or the CEO rose through the ranks by working in different roles at one or multiple companies. Either way, CEOs predominantly have a business and finance background regardless of what kind of bachelor degree was completed. It’s rare to see an individual with only a marketing or engineering background become a CEO. Chances are the CEO completed an MBA and/or has had roles in business operations, management and finance. Moreover, CEOs with diverse backgrounds and experiences are often preferred for high-profile companies.
How does that compare to a school superintendent? First of all, almost all school superintendents rise through the K12 ranks. They rarely come from other verticals. In fact, most of the time, they are prohibited from doing so as per state education laws and regulations. The only way to become a school superintendent is to begin as a teacher; which in and of itself is highly regulated by state laws which is briefly explained in the next paragraph. After accumulating a number of years of experience as a teacher, one becomes a school vice-principal and then a school principal. From there, a school principal can become an assistant superintendent and then finally a school superintendent.
In order to become a teacher in the first place, one has to complete a Bachelor of Education or its equivalent which varies from state to state. A Bachelor of Education program touches on philosophy, psychology, methodology of teaching and so on — as can be expected, it does not address finance or business. For a teacher to become a principal, there’s usually a state requirement to complete a Masters in Education. This program can be geared towards educational leadership, organizational change and educational policy. Once again, there’s generally no major focus on finance or business.
We can ascertain from the above that the career path to becoming a school superintendent is very different from that of a CEO. The path of a CEO is heavily focused on finance and operations. This is very easy to understand as the CEO’s main concern is to increase value for shareholders. In order to increase shareholder wealth, the CEO needs to ensure that sales continue to increase while keeping costs in line and employee morale high.
The school superintendent, on the other hand, is not concerned with shareholder wealth. In fact, the school superintendent is not even concerned with return-on-investment (ROI). The only thing a school superintendent is really focused on is student growth. That’s all. The most successful superintendents are always those that are singularly focused on student growth. How is that success measured? On a number of benchmarks such as student test scores, student report cards, student engagement, staff engagement, parental engagement, etc. Whatever the benchmark, it is not financial. Moreover, other than research academics, no one is looking at whether a school superintendent was able to increase student growth by x factor using x number of dollars in a school district. In fact, the research on public education spending suggests that there’s an inverse relationship between the two; the more the state spends on education, the lower the student growth rate 1.
What does this all mean? To answer this question, I quote Bill Hogarth, the former chief school superintendent of the York Region School Board, the second largest school district in Canada with over 150,000 students. According to Hogarth, to be successful in selling to a school district, you have to be able to “draw a line from the vendor to the student in the classroom”. If you can’t do that, a school superintendent shouldn’t be and won’t be interested in your product or service.
Your solution might save a district money, it might make them more efficient but — the bottom line is — does it impact student achievement? Can you directly, or at least indirectly, demonstrate that students are better off with your solution than without? That’s the gravitas that makes a school superintendent completely different from a CEO.
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There are two ways I can help you:
- If you’re a superintendent and need help building a better tech stack to support student growth and foster teacher engagement, send me a DM on LinkedIn.
- If you’re a sales professional and want to become better at your craft, join my free newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn.
