What New Superintendents Get Wrong About Innovation

I was interviewing to become Harford County’s next superintendent. In both the private session with the Harford County Board of Education and the publicly broadcast community interview, they asked me some version of this question: “What would I change first?”

The question came at me from different angles and in different language, but the underlying ask was consistent. The people evaluating me wanted to know what kind of leader I intended to be. I understood that. What they could not have known is that I had just left a role where the leader did not hesitate to answer that same question early and often, and I had seen from the inside how ineffective that approach had been. I did not answer the same way, and it was not what the room expected.

That was a deliberate choice, and not a comfortable one. A candidate who declines to name his priorities can appear to be someone without real ideas, or without the nerve to share them. I knew that risk going in. I took it anyway, because a new superintendent who announces what he will change before he understands the organization well enough to change it wisely is demonstrating impatience, regardless of what he believes about his own vision.

What Search Committees Miss

Superintendent search committees face a structural problem they are rarely able to name. A candidate's ideas are visible. His capacity to manage a complex organization is much harder to assess in an interview room.

Someone who articulates a compelling vision for instructional improvement, describes an innovative approach to family engagement, or speaks with authority about equity tends to stand out. Those qualities matter. What is harder to evaluate is whether that candidate knows how to run a school district. Whether he has the depth to build a budget, evaluate principals, or manage a disruption without turning it into theater. The assumption, often unstated, is that someone who thinks so clearly about innovation must also be capable of handling the operational details that enable it. That assumption is frequently wrong.

What the Pattern Looks Like

The leader hired on the strength of his ideas typically begins with something that resembles courage. He publicly names the organization's weaknesses. He signals a willingness to say what predecessors would not. People who had grown frustrated with prior leadership respond warmly.

From there, the actions tend to escalate. He restructures the organizational chart. He replaces senior staff. He announces new initiatives before evaluating those already underway. Speed looks like momentum, and momentum is what change agents are supposed to generate.

A telling pattern surfaces in conversation during this phase. Ask these leaders about their prior work, and they describe things they started but never finished. The unfinished work becomes evidence of ambition rather than a question about follow-through. Departures from prior roles get framed as inevitable. The next opportunity was too significant to pass up. Anyone paying close attention should find that framing worth examining.

What the Organization Loses

Every organization, regardless of its problems, has people inside it who have been doing the work. They have teachers showing up, administrators solving problems, and support staff who understand the community in ways no entry process can fully capture.

When a new superintendent's first move is to catalog everything that is broken, those people receive a message they were not meant to hear. They hear that their contributions do not count, that the years they invested in a flawed but functioning system reflect their own failure rather than their commitment. The leader intends to signal ambition. What lands inside the organization is dismissal.

The damage runs deeper than morale. The people who know the most about how the organization runs become the most reluctant to share that knowledge. They watch, and they wait, and they slowly become a form of institutional resistance that no reorganization resolves. A leader who marginalizes the people who understand how things work will spend years trying to figure out why things keep going wrong.

Fix the Base. But Understand What the Base Actually Is.

The most useful framing I have heard for this challenge came from Ray McNulty, an educator and leadership thinker whose work I discovered early in my career. His language was direct and has stayed with me. Fix the base and innovate.

The operational reading of that principle is familiar enough. Keep the buses running, balance the budget, and ensure parents can reach someone when something goes wrong. Those things matter, and leaders who dismiss them as administrative noise eventually pay for it.

But the base worth fixing is more human than operational. Real innovation in school districts does not transfer cleanly across contexts. A leader who imports an approach that produced results elsewhere without doing the demanding work of understanding how different the new context is sets up a predictable failure. What worked in a large urban district does not automatically work in a rural one. What a previous community embraced may land entirely differently with the next.

More often than leaders acknowledge, the problem is that change was done to the organization rather than with it.

When I sat in those Harford interviews and declined to name what I would change first, I was trying to communicate something I wanted the organization to hear before I said anything else. The work of change belonged to all of us, and I was not going to pursue it without them. The base I needed to fix before anything else was a staff willing and ready to pursue change together. That kind of base does not exist on day one. It has to be built.

Why Schools Cannot Absorb Leadership Disruption

Most industries can absorb a period of internal disruption. They can delay a product launch or restructure a team while operations continue around them. School districts operate differently.

The school year runs on a calendar that does not pause. Students arrive in September whether the administrative structure has been sorted or not. Teachers need their schedules, materials, and support systems functioning before the first day, not after the new superintendent has finished reshaping the organization. A disrupted central office becomes a disrupted school, which becomes a disrupted classroom, and what disappears in that sequence is instructional time that no subsequent initiative restores.

Urgency is sometimes warranted. Some districts have more acute needs, and if there are practices that harm students, changes cannot wait. Even so, the manner of change matters as much as its direction. A leader who destabilizes the base in the name of transformation may change the organization. Improving it is a different question entirely.

A Final Thought

The leaders who navigate complex school systems successfully over time share something that interview rooms consistently undervalue. They know how to keep things running, and they understand that the trust and shared investment of the people inside an organization are as fragile and as essential as any operational system.

The change agents who arrive with compelling ideas and insufficient patience often move on before the full consequences of their leadership become visible. The communities they leave behind do not move on as easily. Those communities remember what happened to the people in their schools while the leader was there.

 

Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.