Ethics in the superintendency: the actions of malfeasance by a few superintendents undermine the credibility of honest, hard-working educators

School Administrator, Sept, 2004 by Priscilla Pardini

A superintendent in Maryland accepts as a top honor in a national recognition program a $25,000 cash prize from a textbook vendor doing millions of dollars worth of business with his school district.

The wife of an elected superintendent delivers her husband's campaign literature to the schools in his Alabama district and asks principals to distribute the material in the mailboxes of school staff.

School board members in an Indiana district spend $4,100 of the money earmarked for public relations on an engraved Rolex watch for the district's retiring superintendent.

What's wrong with these pictures?

Perhaps nothing as appalling as the U.S. military atrocities in Iraqi prisons or the sexual abuse scandals rocking the Catholic Church of late. Or as financially self-serving as Martha Stewart's lies to an investigator about a personal stock sale or as morally outrageous as Bill Clinton's personal conduct in the White House.

Yet, say the experts who study ethics in public life, one need look no further than the newspaper headlines to discover school officials in legal trouble. During just a four-week period at the end of the school year, the news media reported on a Long Island superintendent accused of embezzling more than $1 million from his school district, a North Dakota superintendent sentenced to probation for stealing a school district Jeep and securing reduced-price lunches for his children, a Colorado superintendent sentenced to six years in prison for padding his annual salary by up to $44,000 a year, a Nebraska superintendent arrested on a misdemeanor public indecency charge, an Arkansas superintendent who resigned after engaging in a fight with a local broadcaster, a Nebraska superintendent faced with losing his certification after using school district technology to distribute pornography and sexual jokes, and a Louisiana superintendent suspended for three days for plagiarizing a California superintendent's letter to the community.

While still quite tare among school system leaders, experts suggest these moral and ethical lapses are undermining public trust in schools and their leaders--institutions and individuals long held to a higher standard of behavior than their peers in corporate and political arenas. Incidents of financial kickbacks, nepotism and conflicts of interest may grab the news media's attention. Yet potentially even more problematic are the seemingly routine administrative decisions school leaders make every day that can have a negative, long-term impact on a school or school district's moral compass.

To be sure, Ron Rebore, a professor of educational leadership and higher education at St. Louis University, says educators are "by far, the least [ethically] problematic" of our institutional leaders. What's more, the issue of principled leadership is being increasingly addressed through university-level courses and professional development programs for school leaders that focus on ethics. Consider, too, new legislation on ethical behavior that raises the standards of ethical behavior for all public employees.

Still Rebore remains concerned. "We are certainly tainted by what happens in society in general," he says. "Every institution--the church, business, government, and we're part of government--is under suspicion. People don't trust us." In fact, Rebore says today's moral climate has generated a "loss of innocence" reminiscent of the 1960s.

Thomas Sobol, who teaches ethics to aspiring school system leaders at Columbia University's Teachers College, gets the "sense that things are falling apart." Says Sobol: "All that's going on, socially, politically and economically, is part of, reflective of and in and of itself an unethical situation that screams for attention." And when it comes to his own field, says Sobol, a veteran school leader on the state and local levels in New York, "Education contains an important ethical dimension we've been neglecting."

A Sad State

Research on the subject, some of which stretches back 36 years, suggests school superintendents confronted with ethical dilemmas can be expected to make decisions consistent with the AASA Code of Ethics less than 50 percent of the time. The first such study was conducted in 1968 by C. Roy Dexheimer, at the time superintendent of the Tompkins-Seneca-Tioga BOCES in Ithaca, N.Y. William C. Fenstermaker, an elementary school principal in Pennsylvania, replicated the study in 1994.

Both Dexheimer and Fenstermaker asked superintendents to choose one of several suggested responses to what they called "borderline ethical dilemmas" similar to those they might encounter on the job and then compared their answers to current AASA ethics codes. A total of 47.3 percent of those polled in 1968 and 48.1 percent in 1994 chose the responses considered "ethical."

"Sadly for the state of the profession," wrote Fenstermaker in 1996 for The School Administrator, "my findings, with few exceptions, nearly duplicated those obtained a quarter century earlier."

Both studies, the most significant conducted on the issue involving top school leaders, found less experienced superintendents and those working in larger school districts most likely to make decisions in line with the code adopted by association members in 1962. (A streamlined version of the AASA code was adopted in 1981.) Both researchers also found a correlation between ethics and salaries, with those paid the most generally scoring higher.