I recently talked to a graduate student who had decided to do an historical thesis on the career of a retired woman school superintendent. As she combed the library for material for her literature review she was able to find a substantial body of literature on the experience of women principals, but she found it much more difficult to find research on women superintendents. Sacred Dreams: Women and the Superintendency is, therefore, a particularly welcome addition to a burgeoning body of work on women in educational administration.
As its title suggests, the book attends to the personal as well as the public struggles and triumphs of women who have chosen to take on the complex, demanding, and potentially rewarding work of becoming a superintendent of public schools in the USA. The book is organized into four sections based on the stages of a woman superintendent’s career: surveying the role; gaining access to the superintendency; living the experience of being a superintendent; and reflecting on what has been, is, and could be for women who choose this role. Edited by C. Cryss Brunner, the book brings together a collection of papers that explores the experience of women superintendents from diverse cultural backgrounds and from a variety of theoretical perspectives. At the beginning of each section, Brunner precedes her brief introduction with an evocative quote from Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s book, Women Who Run with the Wolves. This proves to be an effective strategy for providing a kind of narrative frame through which the reader can catch a glimpse of what the contributors in each section will offer to understanding each career stage.
Following an introduction by Patricia Schmuck, and a preface and introduction by Brunner, Part One – “Crawling through the window of a dream: surveying the terrain” – provides an historical overview of the work of women superintendents and Marilyn Tallerico looks at the broad research themes that tell us what we know about their work. Schmuck’s chapter looks specifically at the period between 1900‐1935 and reveals a strong link between the womens’ suffrage movement and the ascendancy of women in positions of leadership in educational systems throughout the USA. However, when suffrage was achieved and women’s political clout became an unmistakable reality, Schmuck argues that a backlash against women wielding power in the public sphere became apparent that was fuelled by the emergence of scientific management and growing deference to “expert” knowledge. By the mid‐1900s, school officials argued that choosing a superintendent could not be left up to the vagaries of a public vote but, instead, should be the result of a rational process of appointment by those capable of recognizing expertise. The effect of adopting appointment rather than election in the early 1900s was a sharp decline in the number of women superintendents that has persisted into the early part of the next century. Tallerico’s chapter picks up on Schmuck’s historical account by surveying research that explores and attempts to understand the under‐representation of women superintendents. She organizes her meta‐analysis with three broad themes: profiles, or the demographics of the superintendency; discernible patterns in the career paths of superintendents; and practice, or the nature of what superintendents do. While focused on the gendered nature of each theme, Tallerico also points to the intersection of gender, race, and ethnicity and their impact on the profiles, patterns, and practices of educational systems, as well as the need for further research in each area.
Having surveyed the terrain, Part Two – “‘Do it anyway’: gaining access” – provides insights for women who decide to do just that . For example, Kamler and Shakeshaft expose the role of search consultants as gatekeepers to access to the superintendency and reveal that, while the consultants are often advocates for female candidates, boards are often far less open to their appointment. Brunner’s ethnographic study of the selection of one female superintendent provides a complex picture of the gendered nature of power attached to the position of superintendent that demonstrates how power works contextually to privilege women in certain instances when a board perceives that shared decision making and collaboration are politically expedient. Alston not only focuses on the personal and professional background and the job constraints and facilitators black female superintendents have encountered, but also points out the invisibility of these women in school administration literature. Ortiz’s chapter also looks at the complex intersections between gender, race, and ethnicity in the appointment process of 12 Hispanic superintendents. Like the black female superintendents studied by Alston, the participants in Ortiz’s study often found themselves being chosen as a symbolic gesture of appeasement who were expected to be “messiahs, scapegoats, or sacrificial lambs” in districts that had been badly managed or had high minority populations.
Taken together, it seems to me that the studies in Part Two point to a phenomenon described by Blackmore (1996) in which women administrators are being positioned by increasingly managerialist organizations as “emotional labourers” to absorb the effects of restructuring. Part Three – “‘Small but brilliant’: living the life” – corroborates this impression as each author describes the challenges that women superintendents face in doing their work. However, this section also reveals that, while small in number, the leadership that these women provide stands in brilliant relief against the challenges they encounter in “living the life”. Pavan uses group interviewing to look at the varied experiences of four female superintendents at the beginning of their appointment and then 30 months later. While these conversations reveal stark inequities of opportunity and treatment based on gender, they also demonstrate the importance of women coming to know one another’s experiences in order to extrapolate survival strategies like those offered at the end of Pavan’s chapter. Mendez‐Morse takes a fascinating look at the internal journey of Mexican‐American women who, in the process of becoming and being a superintendent, redefine their self‐image and sense of self‐efficacy. Jackson’s chapter on African‐American women not only provides an historical overview of the representation of black women superintendents, but also the particular experience of and influences on the work of the 1993‐1994 cohort. As each chapter unfolds, it becomes evident that women superintendents leave their responsibilities or are not re‐hired in higher numbers than their male peers. Therefore, Beekley’s chapter that explores this phenomenon is well placed. Using a cultural approach, she demonstrates that women who take on the very public responsibilities of the superintendency may find themselves “dancing in red shoes”. That is, as Beekley’s six case studies suggest, women are particularly vulnerable to dismissal, non‐renewal, or dropping out of their high profile positions because of various combinations of “cultural and social discrimination, professional and organizational isolation, and a diminished quality in their personal lives” (p. 173).
Brunner has chosen to end the book by creating a conversational space in which the experience of Dr Debra Jackson, a successful school superintendent, is first viewed by two researchers through different theoretical lenses to which Dr Jackson responds in the final chapter. First, Brunner uses a qualitative case study approach based on non‐standardized and cumulative interviews to develop a framework for understanding Jackson’s career success. Then Grogan develops a feminist poststructural account based on the same data to develop a complex analysis of the discourses in which Jackson is positioned with a view to enabling her to better understand and, perhaps, disrupt the discursive patterns that hold inequity in place. The last word, very appropriately, is given to Debra Jackson, whose thoughtful response to both Brunner and Grogan is a reminder that our academic work depends on and is enriched by creating opportunities for reflective conversations between academics and the practitioners our work is meant to serve.
The strength of this collection of papers is captured admirably in the epilogue by Chase, who observes that each chapter provides inspiration by reminding us of the work that has been done and remains to be done in working toward “a world worth making”. According to Chase, the experience of women superintendents is a picture of the world worth making for, in their “collective push for social justice at all levels in public schools” (p. 223) they have an opportunity to create a world worth living in for students, teachers, and their school communities. In the end, this book is important because each woman’s struggles chronicled in its pages represent those faced by teachers, students and their caregivers, and those who resist the inequities of insensitive and unjust social institutions that perpetuate “durable inequalities” (Tilly, 1998). That is, the women superintendents whose lives provide the lived data that informs each chapter are exemplars of both the need for pushing at the boundaries of sexism and racism that constrain them as well as the possibilities for social change when those boundaries are challenged and changed.
I am impressed by the theoretical richness and diversity of experience explored in Sacred Dreams: Women and the Superintendency and welcome it as a resource, not only for my own graduate students, but for academics and practitioners who are seeking a more complex understanding of educational administration in general, as well as the particular experience of women superintendents in educational organizations. Despite the fact that all of the papers refer to women superintendents in the USA, there is much to recommend it to those of us in other parts of the world as well. However, the worthwhile contribution that this book makes to the literature would be enhanced by a collection of papers that broadens the analysis to include an international perspective in which the issues of global economic and political forces on the work of school administrators could be more fully developed. In addition, it seems to me that the time has come for a book that takes a “cross‐cultural” look at the experience of male and female administrators in order to develop a more complex gender analysis of the work of school superintendents. While currently marginalized in a world driven by the ideology of profit, I believe that work which explores the centrality of gender to the organization of power in social institutions is essential if we are to recover, in Estés’ words, “the decent wild sanity” (p. 223) of connectedness and care that shelters us all. Brunner’s book gives evidence of sharing those sacred dreams.
