The Broad Center at Yale SOM Launches Repository of Data on School System Leaders
To advance empirical research on public education leadership, the center is working to collect and maintain publicly accessible data on multiple aspects of school system governance.
The Broad Center at Yale SOM, which offers graduate programs for school system leaders and supports essential research on effective public education, has launched a repository aggregating nationwide data on superintendents and other district administrators, which will help researchers investigate how these leaders affect student outcomes and what practices enable school districts to succeed.
Publicly available through the data management platform GitHub, the repository currently includes a dataset of superintendents in more than 10,000 of the approximately 13,000 public school districts in the U.S., comprising over 180,000 data points across 23 states and covering a majority of public school enrollment from 2010 to 2022.
Seth Zimmerman, a professor of economics and faculty research director at The Broad Center, said that the data repository advances the center’s core priorities.
“The Broad Center has a mandate to support research that can help educational leaders do their jobs better,” Zimmerman said. “This data will help researchers learn more about who these leaders are, follow leaders over time as they move across districts, and understand how leadership shapes district outcomes.”
The Broad Center hopes that the data will allow for the continued study of highly effective leaders—for example, by following a superintendent who may move from one superintendent role to another in a new district, and then analyzing the academic outcomes in these districts to determine the leader’s impact on student learning.
In accordance with open science best practices, the repository also includes all of the raw data and code used to create the final dataset, so that other researchers can understand and build on The Broad Center’s work. Researchers at The Broad Center plan to update this dataset once a year, while also building new datasets on different aspects of school governance and roles in district central offices.
This data will help researchers learn more about who these leaders are, follow leaders over time as they move across districts, and understand how leadership shapes district outcomes.
In 2023, The Broad Center partnered with the Annenberg Institute at Brown University to convene a meeting of scholars who had contributed to research on the superintendency and education leadership more broadly. Participants from many institutions concurred that research on superintendents was much less developed than research on comparable educational actors, like teachers. One barrier to this research was the lack of public, processed, and easily legible data on superintendents in individual districts across the country.
Subsequently, Zimmerman connected with Sam Stemper, a lecturer in economics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who had collected a large dataset on U.S. superintendents in order to learn more about how and under what circumstances superintendents affect student achievement. Last April, Stemper visited Yale to present his methodology and findings to a group of 20 faculty members and graduate students from schools across the university, many of whom study education within disciplines including economics, operations, sociology, and accounting. Stemper also made his data available to The Broad Center, where predoctoral researchers expanded it by writing code to scrape public websites for superintendent data and submitting public information requests to states that do not maintain this information online.
In the coming years, The Broad Center aims to add additional datasets to the repository. Zimmerman is currently engaged in a data collection effort on school board members alongside Barbara Biasi, assistant professor of economics at SOM, and scholars from other institutions; the results will be published alongside the existing dataset when completed. He also hopes to augment existing information about superintendents with data about how school administrators climb the career ladder prior to assuming administrative roles.
Natasha Trivers, assistant dean and the Anita and Joshua Bekenstein ’80 B.A. Executive Director of The Broad Center at the Yale School of Management said, “This data repository and the research it represents will not only honor the great work that effective superintendents have done in the past, but will light the way to the key moves public education practitioners can make in the future to ensure strong academic outcomes for their students.” Trivers added, “This is precisely the kind of work we endeavor to do at The Broad Center. We want public education research to be useful for our vast network of alumni, but also for anyone interested in improving public education in this country.”
Public availability of this data has wide-ranging research and policy implications. Zimmerman said that researchers will be able to analyze the movements of superintendents across school districts alongside other information—such as test scores or other measures of achievement and well-being—to identify which district leaders are most successful, and then investigate the policies or characteristics that fuel their success.
“One of the most influential lines of education research in the last 20 years has been about the effects of teachers on student outcomes,” Zimmerman said. “These data can help advance a similar agenda for school superintendents. Our hope is that eventually people will be bringing things in, linking to what we’ve done, and augmenting the repository with data they’ve collected themselves.”
