State Education Agencies as Agents of Change

Today, state education agencies and their leaders face unprecedented demands. What was once a low-profile job of managing federal aid, providing curricular guidance, and ensuring compliance with various legal obligations is now a far more visible and politically fraught task. The new roles required of state education agencies due to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which required each state to adopt standards, assessments, and accountability programs, and the Obama administration's Race to the Top program, which encouraged and rewarded selected states proposing significant reforms, now push these state agencies more and more into the public spotlight. Heightened attention to issues such as turning around low-performing schools, fixing state data systems, and improving teacher evaluations all require state education officials to play a new and far more demanding role, often under the scrutiny of the media spotlight.

A decade ago, when the heads of these agencies were mostly seasoned bureaucrats, only an education savant could name more than a handful. Today, their ranks include many of the shiniest stars in the school-reform firmament. Rhode Island chief Deborah Gist was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2009. Former Louisiana chief Paul Pastorek and Indiana's Tony Bennett have become high-profile advocates for transparency, accountability, and school choice. Kevin Huffman gave up his nationally influential post as Teach For America's vice president of policy to become the education commissioner in Tennessee. And other education agency chiefs, including New York's David Steiner, his successor John King, New Jersey's Chris Cerf, and Massachusetts's Mitchell Chester, are all garnering the attention once reserved for big-city superintendents or key legislators.

Broadly speaking, state education agencies, or SEAs--though they are often referred to as the state's department of education or public instruction--are responsible for administering state and federal education laws, dispersing state and federal resources, and providing guidance to public districts and schools across the state. No two SEAs are organized in the same way, but each agency is led by a chief, called the superintendent, secretary, director, or commissioner of education or public instruction. These chiefs are now in the limelight because of the reforms of the past decade, including dramatic statewide actions addressing testing, accountability, teacher evaluation and tenure, academic standards, schools of education, and failing schools. Much of this has been accompanied by demands that the states find ways to implement ambitious new federal legislation or pursue fundamental changes when it comes to educational standards, teacher accountability, and school improvement.

These changes have put immense stress on agencies that were initially conceived as tiny departments primarily designed to funnel money to local school districts. Yet it is not at all clear that state education agencies are prepared for this demanding new role or that their leaders are equipped for the challenge. Specifically:

• What do we know about SEA capacity to be effective leaders in school reform?
• What are the obstacles that inhibit them from most effectively tackling today's challenges?
• What has experience taught the most successful state education chiefs what their role should look like?
• What can reformers or policymakers do to help prepare SEAs for these new challenges?

These questions were too rarely asked over the past decade, resulting in state agencies that are unequipped for the duties they now must fulfill. In this paper we set out to answer these questions.

Finding the available literature and analysis antiquated, and alarmed by the scarce amount of information publicly available, we turned to the people with the most understanding of the inner workings of the agencies: the SEA chiefs. We identified 13 of the most innovative and successful former and current chiefs and interviewed them about what they see as the obstacles to implementing reform and how, despite these challenges, they were able to move their agency forward. We detail our research in the main pages of this report, but briefly here is a list of our findings and our recommendations.

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