School districts are struggling to create both equitable and fundamentally different outcomes for young people through incremental improvements. The alternative is transformational systems change, when school districts redefine their purpose and operations through a coherent strategy to ensure every school is a high-quality, empowering place for all students to thrive—but this remains rare.
With support from the Barr Foundation, CRPE studied where and how school districts in New England are pursuing this kind of change. Drawing on a region-wide survey of 307 superintendents across all six New England states and 47 in-depth interviews, this report examines what district-level change efforts are underway, and what shapes leaders’ decisions about which changes to pursue.
Join us for a Webinar!
The Transformation Gap — A Panel Discussion
August 5, 2026 | 9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET
Join CRPE for a panel discussion featuring two New England superintendents, report authors, and a program officer from the Barr Foundation. We’ll unpack how, with the right support, leaders can deepen their understanding of what transformational systems change involves and build the skills to pursue it effectively.
Key Findings
- New England superintendents believe their districts need to change to achieve long-term goals, but there is no consensus on how much change is needed or for what purpose. Leaders lack a shared understanding of what transformational change entails.
- In practice, most superintendents focus on changes that strengthen the established purpose of school and stabilize or improve current systems. And where superintendents are trying to shift the purpose of schooling and redesign district systems, their efforts are often limited or in the early stages.
- Superintendents highly value relationships and partnerships to access new ideas and expand their views on what is possible, but did not describe frequent, systematized exposure to alternative models. Awareness of what’s possible is shaped more by personal experience than by organizational routines.
- Even superintendents who aspire toward transformational change are prioritizing work to stabilize district operations and improve instructional basics, which consumes their capacity. Limited capacity goes to safe, strongly reinforced priorities.
- Without more politically sophisticated strategies, superintendents struggle to reconcile competing stakeholder interests, resulting in a balance that favors the status quo. Leaders described scaling back and slowing down far more often than speeding up.
Recommendations
When the conditions that shape district leadership are not aligned with transformation, leaders are “not choosing incrementalism so much as being steered toward it.” The report calls on superintendents to lead beyond improvement toward redesign—and on states, funders, intermediaries, and professional associations to reshape the conditions that produce today’s leadership through fundamental shifts in:
- How leaders are prepared: systematically exposing district leaders to different models of schooling and building the political and strategic skills to redesign, not just manage, district systems.
- How leaders spend their time: radically reducing the time consumed by compliance, operational, and financial issues to increase capacity for adaptive leadership.
- How leaders understand their roles: reshaping incentives to shift the superintendent role from a politically constrained manager to a system-level change leader, with school boards acting as active stewards of long-term transformation rather than risk mitigators.
- How leaders build and engage support: organizing coalitions to deepen public understanding of the necessity for school transformation and reinforce new norms about what schools can and should be.
Without these shifts, even the most capable leaders will swim upstream when attempting to move beyond incremental improvement. And even with these shifts, the broader field must decide whether to invest in helping more leaders swim upstream—or in changing the direction of the river to make leadership for transformational change the norm, not the exception.
