Few Seats At The Table For Female School Superintendents

This week in Just This, Rick and I discuss a groundbreaking story by Rivard Reporteducation reporter Emily Donaldson about the paucity of women superintendents in Bexar County’s 15 public school systems. The lead photo on Donaldson’s story illustrates the startling reality: Although women comprise 70 percent of the teachers and principals in the county’s 15 public school districts, only one woman holds a superintendent’s job. Men exclusively occupy the top jobs running districts with tens of thousands of students and, predictably, earn the most lucrative salaries doing so. We discuss the numbers – superintendencies and principalships by gender, and superintendent salaries, among others – with telling data visualizations provided by Emily Royall, our data editor. We also examine the social, cultural, and political trends behind the numbers.