Superintendents: Josh Starr Talks Superintendent Challenges
Former Montgomery County superintendent Josh Starr, in his first interview since resigning, discusses the demands of the job and what his successor inherits.
In his first interview since resigning, Josh Starr, former superintendent in Montgomery County, Maryland, discusses superintendent challenges and his tenure.
Josh Starr, former Superintendent of Montgomery County Schools, Maryland, discusses life in educational leadership. Starr opens up in his first interview since resigning his post. He talks about the community of superintendents and the demands of the position. Starr also recaps his tenure in office and the environment his successor will be inheriting.
Super-intendents, Episode 1: Josh Starr on the Superintendent's JobPlay: Super-intendents, Episode 1: Josh Starr on the Superintendent's JobAbout this episode
This is the shortest conversation in the series, and the most candid. Recorded as Josh Starr was leaving the superintendency of Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, it is less a farewell than a working leader’s reckoning with the job: what it takes, what it costs, and what deserves to last after the person in the chair moves on.
What a superintendent wants from a conference
The episode opens on a modest question: why a district leader should spend days away at a gathering of peers. Starr’s answer is refreshingly practical. He has little patience for long rounds of presentations and values instead the small sessions where an audience can push back, the time to compare notes with colleagues, and above all the chance to hear from people who frame the problems of public schooling differently from him. For someone at the top of a large system, he suggests, the payoff is seeing classroom-level ideas he would never meet from his own office.
The view only the job gives
The most revealing passage concerns the bond among superintendents. Starr describes a role pulled at once by the school board, the state, the federal government, local politics, funding bodies, unions and parents, a set of pressures that is hard to picture from outside. He illustrates the point with a story about a former deputy who, after becoming a superintendent herself in Hartford, came to see the logic of decisions she had once questioned. That shared understanding of the whole system, in his telling, is what turns a group of rivals into a fraternity.
Holding the middle ground
Asked whether the job is changing, Starr argues that it is, mostly because education debates have hardened into opposing camps: reform or not, for testing or against it. He resists being cast as an opponent of testing and makes the case that sensible answers usually sit between the extremes. What makes that position hard to hold, he explains, is the timing of new Common Core assessments without settled results and a media climate that dissects every decision. He is also wary of the myth of the heroic superintendent; in his account, no single leader rescues a district.
A record he is proud of
Reflecting on a tenure of roughly three and a half years, Starr points to three achievements. Graduation rates rose for every group of students while the district held its strength in Advanced Placement and the SAT through a period of upheaval. The district widened its idea of success to include students’ social and emotional well-being, creativity and critical thinking, without letting academics slip. And it built systems meant to outlast him: published improvement reports for every school, an early warning system that flags students at risk from first grade, and deeper ties with the county and community colleges.
Advice for a successor, and what comes next
Starr notes that his successor will inherit something he lacked, fresh state test results within months of arriving. His counsel, though, is the familiar one he followed himself: begin by listening, spend time with teachers, staff, principals, parents and students, and learn the culture of the community before trying to change it. He closes with a joke about waiting for a call from the New York Knicks, then makes clear he intends to stay in public education after 22 years in the field, ten as a superintendent, while taking a little time at home to choose his next step.
The full conversation is in the player above, and every episode of the series is on the Super-intendents hub.
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