Ethics in the superintendency: the actions of malfeasance by a few superintendents undermine the credibility of honest, hard-working educators.
School Administrator › Vol. 61 Nbr. 8, September 2004
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Ethics in the superintendency: the actions of malfeasance by a few superintendents undermine the credibility of honest, hard-working educators.
A superintendent in Maryland accepts as a top honor in a national recognition program a $25,000 cash prize from a textbook vendor doing millions of dollars worth of business with his school district.
The wife of an elected superintendent delivers her husband's campaign literature to the schools in his Alabama district and asks principals to distribute the material in the mailboxes of school staff. School board members in an Indiana district spend $4,100 of the money earmarked for public relations on an engraved Rolex watch for the district's retiring superintendent. What's wrong with these pictures? Perhaps nothing as appalling as the U.S. military atrocities in Iraqi prisons or the sexual abuse scandals rocking the Catholic Church of late. Or as financially self-serving as Martha Stewart's lies to an investigator about a personal stock sale or as morally outrageous as Bill Clinton's personal conduct in the White House. Yet, say the experts who study ethics in public life, one need look no further than the newspaper headlines to discover school officials in legal trouble. During just a four-week period at the end of the school year, the news media reported on a Long Island superintendent accused of embezzling more than $1 million from his school district, a North Dakota superintendent sentenced to probation for stealing a school district Jeep and securing reduced-price lunches for his children, a Colorado superintendent sentenced to six years in prison for padding his annual salary by up to $44,000 a year, a Nebraska superintendent arrested on a misdemeanor public indecency charge, an Arkansas superintendent who resigned after engaging in a fight with a local broadcaster, a Nebraska superintendent faced with losing his certification after using school district technology to distribute pornography and sexual jokes, and a Louisiana superintendent suspended for three days for plagiarizing a California superintendent's letter to the community. While still quite tare among school system leaders, experts suggest these moral and ethical lapses are undermining public trust in schools and their leaders--institutions and individuals long held to a higher standard of behavior than their peers in corporate and politi...See the full content of this document
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