Superintendents are citing fewer sources of job-related stress, but at the same time, a smaller portion of those leading America’s school districts say the stress they do experience is worth it, according to a recent survey.
Superintendents who participated in this year’s RAND Corp.’s annual State of the Superintendent survey selected fewer sources of work stress from a list of 14 options than in 2023 or 2024. In 2025, superintendents selected four stressors on average from the list—which included budgets, school board relations, staffing, safety, and politics—compared with six in 2024.
Still, just over half of superintendents (53%) overall agreed that the stress and disappointments involved with being a superintendent are worth it, down from 2024 and 2023, when 59% of superintendents said the same. Superintendents of smaller districts, with fewer than 3,000 students, were far less likely than those in larger districts, with more than 10,000 students, to say the stress is worth it—47% versus 72%.
“Those, to me, are really contradictory, and they suggest that maybe there’s something else going on that we’re not capturing in the stress measure that’s impacting superintendents,” said Anna Shapiro, an associate policy researcher at RAND, which began the superintendent survey in 2023.
One hypothesis: Superintendents may be dissatisfied with how much time they spend doing tasks they feel don’t align with their core job duties.
That hypothesis, Shapiro said, is backed by other findings from the RAND report.
The most time-consuming tasks differed for superintendents of small and large districts. Those in small districts said managing school facility operations and maintenance were the most common of the top-three most time-consuming activities, followed by communicating with school staff.
Leaders of larger districts reported spending the largest share of time communicating with their school board members, central-office staff, and parents or other community members.
Regardless of district size, superintendents said they thought they should spend a greater share of their time collecting and analyzing data, helping craft district policies, and communicating with school-level staff.
“What we can see is that small districts and large districts, the nature of their job looks a little bit different, but when we ask them what they think they should be doing, they’re pretty similar in their responses,” Shapiro said. “So that suggests that the pressures of the job are different based on where the superintendents are, but the vision for what they are supposed to be doing as school leaders is not different.”
Budgets, student mental health, and political intrusion are stressful for most superintendents
Superintendents overwhelmingly agree that their jobs are stressful. About two-thirds (68%) say their district’s budget is a source of stress, and 61% selected students’ mental health and the intrusion of political issues and opinions as stressors.
The percentage of superintendents who selected school board relations and school board pressure as a stressor increased from 26% in 2024 to 31% in 2025.
“It reflects a persistent cultural experience that we’re having right now of there being a lot of focus on what’s happening in schools, and that pressure has not declined in the last few years. And you can really see that reflected in this data,” Shapiro said.
On the other hand, there were drops of 10 percentage points or more from 2024 to 2025 in the share of superintendents selecting staffing shortages, educators’ mental health, state accountability requirements, quality of instruction, community relations, and physical safety in schools as sources of stress in their jobs.
