Several years ago, when Rachel S. White was compiling a list of every public school district superintendent in the country, she began to notice something peculiar.
As she flitted from one district website to the next, manually — and painstakingly — entering each superintendent’s first and last name into her database, White saw a pattern emerging.
“There were a lot of Marks and Scotts and Daves,” she says. “Those names kept coming up.”
Curious, she started to chart the first names of thousands upon thousands of these district leaders. It was “just for fun” at first, but has since evolved into a research project four years running.
White, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, recently published data for the current school year on gender gaps in the American superintendency. What she found is that, well, a lot of educators work for a superintendent named Michael, John, David or James.
Those four names account for 10 percent of all district superintendents in the United States.
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