Stefanie Phillips took a nontraditional route to the superintendency, starting out in finance before deciding to switch to education. She ultimately rise to the top job in southern California’s Santa Ana Unified School District last summer.
Phillips studied business and finance on her way to undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of California, Davis, and went on to get a job in corporate finance. But she found something lacking in her first career.
“I wasn’t helping my community or helping the greater good of society,” Phillips said. “I was helping our shareholders make more money. That wasn’t necessarily translating into anything that was satisfying to me.”
The daughter of a civil servant and granddaughter of an educator, Phillips decided to make a change more in line with the values she grew up with. She spent some time in the California Department of Finance and later pursued an opening as the director of finance for a mid-sized school district in northern California.
The work was harder than she expected, but she had found her fit. Over the following years, she methodically learned about all the different operational parts of a school district. Seeing a gap in her own background, she returned to school for a degree in education leadership, logging some teaching experience at the university level.
Eventually she took over the instructional side of administration, too, as an associate superintendent in Chino Valley, and she went on to get a more national perspective on educational systems during five years working in a district near Atlanta. Phillips said her time outside of California taught her how different educators think about reform, where state policy fits into district operations and where the lines are between people issues and systems issues in education.
Phillips returned to California as the chief financial officer at Santa Ana Unified in 2013, taking over the superintendency when Rick Miller retired in August 2016. She is part of a minority of superintendents who are women and an even smaller minority who are women of color.
Even though women are far over-represented in teaching positions and administrative roles – making up more than three-quarters of teachers and central office administrators and slightly more than half of principals – the School Superintendents Association found they occupy less than one-quarter of the nation’s superintendent jobs.
Phillips’ own path to her new position provides some insights into why. One is societal. She has known many women who worry about taking care of children or elderly parents, removing themselves from the running for advanced career opportunities.
“Being the caretakers in our society, we tend to not put career first but family first, and then if we can manage to balance a career then that comes next,” Phillips said.
There are also stereotypes about women leaders — that they’re not strong enough to have hard conversations or make tough decisions, that they’re softer. But Phillips believes that softness, if it’s present, can be a potential benefit to organizations. It can bring empathy and compassion to decision-making rather than relying on rigid accountability.
Phillips finds that a necessary element of good leadership, too.
“The very thing that makes us good leaders is something that is held against us unless you’re a known commodity,” Phillips said.
In her case, prior experience in finance has helped reassure skeptics about her decision-making ability. She has already proven herself in a male-dominated industry and shown she can hold her own. But these characteristics can be a double-edged sword. Women who aren’t considered soft or nice can be labeled hard to work with and vilified for being tough.
It’s a fine line women have to walk, especially in the competition for a position that relies heavily on interpersonal fit with the school board doing the hiring.
Phillips is in her first year running Santa Ana Unified, a district of 53,000 students. She has encouraged her schools to go back to basics, so to speak, focusing on high-quality early education that aims to help children reach early proficiency in literacy and numeracy. Many of her students come into school with learning gaps caused by poverty and other barriers based on the socioeconomic climate of the area. Her theory is that remediating them in middle school is much harder than reaching them in the early years.
Phillips also wants to better serve students who are in the academic middle.
“In our current system, we’re remediating kids at the bottom,” Phillips said. “We’re intervening for kids who are absolutely not making it, we’re reinforcing and enriching the kids who are making it, but the kids in the middle sometimes get lost.”
She’s still early in her tenure, but Phillips has big plans and has built a team around her that she expects will help her achieve big goals in the years to come.