'Top-Down Decisions' Are Out. See What This School District Leader Does

Carol D. Birks makes the case that the challenges schools are facing today are more complex than ever.

The superintendent of the Allentown, Pa., school district says that for quite some time the challenges schools struggled with were typically more technical and relatively simple in nature—say, the buses are running late. So what do you do? But starting several years ago—fueled by the pandemic, technological advances, and cultural shifts—school district leaders have been forced to become more adaptive in their approaches to solving problems.

“If you’re a person and you have high blood pressure, the technical fix is to take medication,” Birks said. “The adaptive fix is to change lifestyle. Exercise, lower your salt intake, don’t eat a whole bunch of red meat, and all those kinds of things that may lead to higher blood pressure.

“In education now, I feel that the problems are just more complex and adaptive in nature. They require real deep thinking. They’re not easy problems to solve.”

To tackle those problems, Birks believes school district leaders need to move away from a top-down management style

. They need to embrace the idea that senior leadership does not necessarily have all the answers to the challenges an organization faces. Leaders need to do their best to gather multiple perspectives and engage in meaningful listening with the people in their school communities: teachers, parents, students, and community leaders. That, she said, is a cornerstone of adaptive leadership.

Birks recognizes that listening to criticism is also part of the process of adaptive leadership. A recent letter to the editor in the local newspaper, the Allentown Morning Call, titled “Allentown Schools Need More Reading, ‘Rithmetic, Less Rhetoric,” for instance, took the superintendent to task for not doing more to improve reading and math standardized test scores in the district—a big challenge school districts across the country are facing.

Education Week interviewed Birks as part of its 2026 Big Ideas special report

about fearless leadership. The National School Public Relations Association named Birks a 2024-25 Superintendent to Watch, as part of a program which recognizes early career school district leaders who demonstrate “fast-paced leadership with strong communication.” Birks is in her fourth year as Allentown superintendent.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You said you emphasize “strengths-based” leadership. Tell me a little bit about that.

Research suggests when people operate in their strengths, they feel more valued and committed to the work they are doing.

We have some people in our organization who are strategic thinkers, they’re achievers and such. And there are others in our organization who are more harmonious—they’re relators. We need people who have all kinds of gifts and talents to help move the organization forward.

But what about shoring up their weaknesses?

We provide lots of feedback to people within our organization. And I’m a firm believer in capacity-building. We have a very robust executive leadership learning academy, and we offer many of our leaders coaches as well. So they have coaches who are not part of our organization who have helped to build their capacity and help them with their reflection to grow their leadership skills.

Quite honestly, I try not to focus on the areas they don’t know. But, of course, if it’s part of their jobs, we try to get them the tools and skills and knowledge that they need to support them.

What were some of the most difficult moments you faced when trying to bridge differences in your school community?

When I arrived in the district, we had different groups that were upset. We had our African American community, which wanted my predecessor to remain in the district. And then I replaced him on an interim basis. (Birks was eventually named superintendent.)

And we had the Latino community feeling as though their voices weren’t being heard. And so I listened to both groups. I went on this major listening tour to hear their concerns. And as a result of that listening, we created together our Dual Language Immersion Academy.

How do you create meaningful, effective listening tours?

We allow people to tell us how they feel, but we also create questions as a part of the listening, where people get an opportunity to talk together and hear others’ thinking. So you might be sitting next to a student, or you might be sitting next to a community leader or a teacher or an administrator, and they work in small groups to talk with each other.

After I conduct these listening tours, I create a whole presentation and then I bring that everywhere I go to say, “This is what I heard from you.”

What was one memorable result of a listening tour?

We had an example, and it may sound small, but our teachers were saying, “we need supplies.” And I’m like, I don’t understand. We have a warehouse of supplies. So, we sent out a survey and asked them: What do you need? You’d be surprised. They said they wanted pencils. Now, we’re in the age that we’re in with technology, and pencils was the number-one answer!

And so we purchased about 117,000 pencils in the middle of the school year. I had my human capital managers and my central office leaders actually go to the schools and deliver the pencils to the teachers’ classrooms. We wanted people to understand: “We heard you.” They were shocked we did that.