I’m excited to welcome Dr. Sarah Davis as a guest author on our Educational Leadership newsletter. With her expertise in innovative teaching, inclusive learning, and authentic leadership, she brings valuable insights that will inspire and inform our community.

Hiring managers have long valued former military officers. The logic is sound: these are people who led under pressure, managed complex operations, rose through competitive ranks, and translated strategy into action across large organizations. Harvard Business Review, Korn/Ferry, and Spencer Stuart have all studied why military leadership translates so effectively into corporate settings. Entire recruiting firms exist solely to place military officers into executive roles.

I'm not here to argue with any of that.

I'm here to point out that there's another talent pool with strikingly similar leadership experience — and nobody is making the case for them. Not recruiters. Not researchers. Not executive search firms.

I'm talking about school district central office administrators.

One of the most valued aspects of military leadership is the progression. Officers don't start at the top. They earn increasing responsibility over years, leading small units, then larger ones, then managing operations that span regions and thousands of personnel. The military also develops leaders through multiple career tracks — combat arms, logistics, intelligence, engineering — all of which produce senior officers.

District administrators follow a remarkably similar pattern, and through similarly varied paths. Nearly all of them started as classroom teachers — years spent managing the most unpredictable operational environment imaginable. From there, some rose through building administration, serving as assistant principals and principals — roles that are among the most demanding in public service. Others built deep content expertise as curriculum specialists, assessment directors, or program leaders, developing the technical knowledge that drives instructional quality across an entire system. Many followed hybrid paths that combined both.

What matters is what happens when these leaders reach central office. That's where the scope expands from a single building or content area to an entire system — and where the leadership skills that translate most powerfully to other sectors are forged.

Here's something that surprised me. When I looked for research advocating for district administrators as corporate leadership talent, I found a void.

For military officers, the pipeline is well-built. HBR has published studies on why they make great CEOs. Spencer Stuart interviews C-suite veterans about how military service prepared them for corporate leadership. Dedicated recruiting firms like Orion Talent exist to place officers into executive roles. The narrative is proactive and outward-facing: these are exceptional leaders, come recruit them.

For school district administrators? The conversation doesn't exist. What does exist is a growing body of "teachers leaving the classroom" content focused on helping individual teachers pivot to mid-level corporate roles — instructional design, corporate training, customer success. There's also education-to-education executive search, which keeps leadership talent circulating within the sector.

But nobody is building the equivalent bridge for the people who ran these systems. And this isn't just about superintendents. A senior director in a central office may manage a $5 million budget and a team of 40 — but their initiatives touch 2,000 teachers across 50 schools and shape outcomes for tens of thousands of students. At the superintendent level, the scope expands to hundreds of millions in budget and thousands of employees. At every level of central office leadership, the work demands strategic thinking, cross-functional coordination, and stakeholder management that most hiring managers would recognize immediately — if they knew to look for it.

It's not that hiring managers have evaluated this group and passed. It's that this group isn't even on their radar.

This is where the parallel to military leadership holds — and where it also diverges in ways that hiring managers should pay attention to.

School districts have a chain of command on paper. The superintendent directs the deputy superintendent, who directs the chiefs, who direct the senior directors. But here's what that looks like in practice: the superintendent wants to improve science outcomes across the district. The senior director of science gets the mandate. But the mandate doesn't come with the authority to make it happen.

To actually move that initiative forward, that senior director has to sit down with high school principals — each running their own building culture — and their principal supervisors. They have to engage science teachers, who will be the ones changing their practice. They have to work with parents and community members who have strong opinions about what science education should look like. They have to keep the school board informed and aligned, knowing that board members answer to voters, not to the org chart. And every one of those groups can derail even the best-designed program if they aren't genuinely brought along.

The mandate flows down. The authority to execute does not.

And there's a layer of complexity here that has few parallels in other industries. Within a school district, educators often share a vision for what children need — the real debate is over how to get there. But education is one of very few fields where the governing bodies and legislative structures shaping the work are largely made up of people from outside the profession. School board members are elected community representatives. State legislators write curriculum mandates. This isn't a flaw — it's by design, and it reflects the public nature of education. But it means that a district leader is constantly translating between the professional knowledge of their field and the priorities of decision-makers who bring different — and entirely legitimate — perspectives shaped by personal experience, community values, and political accountability.

Imagine leading a product organization where your board of directors is elected by your customers and turns over every two to four years. That's the governance reality of public education.

And here's one more detail that outside observers rarely appreciate: that senior director responsible for improving science outcomes? They're almost certainly not only responsible for science. In my own central office role, I was simultaneously responsible for K–12 science, mathematics, health, physical education, visual and performing arts — encompassing everything from studio art to choir, band, drama, ceramics, and photography — as well as maker spaces, integrated STEAM concepts, and climate justice — along with all of the budgeting, staffing, and operational management that comes with running a department of 40 staff supporting 50 schools, 2,000 teachers, and 50,000 students. The science initiative was one priority among many, all requiring the same coalition-building, all running concurrently.

That's the lived reality of central office leadership: you are responsible for system-wide results, but you achieve them through coalition-building, not command. Educators may agree on what children need, but how to achieve it — and who gets to decide — is where the real leadership challenge lives. The central office administrator's job is to navigate these competing perspectives, build enough common ground to act, and maintain trust across all groups while doing it. That's not leading through telling. That's leading through influence — and it's the exact skill set that defines effective leadership in any matrixed corporate environment dealing with boards, regulators, customers, and cross-functional teams simultaneously.

Consider what it actually takes to implement just one of those initiatives — say, adopting a new math curriculum across all grade levels in a district that size.

The central office leader responsible must build the evidence base, secure board approval and funding, manage vendor selection and relationships, design and deliver professional development at scale, coordinate logistics across dozens of sites with different needs and capacity levels, monitor implementation fidelity, communicate progress to the board, families, and the public — and show measurable results, often within timelines driven by political cycles rather than realistic implementation science. All while managing the rest of their portfolio.

No plan survives first contact with 50 different school buildings, each with its own culture, leadership, and community. The ability to hold a strategic vision while adapting execution in real time, across dozens of sites simultaneously — that's not a skill unique to education. That's exactly what a national product rollout or multi-market expansion demands.

The leadership skills that make military officers attractive to corporate recruiters — strategic thinking, operational management, leading through uncertainty, building teams, managing budgets, driving results across complex organizations — are the same skills that district administrators exercise daily.

The difference is narrative. Military service carries a cultural shorthand for leadership that opens doors. K-12 central office experience carries no such shorthand. Most hiring managers have simply never had reason to consider what leading in a school district actually entails — and in the absence of understanding, the experience doesn't register as relevant.

If you're a hiring manager looking for someone who can lead through influence rather than authority, manage competing stakeholder demands, execute at scale in a highly regulated environment, and do it all with public accountability — look at the people who've been doing exactly that in your local school district.

You might be surprised by the leader you find.

Sarah M. Davis, Ph.D., is the founder of 3D Educational Consulting, where she works with schools, districts, and EdTech companies to create change that improves student outcomes. Her career spans academic research, international education policy, EdTech product development, and district operations — including leading a $1.3M research initiative at Singapore's National Institute of Education, managing cross-functional product teams at Texas Instruments, and growing Portland Public Schools' STEAM department from 9 staff to 40+ while managing a $4M budget and securing $10M in grants. She writes about the intersection of leadership, education, and organizational change. Connect with her on LinkedIn.