Don’t overrate the superintendent when evaluating who has the biggest influence on curriculum purchases.

That’s a key lesson learned from a proprietary Education Week Marketing survey of more than 800 top school district leaders who are registered users of edweek.org.

The district chief is only one of four to eight people exerting substantial influence over the decision to buy your curriculum and learning solutions. And the superintendent is not even the most important one, the survey found. At least three other district positions have more influence than the superintendent.

An analysis shows that the people in these jobs exert the largest influence:

1. Director of curriculum and instruction
2. Chief academic officer (CAO)/assistant superintendent
3. Director, reading or math

Who are these curriculum and instruction leaders? Previous Education Week surveys have found that they go by many titles, including:

• Assistant superintendent for teaching and learning
• Chief innovation officer
• Curriculum coordinator

As the pressure to raise academic achievement increased throughout the 1990s and into the No Child Left Behind era, so too did the influence of the educators on the curriculum side of the C-suite. The introduction of test-based teacher evaluations has only tightened the curriculum leaders’ hold on district purse strings, especially given that past Education Week research has found that 60 percent of the district leaders in the CAO role are also directors of testing and assessment.

The Education Week Marketing survey found that principals and teachers also influence curriculum-related purchasing decisions. But they’re tougher for education companies to target because there are more of them. It’s often unclear which teachers and principals will get invited to sit at the table during purchasing decisions, and when. And a teacher or principal tapped to weigh in on one major purchasing decision may not be present for the next one.

What is clear is that curriculum purchases are truly a consensus buy, with people from four to eight different job roles exerting substantial influence over the decision. And with the curriculum and instruction team leading the way, priorities around student learning and achievement carry a lot of weight. Essentially, many districts are “purchasing to the test.”

District Size Matters

When it comes to curriculum purchasing, district size also matters, and so does location. Superintendents and principals are more influential in small districts, with fewer than 2,500 students. Superintendents are also considerably more influential in rural and suburban districts than in urban school systems, which tend to be larger.

By contrast, chief academic officers are more influential in large and midsize districts and in urban and suburban areas. That’s because larger districts have more personnel with specialized functions. By contrast, small and rural districts have fewer employees, so each person wears more hats.

The survey also revealed that school boards play a bigger role in larger districts’ curriculum purchases.

Nearly half the survey respondents from small and midsize districts reported that school boards have no influence on curriculum purchases, compared with less than 1 in 3 respondents from larger districts (those with 25,000 students or more). This reality is likely due to the more political nature of urban school governance and to the larger size of big-city purchases, which may be substantial enough to trigger rules requiring RFPs and formal approval processes by the board.

A 2014 study by the nonprofit organization Digital Promise suggests that the purchase amounts that trigger school board approval vary considerably by district. While more than one-third (38 percent) of district leaders surveyed for that study reported that purchases between $11,000 and $25,000 required school board approval, 21 percent indicated school board approval was not required.

IMPLICATIONS: Education companies need to understand that the number of purchasing influencers in a district is bigger than they might think. The influencers also vary based on the size and location of a district. The approach that helps an education company “break through” in a small or rural district may not work at all for a big-city school system.