Moral Distress Amongst District Leaders: Intensity, Dilemmas, and Coping Mechanisms in the Context of Covid-19

Abstract

Purpose: This study examines the sources and intensity of moral distress among school district leaders during the first full school year of the Covid-19 pandemic and investigates their coping mechanisms for addressing issues that create moral dilemmas for them. Design and Evidence: We draw on semi-structured interviews with 26 school district leaders across 13 school districts in the Northwestern United States. Brief summaries detailing themes in each interview were prepared. Magnitude coding was used to understand the intensity of district leaders’ feelings of distress. Open coding and axial coding allowed us to categorize the origins/sources of distress and the approaches/strategies district leaders used to reduce feelings of moral distress. Findings: Reported moral distress ranged from none to moderate but manageable amounts. Three types of problems were described as morally distressing: political problems with the community or unions, staff problems including staff stress, staff resistance, and collaboration amongst staff members, and an inability to meet student needs due to resource, policy, or community/family constraints. Leaders’ coping mechanisms included social responses such as team building, but also drew on individual virtues such as persistence and patience. Implications: Within the ranks of district leaders, the extent to which leaders frame their challenges in a moral frame is varied. A sizable group articulated challenges with implications for moral action in primarily technical or political terms. If district leaders engage unevenly with the moral tradeoffs of their decisions, they risk adopting an overly managerialist frame.

Introduction

Ethical challenges are inherent in any caring profession and are intermingled with the complex technical challenges that comprise the day-to-day work of educational leaders. Starratt (1996) argued that all calls for significant change in schools involve values and moral leadership, a perspective echoed by Fullan (2003) and Greenfield (2004). More recently, Lowenhaupt (2021) argued that in a turbulent policy environment, the need to attend to the moral dimensions of leadership is growing. There is also increasing recognition that educational leaders are frequently engaged in negotiating the meaning of policy messages (Koyama, 2014; Spillane et al., 2019), which often involves ethical questions about competing notions of good or right (Crawford & Fishman-Weaver, 2016; Zine, 2001). However, there are few studies that examine how district level school leaders navigate ethical crosscurrents, and the way that ethical conundrums affect them professionally.

The challenges of translating competing ethical pressures into practical actions and policies have been particularly apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic, which placed intense pressure on teachers, students, families, and school and system leaders. An improved understanding of how leaders grapple with ethical concerns under these conditions can shed light on how leaders view their roles as stewards of the public trust, and under what circumstances they feel that their work presents them with moral challenges. This study focuses on the experience of moral distress that may accompany intense and immediate dilemmas that reveal competing values and was carried out during the 2020−2021 school year.

In its original formulation, moral distress referred to the pain one feels when one knows the right thing to do but is prevented from doing so by organizational or institutional constraints (Musto et al., 2015). ¹ However, later scholars recognized the need for an expanded definition that reflects that distress can be caused by moral ambiguity, moral dilemmas, or a broader set of moral circumstances that are beyond one's control. Consequently, Campell et al. (2016) suggest that moral distress be defined as, “one or more negative self-directed emotions or attitudes that arise in response to one's perceived involvement in a situation that one perceives to be morally undesirable” (p. 6). This broader definition encompasses the original definition of distress (being unable to carry out a morally correct action by institutional constraints) but includes a broader ecology of sources of distress, such as that which a Superintendent might feel when schools closed during Covid's due to public health emergencies but working parents were forced to leave young students at home alone because they were one paycheck away from food insecurity. In other words, moral distress is a response that may occur when confronting a dilemma that invokes competing professional or personal ethics (Kälvemark, et al., 2004).

In educational settings, the expanded definition of moral distress is useful because it allows us to examine the types of situations that cause educational leaders to experience distress, the level of distress they feel, and their strategies for managing this distress. Unlike past studies of ethical dilemmas, moral distress allows us to examine leaders’ approach to ethical reasoning not in the abstract (“how do leaders think about this?”), but in terms of the connection between the level of discomfort they feel and how they respond. This research thus offers insight into how leaders act in situations where they feel morally discomfited.

We focused our study on district leaders, because their roles are naturally multi-faceted and political in ways that place competing interests and values in tension with one another (Turner, 2015), and because their actions have faced intense public scrutiny during the pandemic. Three research questions guided our work:

1. How intensely are district leaders experiencing moral distress in their work?

2. What is the nature of the problems district leaders described as distressing? and

3. What strategies did the leaders use to ameliorate the problems they described?

We suggest that examining district leaders’ experiences of moral distress experienced during a pandemic period when they were required to make (or implement) changing and often controversial decisions about how to organize schools provides a fruitful opportunity to understand the “practical ethics” (Gueras & Garofalo, 2010) that undergird their work.

Ethical Pressures During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Although there is widespread acknowledgement that Covid-19 produced distress, discomfort, and pressure for leaders, educators, students, and families alike, the research evidence about how leaders navigated these pressures and implications for theory and practice is only beginning to emerge. For example, at the time we write this sentence, only two articles in Educational Administration Quarterly mention the pandemic (Dei & Adhami, 2022; McHenry-Sorber et al., 2021). Nonetheless, there is evidence of administrative angst: self-care practices of principals during Covid-19 suggest that “leaders eat last” and sought to “keep from falling off the cliff” (Hayes et al., 2022, p. 403). Shaked and Benoliel (2022) and Longmuir (2021) found that school leaders increased the time spent with internal and external stakeholders because of the pandemic's challenges and the ways that it disrupted the everyday work of schools. Longmuir (2021) suggests that circumstances forced leaders to embrace novel and rapid forms of change leadership. The external shock produced by Covid-19 revealed new technical problems to be solved, but also, because of the intense disruption of “normal” for students, teachers, and families, created ethical challenges for a caring profession, where past conceptualizations of ethical standards have argued that administrative decisions must always first attend to the well-being of students (Shapiro & Stefkovich, 2016, p. 3; AASA code of ethics, nd).

The data in this study offer insight into the moral dimensions of, for example, the politics of safety and reopening schools, decisions about online learning, and the needs of special education students during the pandemic. Although the work of district leaders is always characterized by moral questions, the salience of these questions was heightened during the pandemic and further compounded by circumstances where there was often uncertainty, few right answers, considerable ambiguity, and political disagreements from all sides.

Ethical Educational Leadership

Most educational leaders have been exposed to a variety of ethical perspectives that have been suggested to realize the ethical goal of “students first” and to resolve ethical dilemmas that arise in pursuit of that goal. Here, we very briefly review some of the most common paradigms in educational leadership while emphasizing that they provided, at best, a base for the often pressing and time constrained decisions required of leaders during Covid-19.

The ethic of justice focuses on rules, rights, and principles of fairness (Shapiro & Stefkovich, 2016; Strike, 2006). Justice ethics recognizes potential conflict between individual rights and duties, which requires leadership to be guided by equal respect for members of the school and stewardship of the school community (Sergiovanni, 1992). More recently, justice ethics has been incorporated into an ethic of critique, which argues that leaders should also attend to underlying power relations and assume responsibility for addressing injustices within society as they are revealed in schools (Frick et al., 2013; Rivera-McCutchen, 2021). Leaders are also encouraged to expand on justice ethics by considering the ethics of school community (Furman, 2004; Strike, 2006) that prioritizes fundamental democratic traditions, including full participation, and processes of working toward the common good. (Strike, 2006). Since these frameworks can be rather abstract, renewed attention has also been paid to care ethics that can help educational leaders to navigate ethical crosscurrents that are raised in their daily work (Louis et al., 2016; Walls, 2020). While justice/critique and community ethics emphasize principles (obligations) governing relationships, care ethics proceed from an emphasis on particularity of needs, attentiveness, and responsiveness (Beck, 1994; Noddings, 2012), which temper the assumption that a school must always prioritize academic achievement. Recent scholarship has also examined the ways that care ethics can serve as a tool for advancing social justice (Rivera-McCutchen, 2021; Witherspoon & Arnold, 2010).

The above frameworks may sensitize educational leadership to ethical conflicts, but empirical research suggests that consequentialism, or teleological ethics, acknowledges that leaders regularly choose actions they view as most likely to produce a desired outcome (Begley & Johansson, 2008; Stefkovich & Begley, 2007). Hammersley-Fletcher (2015) argues that external pressures to achieve specific goals (attainment targets) may attenuate attention to more complex ethical frameworks (Ehrich et al., 2015; Trujillo et al., 2021). One function of our research is to clarify how district leaders, experience and navigate ethical challenges during a period in which consistent pressures that demand rapid action were universal.

District Leadership and Moral Decision-Making

The roles of superintendents and district leaders are multi-faceted: they are expected to wear multiple hats and juggle interests that can naturally produce ethical conflicts (Bjork et al., 2014; Turner, 2015). Yet, like all educators, they are expected to prioritize the interests of students as fundamental.

School districts represent an “intermediate level of governance” that plays a critical role in rationalizing and implementing external policy mandates (Anderson, 2013) in which they use “deliberative interpretive governance” to shape and implement reforms to manage competing policy expectations (Hardy and Salo, 2018, p. 297). Honig (2003), defines this district level process as “building policy from practice” (p. 292). While their challenges may be framed as technical or managerial, they almost invariably invoke ethical dilemmas for which there is no simple solution that may, under some circumstances, elicit recognizable moral distress (Kälvemark et al., 2004).

In other words, “what happens” in schools is in part a byproduct of how district leaders understand what they are expected to do and the choices they make (Honig, 2009, 2012), which have ethical implications that they may (or may not) attend to. For example, district leaders have been found to engage in “buffering,” or managing which external expectations internal stakeholders are exposed to, demonstrating district leaders’ role in adjudicating competing expectations (Durand et al., 2016; Hatch & Honig, 2004; Honig, 2009). Woulfin et al. (2016) found, for example, that district leaders framed a state teacher evaluation policy to emphasize its connection to instructional quality (student focus) but their support to schools primarily focused on the technical aspects of implementation. By so doing, district leaders tacitly avoided attending to the ethical expectation of ensuring instructional quality for all students.

There is ample evidence that district leaders’ choices meaningfully shape what happens in schools. Many studies of the district office role in supporting reform and policy implementation have focused on instructional leadership (e.g., Durand et al., 2016; Honig, 2012), but recent research examines how they shape other school level practices, such as new student discipline rules (Curran & Finch, 2021), programs for social and emotional learning (Allbright & Marsh, 2022), building school-community partnerships (Epstein et al., 2011), and improving mental health services (O’Malley et al., 2018). Research suggests that district leaders play an important role in resolving fragmentation and supporting more consistent leadership practices between the school and district (see, e.g., Elfers & Stritikus, 2014).

The context for district leaders’ work also influences how they interpret and enact their ethical position. Mission statements and priorities for Superintendents may be similar in widely varying contexts (Ingle et al., 2020; Bredeson et al., 2011) but actual practices vary widely and are attuned to specific community characteristics (Bredeson et al., 2011; Coviello & DeMatthews, 2021). Finally, contexts create ethical demands: Alsbury & Whitaker (2007) found that superintendents viewed accountability, democratic community, and social justice as competing goals in their setting, which required them to use their knowledge of and relationships within their district context to weave them together in their practice. Another study of district efforts to democratize decision-making found that well-intentioned initiatives floundered due to preexisting power imbalances, institutionalized work habits, limited capacity and resources, and low trust (Marsh & Hall, 2018).

Moral Distress in District Leaders: A Sensitizing Framework

To summarize: district leaders’ enactment of their complex roles has practical and ethical implications for what happens in schools. We believe that exploring district leaders’ experiences of moral distress during the first school year of the Covid-19 pandemic, when they were grappling with persistent change, ambiguity, and controversy in their daily work practices can shed insight on the “practical ethics” of their professional lives. The Covid-19 pandemic, and particularly the period when this data was collected (prior to the widespread availability of vaccines) is a particularly fruitful context in which to study moral distress due to the evidence that superintendents faced numerous ethical challenges related to navigating local control (Lochmiller, 2021).

While empirical research into moral distress originated in the field of nursing, the concept is now used to explore a wide range of feelings that arise when workers’ sense of moral agency is bounded by structural contexts of their work or by power relationships (Musto et al., 2015). The broader moral ecology of distressing situations posited by Campbell et al. (2016) includes a variety of emotional states that are alluded to in the educational research covered above:

• Moral uncertainty – being uncertain of the correct course of action, often accompanied by feeling constrained from asking for guidance;

• Mild distress – not all morally distressing situations are dramatic; some are mildly distressing but also build over time;

• Delayed distress – in the rush of decision-making and action, professionals may only experience distress after the immediate situation has abated;

• Ethical dilemmas – situations in which multiple courses of action are ethically defensible, but also bear costs;

• Bad moral luck – situations in which one chooses a course of action that seems ethically sound based on available information but results in a distressing outcome;

• Distress by association – situations in which one acts in an ethical manner but feels compromised by the ethical decisions made by others with whom one is associated.

This broader set of situations reflects that moral agency for educational leaders is rarely constrained in a way where there is a clear “right” action that one is prevented from taking, and that moral distress can arise from a variety of circumstances where one feels that a morality is compromised but they cannot act in ways that satisfactorily correct the problem.

Moral distress is related to, but distinct from the frameworks for and ethical reasoning and resolving ethical dilemmas in educational leadership that we have covered above. Studies of ethical dilemmas and reasoning tend to focus on the frequency and resolution of individual ethical dilemmas (see, e.g., Cranston et al., 2006; Dotger & Theoharis, 2008; Eyal et al., 2011; Gurley & Dagley, 2021; Norberg & Johansson, 2007). In contrast, moral distress research focuses on the emotional experience and consequences of these dilemmas and other moral challenges, which may range from transient discomfort to extreme stress. Put differently, it is possible to intellectually know that one is caught in an ethical dilemma, but not to feel particularly disturbed by it, but moral distress focuses on the level of “troubledness” (although it does not preclude examining the ethical positioning of the experience). Furthermore, moral distress offers insight into what happens when moral agency is sustainedly or serially compromised- it is about the ongoing experiences of discomfort and stress rather than unique decisions.

There are three reasons that moral distress is a useful lens for understanding the actions of leaders in situations of stress and discomfort. First, there is growing evidence that moral distress can result in several deleterious outcomes, including burnout (Barlem & Ramos, 2015), attrition from the profession (Musto et al., 2015), and moral disengagement, which in turn erodes the quality of care (Musto et al., 2015). Second, understanding moral distress as occurring “relationally” at the “intersection of structure and agent” sheds light on the cultural context and professional expectations that shape professionals’ experiences of distress (Ulrich & Grady, 2018, p. 16). Whereas studies of ethical dilemmas in educational leaders frequently position leaders as arbiters of a static dilemma, a moral distress perspective highlights the sustained and social nature of moral challenges and the way that effects of these challenges accrue over time. Finally, past studies have shown that the way leaders experience ethical challenges can also change their behavior and decision-making by, for example, leading them to focus on individual vs. group concerns (Frick et al., 2013; Trujillo et al., 2021) or focusing on those who express their desires most vociferously (Hammersley-Fletcher, 2015).

Because of the limited attention to moral distress in education, our investigation is exploratory. We focus on three dimensions of moral distress: the level of distress (between mild and extreme), the situations or circumstances which give rise to the distress, and the strategies or approaches used by district leaders to ameliorate their distress. We offer insight into the circumstances and intensity of distress that leaders faced during the first pandemic school year, and their approaches to moral learning as they tried to diminish this distress.

Research Design and Analysis

We employed a qualitative, interview-driven approach to data collection (Merriam & Grenier, 2019; Rubin & Rubin, 2011). Because the purpose of this study was to examine “process, context, interpretation, [and] meaning” (Yilmaz, 2013, p. 313), semi-structured responsive interviews were an appropriate approach. The following sections describe our approach in greater depth.

Context and Participants

The data were collected as part of a grant to support research partnerships with educational organizations in a designated area, and the district leaders we interviewed for this study came from one region of a western state. Thus, the sample is not representative of leaders across the United States, but this limitation also means that each respondent worked within the same state policy environment during the Covid-19 pandemic, attended the same regional support and guidance meetings, and faced similar community pressures. Consequently, the differences in the ways that different leaders experienced the moral and ethical cross-pressures they faced were not due to dramatic differences in environmental context (Spillane & Burch, 2006). The districts operated in a policy environment where the state education department issued school reopening policies in terms of guidance rather than mandates, which led to community pressures for schools to reopen when state health department guidelines indicated that they should remain closed.

Data for this study consists of interviews with 26 district leaders in 13 school districts. We interviewed the superintendent in each district and asked the superintendent which other personnel in the district leadership “cabinet” we should interview about problem solving regarding ethical and value conflicts in education. In some small districts, the superintendent was the only key decision-maker in the district leadership team. In a few larger districts we interviewed three or four leaders. In general, leaders were very willing to participate in an interview: 26 of the 29 leaders we reached out to agreed to participate, the three non-participants were all assistant superintendents in districts ranging in size from 1,470 to 28,977 students. All the superintendents interviewed for this study (13) were white men, while, with one exception, the assistant superintendents and director-level personnel were white women. The sample thus did not allow us to address the effects of gender (or race) on moral distress because gender and role structure were entangled. To preserve confidentiality, we refer to non-superintendent district leaders as “cabinet-level leaders.” The district contexts ranged from approximately 30,000 students to 150, from 60% of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch to 20%, and from approximately 40% students of color to 10%. The size, locale, and demographic information for each district are listed in Table 1. The districts in this study thus comprise a range of contexts- while our analysis suggests that district size affected the superintendents’ responses, other district characteristics mattered relatively little.

Table 1.

District Demographic Information and Participants.

District	NCES Locale	Number of Students	% Students of Color	% Low SES	Who did we speak to?
District 1	Suburb: Large	10,288	20.0%	28.7%	Superintendent Student Services Director Special Services Director
District 2	City: Midsize	28,977	33.8%	41.0%	Superintendent Student Services Director Student Services Assistant Directors (2)
District 3	Town: Fringe	5,103	27.1%	49.3%	Superintendent
District 4	City: Small	3,470	24.6%	53.3%	Superintendent Assistant Superintendent
District 5	Rural: Distant	1,470	12.3%	48.2%	Superintendent Special Services Director
District 6	Town: Distant	2,636	32.5%	29.6%	Superintendent Assistant Superintendent
District 7	City: Small	3,807	23.0%	55.7%	Superintendent Assistant Superintendent Student Services Director
District 8	Town: Fringe	1,830	25.6%	55.7%	Superintendent Assistant Superintendent Student Services Director
District 9	Rural: Remote	153	8.5%	34.6%	Superintendent
District 10	Rural: Distant	872	9.3%	20.9%	Superintendent
District 11	City: Small	14,113	33.8%	41.0%	Superintendent Assistant Superintendent
District 12	Rural: Fringe	2,564	11.2%	47.9%	Superintendent
District 13	Town: Fringe	1,342	15.1%	27.3%	Superintendent

Data Collection and Data Analysis

Interviews, which lasted between 45 and 70 min, were conducted via Zoom videoconference software from October 2020 through January 2021. Our purpose was “to understand themes of the daily world from the subject's own perspective” and to interpret the meaning of stories and details within the context of the interview itself (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009, p. 24), and initial prompts were intended to launch a broader conversation and lead to natural follow-up probes. Our questions included, “in your job, do you ever feel as though you know the ‘right thing to do’ but are prevented from doing so?”, “What is giving you heartburn these days?”, and “What have you observed about the value dilemmas that you and other people in the district have faced in responding to the pandemic?” Often these questions led leaders to talk about the intensity and nature of moral distress, but additional prompts were also used to help us to better understand leaders’ feelings. The connections between our research questions, probes to our interview questions, and sample responses and codes is shown in Appendix A.

The authors independently completed thematic analysis of transcribed interviews to identify important themes (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and generated thematic memos for each district. Based on these, we generated a preliminary inductive coding scheme that fit to deductive categories (intensity, origins, coping strategies) drawn directly from the moral distress literature (Musto et al., 2015; Ulrich & Grady, 2018). We employed two coding strategies. For our first question, regarding how intensely leaders experienced moral distress, we employed a Magnitude Coding approach (Saldaña, 2013), which allowed categorization of responses by intensity. Based on the analytic memos, we generated a coding scheme that categorized levels of moral distress as moderate/strong, minor, or not present. The “not present” code was only used when respondents indicated that they did not experience the feeling of knowing the right thing to do but being unable to do it. We decided to collapse moderate and strong simply because, although two respondents had visible reactions (crying, frustration) we were not sure whether it was appropriate to code for strength based on observable distress, as people manage emotions in different ways.

For the second and third research questions, we developed inductive categories from our initial thematic summaries, beginning with two categories for each question. The causes of moral distress were political tensions/conflicts and concerns for staff and student wellbeing. For approaches to coping with moral distress, the initial categories were collaborative work/team building and relying on personal virtues (e.g., patience, resilience). One round of open coding was used to identify all the described sources of moral distress and ways that leaders coped with it (Charmaz, 2006; Saldaña, 2013), and we then engaged in pattern coding (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 69) to generate clusters of responses. We found that many sources of moral distress did not fit into our initial inductive categories and that the pattern coding found many “orphan codes” related to constrained time or resources. A second round of pattern coding illuminated sub-themes within the broader category. Although these our approach to these sub-patterns was inductive, our discussions during this round of coding were grounded by the literature base. (Sample codes are shown in Appendix A).

Analytic Trustworthiness and Positionality

We followed Shenton's (2004) guidance to improve the trustworthiness of qualitative research based on credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. We situated our approach to interviewing in well-established practices for qualitative research (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009; Rubin & Rubin, 2011), including iterative questioning (Shenton, 2004) (see Appendix A). We generated memos to triangulate responses across participants in the same districts to understand the level of shared understanding of perceived challenges. We also employed negative case analysis, which helped to generate additional patterns and sub-patterns within the data (Miles & Huberman, 1994) and engaged in dialogic scrutiny of our provisional interpretations throughout the research process. We used member checks with research participants to affirm our interpretation of what they told us (Miles & Huberman, 1994). With respect to transferability, we are clear about the limitations of the study because of the small sample in a particular location and claim only to shed light on how district leaders’ moral reasoning is associated with moral distress given the diversity of challenges they face. With respect to dependability and confirmability, we have sought to give a detailed accounting of our research approach so that other researchers could employ similar techniques in their own context.

Both authors of this study are university faculty. One is an early career researcher who spent several years serving as a district office administrator before moving into higher education. The other has conducted research with central office leaders for decades. All the interviews were conducted by the first author, whose social identity is similar to those interviewed. Both authors are committed to helping district leaders become more effective and flourishing in their work, and our emotional responses during interviews and data collection thus tended toward empathy.

Moral Distress Amongst District Leaders: Findings

Our research was guided by three questions regarding the level of moral distress experienced by district leaders, the sources of their moral distress, and the mechanisms they used to cope with moral distress. Here, we present our findings to these three questions.

Levels of Moral Distress Experienced by District Leaders

Most district leaders in the study – 17 out of 26 (65%) – reported experiencing moral distress in their work. Of the nine district leaders who reported experiencing no moral distress in their work, the overall reason given was that they were not prevented from doing what they thought was best in a particular situation. This line of reasoning is exemplified by one superintendent who remarked, “we've always been able to keep things focused on what's best for the kids… This isn't a popularity contest as a superintendent. If there's an issue, and it's not best for kids, then we're not going to do it.” Another said, “I don't usually let too many things really bother me. You have to know what you can control.” Other leaders described supportive colleagues, finding creative ways to move forward, or a general sense of determination as reasons they did not experience moral distress.

We used a magnitude coding approach to classify the level of reported moral distress. The table below displays the counts of moral distress by superintendent and cabinet level leaders Table 2.

Table 2.

Strength of Moral Distress by Leadership Position.

	None	Mild	Moderate/Strong
Superintendents	5	6	2
Cabinet-Level Leaders	4	1	8

The proportion of each type of leader experiencing moral distress is similar, but moderate or strong levels of moral distress were much more prevalent amongst cabinet-level leaders than superintendents. In addition, the superintendents and cabinet-level leaders who reported not feeling moral distress came, on average, from districts twice as large as those experiencing moral distress. Our evidence suggests that working in a larger district and/or at a higher level of the formal hierarchy may provide some insulation from moral distress. Alternatively, because superintendents have, generally, encountered more “tough” decisions, they may have become sufficiently accustomed to the experience of distress that it is less troublesome.

As noted above, research suggests that high levels of moral distress can lead people to leave the profession or compromise the quality of their work – our respondents did not report such dramatic consequences. The seven district leaders who reported mild moral distress often described their distress in terms of challenges that were difficult but, in some sense, ordinary or typical expectations of their work. One superintendent, talking about the challenge of allocating limited resources for programs, remarked,

A lot of it is just the political dynamic of what the superintendency is. It goes back to maybe that question you asked earlier, balancing that line of community, parents, student, staff. That political dance is hard sometimes, especially when you can decide one way or another, but both ways are correct and both ways aren't. That's the trickier piece. Whether it's staffing or a program or how you allocate whatever, it's just really hard.

The other 10 district leaders reported moderate or strong moral distress. Leaders who experienced moderate/strong moral distress typically described situations that they kept thinking about, frequently returned to, or could not let go of. One cabinet level reflected on a conflict between a family that wanted to switch their students’ school due to a disability and the school administration's unwillingness to permit the transfer. The leader felt that the transfer should be allowed to occur, but district policy is that the onus is on the family to prove the need for the transfer to the satisfaction of the school's administration. This leader said,

I knew I couldn’t fight that battle with this family in September, and we worked through it with this family, and ultimately, things have worked out okay, because I’ve checked in on them a couple times. But that's one of those pieces that just didn’t sit right with me, because there is no real reason not to do this other than we’ve always done it this way.

Stronger instances of moral distress thus often lingered in leaders’ minds more than milder cases.

Sources of Moral Distress

District leaders’ descriptions of what caused them moral distress fell into three broad categories. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that data collection occurred during the autumn of 2020 and winter of 2021, the academic, social, and emotional challenges posed by the pandemic were one major source of moral distress. The other categories included politics (understood as competing and irreconcilable stakeholder interests), and unmet needs of students who qualify for special education services. The first two categories of sources of moral distress fall under the broader definition of moral distress offered by Campbell et al. (2016) in which there was not a single clear course of action that leaders could take to address the problem, but instead a morally unsound situation in which leaders experienced constrained agency and imperfect options to repair the situation. These leaders are experiencing circumstances where their moral agency is curtailed, but not always in the original “pure” definition of moral distress where they are prevented from taking the morally correct action. Rather, these leaders are often afflicted by ambiguity (moral uncertainty) and ethical dilemmas (right vs. right) situations that they find distressing. The distress related to special education, however, was often described as a sharper curtailment of leaders’ moral agency and closer to the original definition of moral distress.

Nearly half of the leaders who experienced moral distress pointed to the pandemic as a cause, reflecting their ethical obligation to put students first. Six identified online learning (lower quality of online instruction or the need for students to be in person) as the source of their distress. One superintendent said, for example, “part of it is the loneliness that some of these kids have [been] experiencing, the lack of belonging … On those off days, what are they doing? Are they okay?” Another superintendent, who felt that students would be better off being back in school full-time regardless of the risk of illness, remarked,

I know that our kids need to be in school, and so two days a week is better than no days a week, but we need them all the time… Trying to manage it and work with folks and do the best that we can with what we have. Even if we wanted to come back [full time], we couldn't because we don't have space to do six feet apart.

But distress was also experienced because of a felt obligation to care for all members of the school community. Four leaders pointed to the stress and loneliness faced by staff members, and their inability to ameliorate those experiences, as a source of moral distress. A cabinet-level leader remarked that although she felt unhappy about teachers’ own stress and stress on behalf of their students, she felt unable to help them strike a better balance: “It's … not knowing how to help in some situations. There are so many teachers who are so stressed right now and worried about their kids not growing academically, about their own health, about not feeling like they’re effective.” In a different district, both the superintendent and cabinet-level leader pointed to teachers’ stress as they zoomed intimately into their students’ homes and saw the struggles being experienced by students and their families.

The second broad theme that caused moral distress for district leaders was navigating what one superintendent called the “political dance” of district leadership. Out of the 17 leaders who professed some level of moral distress, 12 (71%) described morally troubling political challenges – but typically reported them as dilemmas, where conflicts between ethically valued outcomes and the politics of the pandemic could not be resolved. They often pointed to their obligations to the larger school community, particularly its vulnerable members. As one superintendent remarked about the political contests surrounding the pandemic,

If you just look at the COVID thing it got so politicized, that's one thing. In our community [if] Donald Trump says it's a hoax, our people say it's a hoax, yet we are dealing with the science of it all, which is saying, ‘We've got people testing positive left and right’ …You're pressured to get schools open but then not only is it political, but it's also basic survival for our families. We're not terribly affluent in this valley…blue-collar workers … don't have the ability to stay home with their kids, they can't afford to miss hours at work because that means less cash in their pocket, which means they can't pay their bills… We also have a greater calling to the community, to society, not to … to cause the healthcare system to implode because … that impacts people that are going to have heart issues or like my mother who has cancer…We have an obligation to do everything we can to make sure that the system stays functional.

The moral distress of this leader was caused by a moral dilemma in which the available options for action have potential benefits but also profound costs (Campbell et al., 2016). A cabinet-level leader in a different district closely echoed this sentiment when she remarked,

Everything's politicized. I'm getting parents who say, ‘We need to get these kids in school now’ and others who say, ‘You guys are– You're murderers if you send kids back.’ They're yelling at me. I get all of that…Getting those political phone calls, it takes its toll. My right eye has started to twitch. My right eye twitches all the time when I'm on the phone with parents because that's like, my body can only take so much stress and that's where I am right now.

The distress expressed by these leaders is produced by their position at the fulcrum of irreconcilable public interests. In addition to their professional judgements based on what they believe about student needs and information they receive from, for example, county health officials, they are expected to represent diametrically opposed community groups: those for whom opening school is essential to their economic well-being, and those for whom opening school could be highly detrimental to their health. Furthermore, their responses demonstrate the ways that moral distress accumulates over time- the ethical dilemmas they described are not one-off events, but repeated and sustained sources of discomfort.

Another area of conflict that led to moral distress for district leaders was the entrenched power bases that could thwart efforts to introduce programmatic improvements that would benefit students. Several pointed to the distress they felt when they needed to introduce needed curricular changes very slowly to minimize resistance from powerful groups. One cabinet-level leader discussed the process of choosing a new language arts curriculum and the political challenges involved. She said, “I know what the right materials are,” but noted,

My barrier is I've got a strong-willed group of folks who don't necessarily agree with me. The difficulty I find myself faced is two-fold…I want to come alongside [them] and understand them and help them see what I'm seeing and why the decision may come this way but…we're going to have to go with the right materials and I'm going to have to make that happen, and that's not easy. The difficulty is that in selecting these materials and saying, ‘this is what we're doing,’ will I get compliance? Yes, because that's what we're going to do.…Is there potential for sabotage? Absolutely.

This contest reflects a common refrain in descriptions of distress caused by political contests: a sense of urgency to improve students’ school experience and the sense of time being wasted. This leader (like several others) knew what she wanted to accomplish, and even seemed optimistic that at some point she would be able to accomplish it but feels ethical discomfort and reduced moral agency due to the time it will take to try to achieve her goal and the distraction of managing an entrenched opposition. In these circumstances, moral distress is not caused by being wholly unable to pursue a preferred course of action but being constrained by the institutionalized power structures to pursue it incrementally and in a piecemeal fashion which, in their view, hobbles a commitment to students.

Four leaders expressed moderate moral distress about the systemic challenges faced by students who were diagnosed as eligible for special education services, pointing to colleagues’ resistance to meeting the longstanding legal requirements for inclusion. One remarked:

Hearing about a special ed-situation, I get frustrated because, in my mind, I'm thinking if you would just have, go to your gen-ed teachers and say, ‘It's your responsibility to have a solid Tier One instructional plan, and it's your responsibility to provide intervention to these kids.’ They don't just get shipped out to somebody else's room down the hallway to get support. I have said that before, and its broken relationships with the principals, but I'm just sitting there like, ‘Ugh’.

Another closely echoed these remarks, noting,

I had a principal that wanted to expel a student who was in special education. I'm like, ‘You can't, you legally cannot do that…’Well, he ended up talking the parents into having the child stay home and do online learning, which was not beneficial for this child because he had such poor social skills needs and now basically lost that entire year. It was hard to get him back to school. Now, he's in lockup and in jail… we have so many people that are like, ‘We need to get this kid out of school. He's scary.’ I'm thinking, ‘School is the best place for that kid, legally and ethically.’ That's something I struggle with.

Both leaders had a sense of their preferred course of action- keeping students in class and school with appropriate supports but both leaders were also prevented from enacting their preferred course of action due to limits on their power in the situation. Two district leaders pointed to moral distress that emerged from systemic misalignments for inclusion of special education students across district schools that interrupted students’ experiences. One said,

I look at it from a district lens of all the different schools… [In] elementary…we have an inclusion number that is let's say 48% or 50%. …Then, we have a leader at the middle school… and she's all about inclusion, inclusion, inclusion. Those kids that were in that[non-inclusive] elementary school … now they're pushed into the classroom…[A]t our high school …We take the [middle school] kids that were all in the general environment with all their peers, learning, starting to really get growth, … and we put them back into those classrooms where they're not included with their peers…I've had that conversation to say [to those principals], ‘I'm really mad, I'm really upset, I'm really emotional about this. We can't have these practices, but it's not easy … You have to get the teaching staff trained, you have to come along as a leader and be able to lead that work and believe in it.’

For this respondent, swiftly maximizing inclusion was clearly the most morally defensible outcome, but she was unable to enact that outcome at the school level.

The leaders who identified injustices for special education students came closest to the original definition of moral distress- a circumstance in which one knows the right thing to do but is prevented from doing by organizational or contextual constraints – in this case, accepted professional power structures in schools. They see practices, both system level and individual events, that cause them distress and that they have limited agency to address. Time and urgency are again relevant: these leaders hope that they are making progress but are also upset at the pace of progress and their inability to accelerate it.

Managing, Ameliorating, and Leading Through Moral Distress

As indicated above, the sources of moral distress were varied both in their severity and the way that leaders thought about them. Almost all leaders drew their “practical ethics” from one or more of the ethical frameworks described above, but distress often occurred because there was no simple resolution. Conflicts about reopening schools were experienced primarily as ethical dilemmas where competing factions in the community and potential misalignments with the leaders’ professional judgment meant that no option was ethically costless. In other cases, such as the curriculum and special education examples above, leaders’ experiences more closely aligned with the traditional conception of moral distress: they knew the morally correct course of action but could not enact it at a pace that would ensure that individual students’ interests were served.

Although the leaders could not directly resolve the sources of their distress, neither were they powerless: distress could spur certain kinds of action. We found that leaders employed three broad approaches to managing, ameliorating, and leading through moral distress: employing relational politics with internal and external stakeholders, managing and reframing distress with internal stakeholders, and engaging in self-reflection to bolster their sense of moral agency. Table 3, below, displays the three approaches and, within the second and third approaches, the subcategories that comprise those approaches.

Table 3.

Moral Distress Coping Mechanisms by Category and Subcategory.

Categories and Subcategories	Number Reporting (Percentage)
Power and Managing Moral Distress	9 (53%)
“Managing” and Reframing Moral Distress	7 (41%)
Planning and Starting	4 (24%)
Making the Best of Bad Options	3 (17%)
Self-Examination and Self-Reflection	8 (47%)
Reflection on Good Work by Self and Others	4 (24%)
Practicing Virtues (Patience, Perseverance, etc.)	4 (24%)

As noted above, 17 of the 26 leaders described experiencing moral distress in their work: the counts and percentages in this table thus indicate what number and proportion of the 17 described using that approach. Out of the 17 leaders, 11 leaders reported using one of the three approaches, five reported using two of the three approaches, and one described using all three approaches. Additional descriptive detail on the three approaches is offered below.

Power and managing moral distress

District leaders suggested that they used political relationships and/or relational politics to grapple with moral distress. Incremental coalition building and engaging in strategic contestation over ethical concerns was the single most common way that leaders in this sample sought to ameliorate the distress they felt. Underlying their thinking was an understanding of their need to maintain relationships with multiple groups of stakeholders in order to remain effective. As one leader noted, “I also know that I have to go back to work with that person the next day. If I alienate them, I'm not going to be able to…help guide those decisions. It's a fine line of how much I can push.” Some leaders, though, did say that registering their emotion and disagreement was a way of coping, in part because they thought that it would influence others as well. One remarked, “I get pretty passionate about that whole concept of, I feel like I should be able to have this control or do what I know is right for my kiddos. I'm going to tell you if I'm mad, I'm going to tell you if I disagree.” Conflict is part of human relationships and leadership activities, and distress pushed leaders to engage in productive challenges while maintaining strong relationships. One superintendent argued for the need to avoid personal attacks:

In the community… I've made enough deposits in the community that people haven't necessarily agreed with where we are or some of it [but] not once have I been personally attacked…There's a difference between attacking the decision versus attacking the individual.

While managing political relationships with the community, leaders pointed to the building trust, modeling behavior, and crafting coalitions. After describing struggles with the community over resistance to focusing on equity and inclusion in education, a superintendent remarked:

I feel positive in the sense that we're building trust with our community, we're building trust with our staff and our students. We're getting to a safer, more vulnerable place, and we can have these conversations, but now …I need to go there and address issues of race, issues of gender, issues of sexual orientation, and other issues of privilege and power.

Another superintendent pointed to building support for initiatives by producing small-scale exemplars: “We create opportunities for kids and teachers to operate on the margins and then people look and go, ‘Well, how are they doing that?’ Then parents say, ‘Well, I want that.’ Then it starts to move forward this whole notion.”

“ Managing” and Reframing Moral Distress

The second category of coping mechanisms reported by district leaders was management strategies. While some management strategies and “political” strategies are often intertwined, political strategies were distinctive in the involvement of both internal and external stakeholders and focused on agenda-setting and maintaining relationships, while management strategies were directed internally to reframe work that was already occurring.

The first management strategy, reported by 4 of the leaders, was detailed planning to get as close to the preferred outcome as possible. One cabinet-level leader said, about supporting a student who had persistent problems staying in school and managing peer relationships,

I know that sometimes there … isn’t a solution that exists for this family, and that kid … and I struggle with that. [But] I have to be thinking about ‘Okay, we can do this…We can start this conversation. We can look differently.’

One way that district leaders began working on a problem or challenge that caused them moral distress, even when they felt that they would not be able to fully “solve” that problem, was by beginning a pilot program or starting with a small group of like-minded colleagues. One cabinet-level leader reflected on her efforts to start a standards-based grading program. She remarked that,

I think, internally, I have to get past the frustration point first, and then what I typically will do, I'll reach out to folks that I know are interested. I think that's how…a lot of pilots start…finding a small group and trying some things and then sharing the results…with more people to see if that may change…some thinking.

Finally, three district leaders reported that they sought to manage distressing situations to reduce the ethical cost of undesirable options. One cabinet-level leader reflected on the school district's options for students with persistent and profound behavioral challenges:

For example, we have a primary and intermediate [behavior intervention] program, and we have added the best teachers in those programs. It's in a school where we’ve hired the whole staff, so they are committed to trauma-sensitive practices and are not afraid to include [behavior intervention] kids into their classrooms as much as possible. Even though we're taking a kid from a neighborhood school, taking them from their peer group, in this scenario, we do have the best possible alternative. Things like that help.

These strategies of finding like-minded colleagues, beginning small pilot programs, and seeking out the most palatable available alternative were the primary ways that district leaders sought to “manage” their moral distress by taking some actions.

Self-Examination and coping with moral distress

The final category of coping strategies for moral distress raised by school leaders was self-reflection and practicing virtues. Four leaders said that when faced with distressing problems they could not solve, it helped to reflect on other good work that they were engaged in. One cabinet-level leader remarked, “In my head, I have to keep saying, ‘It's different work. It's the right work but then at some point, I’ve got to get to the work I'm supposed to be doing.’ Everyday changes. I think you just have to tell yourself you're doing the right work for that particular moment in time.” These leaders also remarked that focusing on the good work being done by others helped them to feel like progress was being made. One superintendent said, “I get [into] a classroom every single day. I talk to kids, and I talk to teachers. I know the work is worth it when I see our bottom line and when I see the teachers because teachers, all the teachers want to do really good work for their kids.”

Four leaders also talked about practicing virtues such as patience and perseverance in the face of distress and believing that things will improve. As one cabinet-level leader remarked,

For me, you just have to have hope and you just say another day will be here. You do all you can. It's a mindset…I laugh because I say, ‘I've got a lot on my calendar,’ and sometimes I walk away and I didn't do anything that day on my calendar, but I sure did a lot. I think it's just making sure that instead of saying, ‘Man, I didn't get anything done today,’ I got a lot done today, it just wasn't anything I had planned. It's that mindset of just, we'll get there, it's just not as fast as I'd like to.

Two persistent themes in leaders’ methods of managing and ameliorating moral distress highlight the importance of time and proximal outcomes. When faced with the feeling that their moral agency was limited and feeling distressed at their inability to remedy a situation in front of them, leaders focused on working toward a future remedy or trying to achieve something close to their preferred outcome. They built their own sense of ethical worth and efficacy via self-reflection and taking a longer view of their work. The leaders experiencing moral distress in this study found that their power was bounded but did not feel wholly powerless.

Discussion and Implications

This study was intended to deepen our understanding of the ethical dimensions of district leaders’ work through the prism of moral distress, defined as distress that arises when one's moral agency is curtailed by the conditions of one's work or role. In the original studies of moral distress, agents were presumed to have little control. However, as the definition of moral distress continues to be refined, there is recognition that control is often constrained or limited rather than absent. Leaders are presumed to have more control than other workers, but this also potentially widens the possible sources of moral distress in that leaders may feel like there is more that they “should” do something about but, practically, cannot. Our hope was to understand how district leaders – who have considerable authority in their settings but are nonetheless constrained by a variety of organizational and community conditions – experience and navigate feelings of moral distress.

Our analysis highlights the need for a broader definition of moral distress for leaders that encompasses the challenges of balancing the legitimate desires of multiple competing constituencies, the distress that arises from being repeatedly limited to enacting fractional compromises or frustration with the time needed to build a coalition in response to perceived ethical challenges. Just as research in the health professions has arrived at a broader definition of moral distress that encompasses multiple ways that moral agency can be compromised or curtailed (Campbell et al., 2016; Musto et al., 2015), we suggest that a complex view of the effects of distress is needed for educational leaders.

In particular, attention should be paid to the role of time and urgency in moral agency: our leaders suggest that distress is moderated when an ethically preferable decision cannot be made immediately but their position allows them to chart a longer course of action. For many leaders, this sense of agency and hope (whether realistic or not) was a powerful salve, and may be the reason that although moral distress was common, it was generally moderate rather than acute. We were surprised that a minority of the reported experiences of moral distress were related to the immediate disruptions of pandemic, but many of the ethical dilemmas that arose during the pandemic were similar to others that they had encountered over their careers. Experience may have provided our respondents with a deeper set of personal strategies for managing their distress. This assumption is consistent with Norberg and Johansson (2007), who found that inexperienced educators viewed ethical challenges differently than more experienced leaders.

Considering moral distress in the context of leadership also raises the role of control. Traditional conceptions of moral distress presume that the actors involved have little formal power with which to practice professional discretion (e.g., when a doctor orders a nurse to do something) (Musto et al., 2015). Leaders are presumed to have greater agency, but their actions are still bounded by institutional and environmental constraints. For example, a superintendent might find a state policy guideline (closing schools) to be morally problematic but is professionally bound to uphold the law. In these cases, they appear to be imagining and crafting future actions that are based on their understanding and commitments (see Honig, 2006). One can imagine other examples as well: a military commander who is concerned about soldiers’ well-being but must order them into battle (McAninch, 2016) or a hospital director who must put his staff at risk to organize the provision of health care during a global pandemic. In these cases, there is clearly a moral dimension to the distress these leaders’ distress, but there is no single “right” answer available them. At the same time, they often default to actions that they can take that to improve the situation but accept that there are none that would prevent it from being “morally undesirable” (Campbell et al., 2016, p. 6).

We posit that these experiences, and the experiences of superintendents struggling with the effects of pandemic schooling on students and staff, fit within the definition of moral distress, but are also subtly different. The leaders in this study are in situations where they need to repeatedly balance and reassess the moral equities of a complex situation where their actions are constrained, and no ideal solution is possible – a sort of persistent “moral wear and tear”. Further research is needed to further clarify the impact of this position.

Among district leaders who did not report moral distress, the main reason given was that they were able to act in “the best interests of students” (Shapiro & Stefkovich, 2016). This belief is aligned with the ethic of the profession which holds “the best interest of students” as the central criterion by which ethical decisions are made- suggesting that these leaders can work within an ethical comfort zone in their decision-making. However, two lines of critique that have been advanced regarding “the best interests of students” as the linchpin of ethical educational leadership that raise additional questions. First, Furman (2004) drew attention to the need for a communal and processual conception of students’ best interests: who decides what those are and how decisions are made are important. Furthermore, Frick, et al. (2013) found that even within the “best interests” model there are unanswered questions about individual vs. collective needs and the obligation of schools to meet students’ non-academic needs. Thus, lack of moral distress from some leaders may also be indicative of lack of thorough ethical engagement with the situation.

One aspect of the data which supports this interpretation is that higher levels of moral distress were experienced by personnel who reported more direct contact with students and families and lower among those whose work focused more on working with groups inside and outside of the schools (e.g., superintendents, especially in larger districts). The data suggest that the ethical work of balancing competing interests while being attentive to care for individuals and processual equity appeared messier and more distressing to cabinet-level managers than superintendents. In this sample, cabinet-level district staff were more frequently faced with injustices experienced by individual students, families, or staff members, whereas superintendents, except in the smallest districts, were more likely to be presented with these problems in abstract or systemic terms.

Among superintendents who reported experiences of moral distress, the mechanisms for ameliorating their sense of reduced moral agency – or trying to lead through it – were often to employ political or managerial strategies. But for many of the leaders in this study, the most frequent response to moral distress was to redefine the problem to permit them to act on it in some way. Many described enacting a facsimile of their preferred response either through negotiation with internal or external stakeholders or through working via intra-organizational relationships. This often took the form of pilot programs, building consensus within the community, or finding the next best option (e.g., transferring students to a school that could support them rather than improving their current school).

Two aspects of this response are particularly noteworthy. First, when confronted with an ethical challenge they could not resolve, the leaders in this study engaged in a default to consequentialism (Strike, 2006; Trujillo et al., 2021). When they could not do what they felt was “right”, they naturally turned to the question of what they could do. The seemingly short road from the question of “what is right” to “what can we do” can have considerable practical consequences. For example, past studies have found that from an ethical and practical perspective distressed leaders may encourage courses of action that prioritize the needs of larger groups over the rights of individuals (Ehrich et al., 2015; Frick et al., 2013) or it may expose decision-making to external pressures in ways that conflate greater needs with greater influence (Hammersley-Fletcher, 2015).

Second, there was evidence that after the experience of moral distress, the leaders in this study engaged in strategic relationality. High attentiveness to relationships and relational needs is most associated with care ethics (Gilligan, 1993; Starratt, 1996). However, some of the leaders in this study indicated a more instrumental, transactional approach to relationships in their actions to redress morally distressing situations (Noddings, 2001). To be clear, there were moments of deeply felt care in their responses, such as when one respondent broke down in tears describing the way Covid-19 had affected the mental health of students, but there were also times when leaders described the way they managed interpersonal and political relationships in ways that are not reflective of authentic caring (e.g., “making deposits” in the community than can then be withdrawn, “getting people along for the ride”). Care ethics and attentiveness to relationships can be powerful organizational tools for building trust and efficacy (Louis et al., 2016; Walls, 2020), but care ethics also demand sustained attention to relationships for better or worse. Thus, the understandable individual need to reduce the experience of moral distress may have consequences that are inconsistent with the ethical frameworks outlined earlier.

The interviews that revealed some of the strongest feelings of moral distress focused on the inability to serve students with special needs, many of which were unrelated to the pandemic. Furthermore, past research has highlighted the salience of special education leadership for our understanding of both distributive and legal ethics of justice (Frick et al., 2013) and social justice and inclusion (DeMatthews & Mawhinney, 2014; DeMatthews et al., 2020). Despite the centrality of special education leadership to these questions at the core of inquiry in educational leadership, we found very little recent research about the role of district-level leaders in guiding moral reflections around the district's obligations to its least advantaged students. Special Education Directors often function as “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky, 2010) making ethically fraught decisions about the rights and needs of students. The dearth of attention to the role of cabinet-level ethical leadership in this area is thus essential to correct.

The study also suggests a need for a different approach to professional development for district level leaders who will, inevitably, confront the broader definition of moral dilemmas, including ambiguity, competing values, and interacting with others who are acting unethically (Campbell et al., 2016). Many of the materials in the Journal of Cases in Educational Administration deal, either explicitly or implicitly with instances that could help sensitize preparation continued learning to the inevitability of these, and the possible limitations of the reframing-to-make-manageable approaches that seemed most common in our sample.

This was a relatively small study of district leaders undertaken at an unusual time. In fact, it was only by happenstance that we collected data during the Covid-19 pandemic- the study was planned prior to the onset of the crisis. However, the pandemic also underscored the need for attention to the moral crosscurrents experienced by educators and educational leaders. Additional research comparing the perspective of district leaders to the moral experiences of school-based leaders and teachers would help to identify misalignments and fault-lines with considerable implications for how ethical visions are enacted in practice.

Author Biographies

Jeff Walls is an assistant professor of Educational Leadership at Washington State University. His research focuses on the intersection of ethics and organization in education.

Karen Seashore Louis is Regents Professor Emerita, University of Minnesota. Her recent research has focused on leadership and school improvement.

Appendix A

Research Questions, Interview Prompts, Coding Segments.

Research Question	Interview Protocol Probe Questions	Sample Responses and Codes
How intensely are district leaders experiencing moral distress in their work?	How does this make you feel? What emotions does this bring up for you?	Direct examples of the intensity codes were given in the text of the article.
What is the nature of the problems district leaders described as distressing?	What are some examples of times when you’ve felt like this? What are the situations that cause these feelings?	Coded within Constraint of Time/Resources: “Knowing some of the situations that our kids are in, causes me the most grief, the most heartburn, the most worry. Our kids that are that aren't checking in anymore, kids whose parents chose a self-paced option, and they're not doing anything they've just checked out. We have an outreach team now that we go out. We visit homes. We try to contact kids. That's the thing that I worry about the most.” Coded within well-being of students and staff: “I truly worry about the mental, emotional well-being of our kids, of our staff, and of our families. This has been really hard. I didn't sign up for it, but I did. None of us really signed up for it. Trying to manage it and work with folks and do the best that we can with what we have. Even if we wanted to come back five days a week, we couldn't because we don't have space to do six feet apart. Our kids are being amazing with their social distancing and mask-wearing, and I want more of them. We're just limited right now.”
What strategies did district leaders use to try to ameliorate the problems they described?	How do you navigate these feelings? What do you do when faced with this situation to feel better about your work?	Coded within building relationships or coalitions: “If there's a tension about a decision that even if I know the decision is right, but I feel like the relationship is now strained because of that decision with the person that I wouldn't shy away from it. That's a personal thing for me is don't avoid that person or whatever, but just continue. People take time to go through whatever they could be mad at me. I hope they're not mad at me that often, but sometimes they are.” Coded within internal virtues: “I think the length of time I've been in leadership role really helps me, because I just know it'll come. I trust that. I think the other part is look at all the other good work that we're doing. What other things are we putting in place, that then will contribute to a real positive about becoming all that comes along?”