Great On Their Behalf: Why School Boards Fail, How Yours Can Become Effective

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program A.J. Crable. A.J. is an author and school governance expert who currently serves as the conservator of DeSoto ISD in Texas.

[00:23]

He has served on the Council of Great City Schools Executive Committee, the Missouri School Boards Association, as board chair of Kansas City Public Schools, and as deputy commissioner in the Texas Education Agency. And he's the author of the new book, Great on Their Behalf, Why School Boards Fail and How Yours Can Become Effective.

[00:44] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:46] SPEAKER_00:

AJ, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:48] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much for having me, Justin.

[00:49] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I'm excited to speak with you, AJ, because you start a lot of your work with the statement that student outcomes don't change until adult behaviors change. And I know you have a lot of experience working in governance at kind of the high level of kind of monitoring adult behavior. What does that mean that student outcomes don't change until adult behaviors change?

[01:09] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, this one's easy to misread. And so on its surface, it sounds like exactly what it sounds like. That's a total misnomer, as I'll get into. But there is something there, nevertheless, this idea that if what we want is for that it would be something transformative for our students. We as adults have an obligation to figure out what in our behavior as adults has to change in order to create that. It's not actually to suggest that students can't be the architects of their own learning.

[01:41]

It's actually to be intentional about placing responsibility for creating amazing learning opportunities for students to center that opportunity on adults and to push aside any type of desire to place culpability on the children or maybe we have the wrong parents. We don't have enough money. There are all these externalities that we really don't have a lot of control over in school systems. We don't get to choose our students. We don't get to choose our parents. You know, budgets tend to be outside of the scope of our control, how much money flows into the system.

[02:15]

What there is to do is how can I change my behavior in response to what the circumstances that I'm experiencing are and to really find my locus of control within that to be transformative in the lives of the students I serve.

[02:29] SPEAKER_00:

You kick off the book in part one by describing three types of failures that school boards can experience. What are those three reasons or three ways that boards tend to fail?

[02:39] SPEAKER_01:

The idea that we've developed is that if student outcomes don't change until adult behaviors change, we have to have a theory of what are key drivers of adult behavior change. And the key drivers that we've identified are just as true in the boardroom as they are in the classroom. The first step in adult behavior change is around knowledge. Is I know more? I can change my behaviors in response to that knowledge. It's an important driver, but we just describe it as insufficient.

[03:04]

The next driver is skill. So where knowledge is what I know, skill is how can I use and apply what I know. And that's an important driver as well. But the argument that I make is that even knowledge and skill collectively is the small end of the lever, that the largest lever, the longest lever for being able to move adult behavior is mindset. Mindset is how I view the world, how things occur for me as I see and experience what's coming at me. And that is my mindset shifts, my behaviors begin to shift in correlation with the change in mindset.

[03:36]

That is the third and the longest of the three levers for changing adult behavior. And so then If those are key levers for adult behavior change, then the question that the book asks is, what are the specific areas in each of those three that are missing, the presence of which would really make a difference for students? In the area of knowledge, It's really understanding, in part, why do school boards even exist? What are the things that we're here to do? And so often it's easy to get caught up into this belief that school boards exist to, if you ask a lot of board members, they'll tell you, well, we set policy, we set the budget, and we hired and fired the superintendent. That's what school boards do, but it's actually not why school boards exist.

[04:17]

And so creating clarity, that lives at the level of knowledge. The next step, the set of failures that we see with school boards is around skill. It's knowing how to take this understanding that school systems only exist to improve student outcomes. It's the only reason why school systems exist. taking that knowledge and then figuring out how do we apply that in terms of how do we use our time in the same way that I would want teachers to do some type of time analysis from time to time to figure out how am I deploying the time in my classroom. I want school boards to do the same thing, to do a time analysis from time to time to figure out how are we deploying our time in the boardroom.

[04:53]

Are we actually spending our time focusing on the things that matter or are we spending our time on things that aren't really high leverage activities? And the final area of failure of mindset is to adopt mindsets that don't actually have us intensely focused on improving student outcomes. Mindsets that are around my own glorification. Maybe I'm interested in some other position of authority in the community, and this is a stepping off point to that. Or simply a mindset that advances the needs of adults as the primary focus. focus of school systems as opposed to advancing the needs of children.

[05:28]

And that happens in so many subtle ways that it could really be hard to recognize it unless you're looking for it. So those are the three dominant areas of failure of knowledge, skill, or mindset. And as boards begin to cure some of those failure modes, then what they can do for children really begins to grow.

[05:45] SPEAKER_00:

I should clarify, this is not a comedy podcast, but I suspect that some of our listeners may have laughed out loud when you said that the only reason school boards exist is to improve student outcomes, because any leader who works regularly with school boards might have had experiences that would indicate otherwise.

[06:02] SPEAKER_01:

You could be forgiven for not having noticed that in practice.

[06:06] SPEAKER_00:

And there definitely is the possibility for any type of leadership position to not so much be one of service to students and their learning, but to be one of, you know, as you said, self-aggrandizement, self-advancement. You know, if people have political aspirations or aspirations for a higher level leadership role, there certainly are some incentives or some kind of conflicting goals that may be operating.

[06:26] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I would submit to you on that point, that's just as true for principal leaders as it is for school board leaders. It can be easy to get sucked into the whirlwind of what's happening in the school system and lose focus. And so I only point that out to suggest what I don't argue in the book is that I don't think what we have is a crisis of intention or crisis of morality or goodness. Like we just have evil people who are up at night thinking, how can we make sure little AJ doesn't learn how to read this week? I don't think that's the nature of our crisis. I do think it is that these learnable areas of knowledge, skill, and mindset, just the way I believe that that's true of all of our teachers and our principals, that they want greatness on behalf of the children that they serve.

[07:11]

Now the question is for us teachers, as folks who support educators and support education policy leaders, how do we help them tap into the greatness that they want, recognizing that often their own patterns of behavior are a key impediment to that?

[07:27] SPEAKER_00:

And that to me seems like a question of alignment. We all have our goals in life. We have our personal aspirations and ambitions and needs, but hopefully we can achieve a reasonable degree of that type of success in alignment with student learning, right? In alignment with putting the systems in place and becoming the kind of school system that our students need. So I wonder if we could tackle this question maybe from the direction of the principal, because most of our audience is principals and I was a principal in Seattle Public Schools and have to say I never dealt with a school board member, never spoke with a school board member. They didn't call me at home.

[08:01]

I didn't talk to them. There was quite a wall between principals and school board members, but that's not the case in a lot of places or for independent schools where there's just a much more direct relationship between board members and principals. And certainly in small towns, there are many interleaving, interwoven types of relationships that come into play there. What are some kind of foundations of an aligned partnership between school leaders and school board members.

[08:30] SPEAKER_01:

First, a quick shout out. I'm currently supporting the Seattle School Board and so hello to all the leaders and the superintendent there. My first experience in Seattle actually was working with Washington Middle School to support some of their interest in restorative practices. really training some of the staff on how to deploy restorative circles and things of that nature as response to behavior challenges they're experiencing in the middle school. Not that middle schoolers have ever presented a behavior challenge at all. It's always had a small affinity for the fine folks of Seattle.

[09:07]

In terms of this alignment and how do we generate alignment? First, I just want to acknowledge that the question is an essential one. I was actually visiting with the superintendent in his cabinet just yesterday and talking through their need to create HR and budgetary alignment throughout the school system as a reaction to the reality that they are spending, in their case, hundreds of millions of dollars per year, but in ways it wasn't revealing the results that they wanted for children. I liken it to this idea of you having a team of 10 people in a canoe and everybody's got a paddle and everybody's paddling furiously, just putting everything they have into paddling. But If they're all paddling in slightly different directions and at different depths of paddle and different angles of attack, then really the canoe isn't going to do much of anything other than be swept along by the current, most likely, as it pinwheels along and also quite possibly capsizes very quickly.

[10:10]

This is the nature of non-alignment. It actually takes all of the hard work that an organization pours into something and turns the results of that hard work back against the very people who are putting it in. And so what happens is I think some people fail and say, well, how could our teacher just, they're not working hard enough. Our principals, they're just not working hard enough. No, actually, I genuinely don't find that to be the case. And in my role with the state agency in Texas, one of the areas I supported was our school improvement team.

[10:41]

And so would go out and visit a lot of our lowest performing campuses across the state. I never found, and I'm not suggesting they don't exist. I'm just saying I never ran across a group of lazy teachers. I never ran across a group of lazy principals. What I did run across were unaligned teachers and unaligned principals, folks who were all paddling in very different directions. what i've observed over time is while certainly a significant part of creating alignment lives at the teacher level lives at the principal level what i have observed over time is that a significant source of non-alignment lives at the board level and what happens is the board says we should go this way and so then they all start furiously moving in this direction and hire a superintendent to move us in this direction and the superintendent brings in new staff and new programs to move in this direction.

[11:29]

And then the board, all of a sudden, 12 months later, well, we should move in that direction. Well, it's okay. Let's all run in that direction. Well, now we've created this pivot point because every principal in the district is now asking themselves, well, wait a minute. I've spent the last 12 months getting my folks geared up to run left. And now you're telling us to run right.

[11:45]

And in that moment, some of your most effective principles that not insubordinate, not lazy, but effective principles will make the strategic decision. I'm not going to go right because I've been spending all my time getting my team to go left and I'm going to lose them if I try to get them to go right now. I will just play defense against the district while it talks about going right and we'll keep going left. Twelve months later, boom. different boards, it's okay, well, now let's run this other direction. Well, now all the principals who did make the decision to turn right, now they are at a pivot point.

[12:14]

Okay, are we going to now go backwards? Are we going to keep going right the way we have been? And over time, you have all of these leaders who out of an abundance of caution and trying to protect their school and learning environment are now going a bunch of different directions as a result of constant changes that are happening in the boardroom. And so I do see this direct connection between aligned behavior and consistency of that aligned behavior in the boardroom and the likelihood that you're going to see aligned behavior happening in the classroom.

[12:45] SPEAKER_00:

That challenge of the board changing direction, of board turnover, of new board members being elected every year or every couple of years definitely presents a big challenge for school leaders who, as you kind of said, play kind of a shock absorber role sometimes for their teams. You know, like this is a political pendulum. It's going to swing back. So we're going to stay steady on. Play the course. This too shall pass.

[13:05]

Which sometimes is true. Sometimes things do not pass. And school leaders, especially, and superintendents as well, are kind of caught in the middle. One of the things I wanted to be sure to ask you about is this idea of professionalizing the role of the school board. Because in some places, it's a paid position. But in a lot of places, in a lot of small towns like my own, it's a volunteer position.

[13:26]

If you are a booster of the school, if you like the football team, you might run for the school board. And that may be about your... the extent of your professional commitment. Whereas for educators, this is our career, we attend professional development, we get advanced degrees.

[13:39]

And I sense a desire in superintendents and principals to professionalize the role of the school board, and yet they're not our direct reports, it goes the other way. So how can that work? How can educational leaders who are district employees play a role in the development of school board members?

[13:59] SPEAKER_01:

A few completely different ideas here. The first is that we have to understand what the role of the school board is. And the role of the school board within the context of creating the conditions for improvements in student outcomes, the role of the school board is to represent the vision and values of the community. It is not, in fact, the role of the school board to be educational experts, financial experts, operational experts, transportation, food service, special education, or anything else. None of those are the role of the board. None of those are expertise that the board requires to have.

[14:27]

The board literally has hired someone whose job is to either have that expertise or hire for that expertise. The function of the board is to represent the vision and values of the community. And so if we're going to talk about what is the professional function of the board, we first have to understand what is their job? what is it that they should be doing? It's not their job to understand curriculum inside and out. It lovely if someone on the board was a C&I director, that's great, but that's not what they're actually on the board to do.

[14:53]

There's a C&I, someone responsible for curriculum instruction in the school system, and it's not the board members function to be that expert. So that's the first thing to clarify is if we're gonna talk about what it looked like for the board to behave professionally, we first need to recognize that their job duties their whole function, their reason for existing is radically different than any other district's employees. So that's step one. Step two is you have to distinguish professionalism from effectiveness. Professionalism just means we're behaving in a way that allows us to conduct the business of our function. And so we're not yelling at each other.

[15:25]

We're not throwing things. We're not cussing each other out of the dais. All of those live in the domain of professional behavior. We're hosting meetings. People show up for the meetings. We actually have a quorum.

[15:34]

These are all tenants of professional behavior. None of these are tenants of effective behavior. You can be professional in your conduct, but not effective in your impact. To be effective is something else entirely. To be effective means it's not just enough that you do things the right way. You actually have to choose to do the right things.

[15:54]

It's not enough to choose to behave in a way that allows you to conduct business. You actually have to choose which business to conduct that's going to be most meaningful. And the coaching that I offer is that boards that want to be intensely focused on improving student outcomes, boards that want to be effective, are going to spend at least half of their time every month without fail. half of their time, 50% of their minutes every single month that they're meeting, monitoring progress relative to their goals for student outcomes. That's what it looks like for boards to be effective as distinct from boards being professional. And then finally, the third part of this to your question, what can principals, superintendents and such do to support that?

[16:30]

Find people to run for the school board and then support them in being able to distinguish between board work and superintendent slash administrative work. There's the function of governance and there's the function of management. Find people to run, encourage people to run, lift people up, people of goodwill who want to be transformed into the lives of children, but who are also willing to understand that the role of governance is to represent the vision and values of the community. The role of management, the leadership team in the district, which is inclusive of your principles, is to implement the vision and values of the community. So the staff does not get to say what the community's vision is. They don't have any final vote in what the community's vision is.

[17:10]

They certainly are part of the community. They can be part of the community listening sessions where that's derived. But the board and the board only has been hired by the community to represent its vision and values. The staff have been selected because of their ability to implement the vision and values. And so when you're looking for folks, you're not looking for folks who can implement the vision and values of the community. You're looking for people who can represent that.

[17:34]

And so you don't need an education background. You don't need a legal background. You don't need a professional services background, finance, any of those things. You just need to be willing to listen for the vision and values of the community. Write it on paper. We refer to that as policy.

[17:48]

Policy is just the codification of the community's vision and values. And then to monitor progress relative to the goals that the board has set for student learning. That is what is required to be an effective, not merely a professional, but even above and beyond that, an effective school board member. The challenge that we run into often is we have many, many boards, I would say probably the vast majority of boards across the nation, that behave in a professional but ineffective manner. And so part of the work that I'm engaged in and people that I'm working with is to figure out how can we help students All these board members across the nation who have a heart for children. How can we help them not only be professional?

[18:26]

How can we also help them be effective? How can we help them be intensely focused on improving student outcome?

[18:31] SPEAKER_00:

That is a huge distinction and insight. I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that there's such a big difference between a professionalism and, you know, acting appropriately. And people tend to end up on TV or on social media when they're not professional. Yeah. But being professional is no guarantee, as you said, of effectiveness. Yeah.

[18:47]

There are lots of pleasant meetings where nothing good gets done.

[18:51] SPEAKER_01:

You've probably been in PLCs where this was the case, where the PLC was very professionally conducted, but not at all effective.

[18:57] SPEAKER_00:

It's the same phenomenon. I also appreciate the distinction you made between governance and management. And sometimes that's where administrators get into some maybe not turf wars, but just some kind of push and pull about, you know, whose decision is this? Whose job is this? Why are you telling me what to do on this particular question? That maybe is where my previous question could go a little bit around governance.

[19:18]

clarifying with board members about what their role is. Certainly people run for school board for all different reasons, have different skill sets and interests as they take on the role. And I think it's not an uncommon experience for school administrators who deal with boards directly to have the feeling that maybe we haven't clarified our respective roles and responsibilities appropriately. Are there any kind of universal kind of principles, concepts there? And are there local variations?

[19:46] SPEAKER_01:

This is an important part of the relationship between the board and the superintendent, and certainly I have the privilege of working with all manner of school systems. And so probably the smallest school system I've worked with is a school district in West Texas with 150 students. But I also work predominantly with much larger districts than that, 1,000, 5,000, 10,000. A number of the districts I work with range in the 200,000 to 300,000 student range. And so I certainly do notice variation on this point by enrollment size that in my district with 150 students, those board members are in a town where literally everyone knows everyone. I mean, so that's a little bit different.

[20:28]

So if we set that aside, I would describe kind of as micro districts that are so small where everyone knows everyone. It's really impossible. at that scale, not to every single day run into half of the district at the grocery store. But if we look at most school systems across the country, probably somewhere between 500 and 5000 students. In that context, the relationship between the board and the superintendent needs to be such that the board is being clear about what the priorities are and then monitoring progress toward those priorities and driving alignment relative to those priorities. Like these three behaviors, clarifying the priorities, monitoring performance and monitoring progress and causing there to be alignment of resources are really the most important ongoing behaviors that the board engages in.

[21:17]

And so when we talk about identifying the priorities, What I want boards to be doing is being clear about the community's vision and then reducing that into a set of one to five, I generally recommend no more than three goals that are smart, specific, measurable, attainable, results-focused, time-bounded to describe what students should know and be able to do. And that's how the board captures the vision of the community. Then I also want the board as part of identifying the priorities. to capture the values of the community into one to five statements, I recommend three or less, that describe what are the non-negotiables that have to be honored on the path to accomplishing the goals. The way that I often tell this story is I was leaving my office one day to go to the airport. So I called it Uber, but I happen to know on that day that the fastest direction, the most obvious direction to the airport was under construction.

[22:01]

It was complete standstill. And so when I hopped into the backseat of the Uber, I leaned forward, I said, hey, don't take I-35. Now, in that moment, there are about five, six, seven other paths that one could reasonably take to go from my office to the airport. But at that moment, I've given them my vision, get me to the airport, and I've given them my values. Don't take I-35 because we're going to lose time. And now every other decision of do we speed up?

[22:28]

Do we slow down? Do we go left? Do we go right? Which of the remaining seven paths do we take? All of that is up to the Uber driver. That's not up to me.

[22:35]

I've made clear the priorities. Get me here, the vision, the goal, and don't violate this, the values, the guardrails. And so there's these goals and the guardrails that represent the vision and values of the community. And it's the board's job to identify that and to take the vision and value and to codify it into the goals and the guardrails. And then to monitor Month by month by month, how is the district progressing in terms of honoring and accomplishing the goals while honoring and staying within the guardrails? That's the work that I want the board doing.

[23:07]

And then anytime it votes, its vote should be directly aligned with how is this expenditure going to either get us closer to the goals or honor one of the guardrails. If it's not about the goals of the guardrails, I don't know why we're voting. Explain this to us. How are we honoring the, accomplishing the goals, honoring the guardrails, accomplishing the goals, honoring the guardrails. That is the extent of the conversation I really want boards to be having with the superintendent or really any other staff is that if the board goes off of that script What happens is you start to create this non-alignment that is absolutely destructive to quality instructional programming at the district level. And so while you may have great instruction happening at this building or that building or that building, they're occurring in a non-aligned way, which means we're wasting money on PD because the PD that we're offering doesn't actually meet these folks' needs because they're unaligned.

[23:57]

It means the instructional materials we're using probably aren't that great. in terms of what the teachers actually need, which is why you see horrific practices like teacher pay teacher, where individual teachers are going out and finding their own instructional materials. I don't blame teachers for that behavior. I blame non-alignment at the district level for that behavior. And often it emerges from boards, instead of having this clarity of focus around what are the priorities and aggressively monitoring that progress and aligning resources with the goals and the guardrails, Boards go off in the splinter of direction. And sadly, staff members follow them in all these different directions.

[24:33]

And so if you have seven board members and you have seven schools, maybe they're going in seven different directions. And all of a sudden, the great things we could get done for children starts to dissipate and our collective ability to serve them gets a little bit less every day in that context.

[24:46] SPEAKER_00:

I can't help but bring up the specter of micromanagement when it comes to that oversight role, because certainly it's easy to complain about micromanagement when you don't get your way as an administrator. Micromanagement is oversight that I don't want. And if I get my way, then it's not micromanagement. But let's say we have kind of a typical size district, a couple thousand students. And as a superintendent, I bring to the board a purchase that requires board approval. Let's say I want to spend $25,000 on a curriculum or a professional development program or software.

[25:17]

I bring it to the board. When a board is operating effectively... What types of questions are they asking and not asking to play their role effectively, to do their job, not to do the principal's job, not to micromanage, but really to exercise the type of oversight and create the type of alignment that you're talking about?

[25:34] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, one of the things I looked up in the book is the distinction between technical, tactical, and strategic questions. The role of the board is a strategic role, not a technical role, not a tactical role. It's a strategic role. So when I say technical, I mean questions that are about measurement and numbering systems. When I say tactical, I mean questions around who's doing what, who specifically is doing what things. And when I talk about strategic, it's questions that are around what is the alignment between what we're talking about and accomplishment of the goals, what we're talking about and adherence to the guardrails.

[26:08]

These three different buckets of questions, technical questions, tactical questions, strategic questions, almost every question a board member asks, I can slot it into one of those three buckets. Every now and then you get the oddball question that has nothing to do with anything. That's an other category. But most board members' questions will follow to what are these three buckets. And so what I really want to coach board members is they're going to be at their most powerful when they are engaged in strategic inquiry, where their questions are of a strategic nature, and that they should limit technical and tactical questions to things necessary to understand the core function of the system so they can ask strategic questions. So asking the technical question, what percent of our students actually took this assessment?

[26:51]

We're about to make a major decision based on what this assessment is telling us. What percentage of students took this assessment? Well, if the answer is 1%, then maybe we should rethink that strategic decision. But if the answer is anything north of 85%, then it's probably reasonable data depending on who that 15% is. That is a technical question. The understanding of which could lead us to better strategic.

[27:13]

Technical question might not is I see this all the time where you have a former, I'll pick on curriculum instruction again, a former C&I director who's now on the school board. And so they want to get in. It's like, well, help me understand the psychometric properties of this particular assessment relative to that particular assessment. And they go way down that road. These are technical questions, but I'm not clear that those are technical questions that the entire board needs to have an understanding of in order to make well-reasoned strategic decisions. They're interesting questions, and they're very, very important for principals to understand and for senior leaders to understand.

[27:50]

But I don't know how much those help the board make strategic decisions. On the tactical side, board members asking about, well, are we having tacos on Tuesday or Thursday? That is a tactical question. I don't know how that's going to help us make a strategic decision. So the board should generally limit their inquiry to technical and tactical questions to the extent that they help elucidate our ability to make strategic decisions. So that's the first step is that if we see boards that never have strategic conversations, never have questions, they're asking about alignment between this particular strategy, this particular strategic approach and the goals that we have set.

[28:28]

If we're not seeing that alignment in the inquiry, then the board is probably it may be behaving professionally, but ineffectively and professionally ineffective boards are problematic. present all across the nation. The missing isn't in their intent. The missing is in their impact. So that's part of the challenge is what type of question is being asked and how do we support boards? The way that I would want staff to support boards is to try to come up with a system where board members ask a lot of their questions about what's going on at the board meeting.

[28:59]

many many days in advance so in my school district our board gets all the information 12 days before the board meeting and then has five days to submit questions and the principal superintendent has three days to submit answers to all the questions so all the technical and tactical questions still get asked but they get asked before the board meeting so that when the board is together as a unit it can focus on strategic questions So that's one thing is how do we build systems out? And it's staff systems that are helping set the board up for success by making sure it has the information it needs to have the focus that really improving student outcomes demands in the boardroom. That it's not just a board sitting around and telling people what to do. The other question that you asked, you asked a question around micromanagement. And what you offered is a powerfully ineffective description of how many people deploy this idea of micromanagement. If I'm getting what I want, that is not micromanagement.

[29:48]

If I'm getting what I don't want, that it's definitely micromanagement. I'd offer a different definition that micromanagement occurs anytime the board is operating outside of its defined delegation. And by the way, this definition of micromanagement is just as true for principals and superintendents as it is for the board. that any time the leader defines an area of delegation and then pierces that area of delegation, that would be my operational definition of micromanagement. So if the board says, here are the goals, here are the guardrails, and superintendent, any decision that gets us close to the goals while honoring the guardrails, we leave that up to you. Well, now we've delegated operational decision-making for the entire district up to the superintendent, as long as they can demonstrate its alignment with the goals and its adherence to the guardrails.

[30:34]

And so the only real exception to that is there are legal decisions that sometimes the board has to make that are outside of that, and the board has to follow the law, so be it. But with those being really the only three descriptors of board work, is it related to the goals, related to the guardrails, or legally required? As long as the board is staying within that conversation, then it's impossible for that behavior to be micromanagement because they are having conversations about the things that they haven't delegated, the things that they've retained authority over. The board has said, we're going to retain authority over goals, guardrails, and legal requirements. Anything outside of that, we're delegating to you. And so that's the operational definition.

[31:12]

I would encourage both board members and superintendents and principals, Like as a principal, if you say to a staff member, OK, I want you to lead this PLC and then the principal shows up and starts leading the PLC, I'd say that that's micromanagement. But similarly, if the principal says, I'm going to lead the first three just to model and then you will lead the rest. So then in that context, when the principal comes up and leads the PLC for those first three, that's not micromanagement because it still lives within the system of delegation they've designed.

[31:42] SPEAKER_00:

And we should say the book goes into quite a bit of detail on all of these topics. So just a tremendous resource for superintendents, for board members to kind of understand those different aspects of delegation and of strategic versus technical and tactical decision making. Well, AJ, one of the things you said earlier that really stuck with me is the idea that boards exist to represent delegations. vision and values of the community. That's right. And that probably sounds fine as long as the community kind of agrees on what their values are and what their vision is.

[32:13]

But we're seeing in a lot of cases now, especially in suburbia, especially where rural and urban areas meet, especially where there's new development, people are moving in, people are moving out, things are changing. We see a lot of conflict. We see an enormous amount of disagreement among the public about what schools should be for, how schools should operate, what should be in the library, what should be in the curriculum. And school boards are kind of the battleground for a lot of that conflict. What are you seeing as far as that conflict in the public sphere between different visions and values? And how does that play into the work of boards and administrations?

[32:51] SPEAKER_01:

Your observation is so spot on here. And I want to describe kind of my theoretical framework for why we're seeing what we're seeing and how that can inform how boards can navigate this. So my observation, again, I work with really small districts, with mega, some of the largest districts in the nation, and a lot of districts in between. But I also work with districts that are countywide districts in a number of our states. The school systems occur by county as opposed to here in Texas. They occur wherever they occur.

[33:20]

So within one county, you can have a dozen different school systems or you could have one school system that spans multiple counties. It's all over the place. We've got 1,200 LEAs statewide. It's out of control. And so inside of that diversity, I've noticed the same pattern that you've noticed, is that the most upheaval occurring in board meetings is rarely happening in our urban school systems that tend to be predominantly blue politically. And it's even more rarely happening in our rural school systems, which tend to be more red politically.

[33:53]

Wherever I see the biggest conflict, it tends to be in places that are purple. I think it's exactly for the reasons you describe is that's where you run into significant non-alignment in the community around some of these types of social issues. Should we lean this direction? Should we lean that direction? In places where the majority of the population already seems to lean in one direction. predominant direction, then there's not going to be a whole lot of conflict.

[34:16]

That's why I think urban and rural districts are largely spared of this. But to your point, suburbia or countywide districts where you have within one district, urban, rural, and suburban all squished together, that's where I've seen some of the most heated conflicts across the nation play out. So if we understand that that's what's happening, now we go back to the basics. The job of the board is to represent the vision and values of the community. Say you have 100,000 people living in a given boundaries of a school system. They're picking seven, maybe nine people to represent them.

[34:46]

That job was already impossible, even in the most aligned places. We're relying on seven people to collectively represent the vision values of the community. And remember what I said earlier, my hope for them is they adopt no more than three goals and no more than three guardrails. So on any day of the week, no matter where in America you're at, Somebody ain't going to be happy about what happens next. So the job of biggest gold board member is inherently challenging in that regard. But that is the work.

[35:12]

And so in these areas that are purple, it's just that exact same task, but to the nth degree. And that there's going to be fewer and fewer things that you have everyone able to agree upon. Here's what I find has been effective. When boards have leaned into this, I'm thinking of one particular district, I won't name them, but they are a massive district, probably the top 25 districts in the nation size-wise. And they're a county-wide district. And they've been implementing this work around goals and guardrails.

[35:41]

And what they found is that going through this work of trying to capture what is the vision of this community but that will be held by the largest segment of our community possible. What winds up leading them to is goals and guardrails that are really focused a lot more on the basics, literacy, numeracy, college and career readiness. So they wind up going to what's this common denominator that can cut across all these constituencies. Because whether you live in a red neighborhood or a blue neighborhood or a purple neighborhood, you still want your kid to be able to read. You still want them to be able to do math. You still want them to be able to use chat and GPT to write paper.

[36:23]

That's a different topic. But it's the same set of desires. And so that's what I see is that when board members are in these places that are more purple, they can still do this work, but it will look different because they're going to have to lean into, okay, what are the things that can bring us together around the table? And the district that I'm thinking of and a lot of districts like it that have done that, that have said we're not going to play, oh, there's a seven member board, four blue and three red or four red and three blue. And so we're just going to go with a four three split and the other the three on the losing end will just have to deal with it. That's not the path.

[36:57]

The path is there's seven of us. We all see the world a little bit differently. There's some far left, far right, some in the middle. What's a set of things that can bring us, bring our community together? What do we have common purpose around? And when they've done that, they've been able to bring an entire community with them to everyone's shock and actually get things focused on what's possible for children.

[37:17] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is great on their behalf. Why school boards fail, how yours can become effective. A.J. Crable, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[37:27] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks so much for having me. And just my gratitude to all the hardworking principals across the country.

[37:33] Announcer:

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