Beyond Ranking and Sorting: Leading Schools Where All Can Thrive
(A follow-up to A Unified Approach: Blending Management and Leadership for a Positive-Sum School Culture) Historically, our education system has operated as a zero-sum game—one where success for some comes at the expense of others. Schools were not designed to support every student in realizing their full potential, but rather to rank, sort, and separate students into predetermined pathways. As Michael Horn (2022) explains in From Zero Sum to Positive Sum, this…
A Unified Approach: Blending Management and Leadership to Build a Positive-Sum School Culture
For far too long, school leadership has been framed as an either/or choice—are you a manager or a leader? Are you focused on compliance or innovation? Are you maintaining systems or inspiring change? These false dichotomies trap us in a zero-sum mindset, where every improvement in one area is assumed to come at the expense of another. But just as education itself must move beyond the outdated practice of ranking and sorting…
Aligning Agility with Long-Term Strategy: How School Leaders Can Avoid Moving in the Wrong Direction
Chaos. Complexity. Collapse. These words may feel all too familiar right now, especially for middle and high school principals. You’re juggling shifting mandates, staffing shortages, evolving student needs, and countless new priorities. In such a rapidly changing landscape, agility—your ability to pivot quickly—can feel like the only way to survive. But agility alone isn’t enough. Moving fast in the wrong direction can waste precious resources and demoralize your team. True agility means…
Reclaiming 13 Weeks: Practical Time Management for Secondary School Leaders
If you’re like most school leaders, your days start with good intentions but ends in exhaustion. You’re constantly juggling meetings, emails, classroom walkthroughs, teacher concerns, and unexpected crises. By the time you sit down to focus on a high-impact task—analyzing student data, designing a professional learning plan, or planning a strategic initiative—you’re interrupted by another urgent request. You’re not alone in facing these challenges. Research by The Economist Intelligence Unit has found…
Leading Through Chaos: Be a Thermostat, Not a Thermometer
To Secondary School Principals and Assistant Principals, We are living in an era of uncertainty, volatility, and unprecedented challenges in education. The chaos of shifting policies, the complexity of managing diverse student needs, and the collapse of traditional structures place extraordinary demands on school leaders. In the face of this, how will you respond? Will you be a thermometer, reacting to the rising tensions, unpredictable policies, and external pressures that seem to…
Leadership and the Water Tower: A Reflection
When thinking about a water tower, what images and thoughts come to mind about its form and function? Its towering presence, carefully engineered structure and ability to provide consistent service are impressive. But have you ever considered the water tower as a metaphor for leadership? Like a water tower that must carefully balance its pressure to meet the needs of the community, leaders too must regulate their sense of urgency. Too much…
The Balanced Principal: A Path to Sustainable Success
As a school principal, your to-do list feels endless—meeting student needs, managing staff, navigating community expectations, and tackling unforeseen challenges. It’s easy to feel as if success hinges on doing more and doing it faster. But what if the secret to effective leadership wasn’t about doing more, but rather about doing less—with intention? A timeless lesson from a martial arts student offers a powerful analogy for school leadership. When the student asked…
Rethinking Educator Evaluation in Wake of Changes to PERA, MCL 380.1248 & 1249
Since June of 2023, the Michigan Legislature has made major reforms to the state's educator evaluation (section 1249), collective bargaining (PERA), and educator layoff and recall (section 1248) laws. Taken together, these changes represent a sea change in the way districts must approach and operationalize their educator evaluation system. While the surface implications may appear straightforward, school administrators and attorneys are finding upon closer examination nuanced layers that demand attention. To aid…
Educator Evaluation Post PERA Repeal and Updated EdEval Statutes
For the first time since Michigan passed our educator evaluation law in 2013, the process local districts use is now subject to collective bargaining. A recent MEA Voice article (Clawson teachers light the way: contract settles all newly restored topics) about contract negotiations in Clawson Community Schools highlights the potential for districts to utilize this process to elevate teacher voice and agency in order to develop collective efficacy, something we know is…
Automation and the Future of Work (… and Education)
Education is inextricably linked to the needs of the labor market. Whether we like or dislike that, the push from policymakers will always be to prepare our students for their futures. Ours is to ensure those futures are limitless. And, the US labor market is going through a rapid evolution in the way people work and the work people do. While the US job market has come roaring back since the pandemic,…