I hope this finds you a small reprieve this weekend, with school starting back up soon for most of us. I have also started branching out into YouTube, Instagram, and Threads — follow along there too if you are on those platforms. As always, your help building this community is immensely appreciated.
Let's jump in. Here's what's in this edition:
Optimizing the principal's time for maximum instructional leadership (with an organizational chart from a rapidly improving public high school)
Celebrating academic gains in your school, and how to make it exceptionally meaningful
Research turned into practice you can use tomorrow
A short video on declining enrollment, but increasing student need
If something resonated, hit reply and let's talk about it.
Growing the Community
485 public education leaders making a difference and counting
The goal is 1,000. If this is useful, share it with another K-12 leader, or with anyone who supports the work of school and district leaders.
Progress
49%
485 of 1,000 subscribers
Share The Work
Know a leader who'd value this?
Forward it to a principal, assistant principal, or district leader. Send it to an aspiring administrator or higher ed faculty member. Share it with anyone who coaches or supports K-12 school leaders. One forward can change how someone leads this week.
Optimizing the principal's time for maximum instructional leadership:
Some folks have told me that I take a highly progressive and almost radical view of how a school should be organized as far as the duties, responsibilities, and time allocations of the principal. Everything about how I view the organizational element of school leadership comes back to one single quote I read in a leadership book:
"Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space."
It takes a lot of bravery, but we almost never leverage the concept in this quote. As school and district leaders, we constantly put out fires and manage what is in front of us. We never step back and consider that if we spend our time in sometimes counterintuitive ways, it can pay dividends down the road. The example I like to cite is around principals spending time in classrooms. We think we can't do it, but we never get to directly experience the positive dividends of investing time in classrooms because the effects of that work are never directly experienced.
Block classroom-visit time on your calendar before anything else claims it — protect it the way you would protect an IEP meeting you cannot move.
Hand routine sign-offs to your assistant principals on paper, not just in practice, so nothing quietly routes back to your desk by default.
Track your own calendar for one real week and tag every block as instructional or operational — the ratio will tell you more than your intentions do.
Celebrating academic gains in your school:
In 2026, educational leaders have a greater responsibility than ever to produce real results in academic achievement. Not everyone loves standardized tests, and selling them and branding school accountability in a way that is powerful to a school and district is challenging. Communicating results and branding your institution is more important now than it has ever been, and you can't sell your brand if there's no real legitimate performance behind it, at least not in public education.
A few tips if you are building your own version of this moment:
Name the specific people and decisions behind the gain, not just the score — staff want to see themselves in the story.
Send the message before the district office, the local paper, or the state report card site beats you to it.
Repeat the story in at least three formats — email, a staff meeting mention, a social post — so it actually sticks with your community.
Research turned into practice:
How much effort does your state put in?
State fiscal effort is commonly studied by education finance scholars as a way to demonstrate how significantly states invest in their K-12 education systems.
Understanding your state's fiscal effort and overall spending plays a significant role in your communication strategy. If you live and work in a low spending, low effort state, that matters. If you work in a high spending, high effort state, that matters also. Your fiscal landscape forms your advocacy narrative from your role as a school or district leader.
Spending and fiscal effort communication matrix
Three tips for putting this to work:
Look up where your own state ranks on fiscal effort before you build your next budget narrative — it changes the argument you are making.
Translate the "effort" language into one sentence a school board member could repeat verbatim.
Pair your spending number with your effort number every time — one without the other only tells half the story.
Sure, enrollment has dropped, but what about student need?
Enrollment decline gets treated like a self-explanatory budget problem: fewer kids, fewer dollars, done. But raw headcount was never the whole story. A shrinking school can still carry the same share, or a growing share, of students who need more than a standard allocation — more behavioral support, more reading intervention, more of an aide's time. The number that matters is not just how many kids walked in the door this fall. It is what they need once they are in the building.
I put together a short video this week on why I think leaders need to track declining enrollment and rising student need as two separate lines, not one line quietly canceling out the other.
Three tips if this is showing up in your building:
Separate your enrollment conversation from your needs conversation — track them as two different data points, not one.
Convert your Tier II and III supports into a per-pupil number so the resource conversation is concrete, not abstract.
Do not let a shrinking headcount become the excuse to shrink intervention staffing before you have actually checked who is still walking through the door.
If this is playing out in your building this fall, hit reply and tell me what it looks like.
That's the shape of this edition: time worth protecting, a win worth naming, research worth using, and a number worth separating from your enrollment count. I appreciate you spending part of your Saturday here every week. If any of this would help a colleague, an aspiring administrator, or another school leader you know, forward it their way. That's the best way this list grows.
Same lens on time, people, and money. Quick clips, plus now full episodes too. I'm new to this, so if it's useful to you, a subscribe helps more than you would think right now.
