QUESTIONS AND RESPONSES
Question: Can you say more about guardrails, double negatives, directives, whether guardrails have to align to the goals, and how we coach around these issues? -- Coach in Iowa
TESBC: Starting with the basics: Guardrails exist to represent the prioritized values of the community. What this also means is that Guardrails don't exist to complement or assist with the community's vision. This is a common misconception. Guardrails don't have to have any relationship to the Goals. They can and often do, but that is not why Guardrails exist, so they don't have to.
The question of double negatives comes up often. Here are the two points that seem to help the most: double negatives make Guardrails harder to understand and double negatives frequently lead to directives rather than prohibitions.
In general, the simpler you can make Guardrails, the better. Guardrails should not be challenging for community members to decipher for the same reason that monitoring reports are intended to be written in a 6th-8th grade level. Simple language, no jargon, and no complicated phrasing.
It is rare that we come across examples of double negatives in Guardrails that aren't directives in disguise. For example, instead of "Provide teachers with a 2hr lunch break" it might say, "Don't allow teachers to be without a two hour lunch break." These are saying the same thing. Guardrails need to be about the value to be protected, not about the strategy to be encouraged.
Be cautious of these less obvious double negatives that tend to lead toward directives:
“The supt shall not fail…”
“The supt may not operate without…”
My preferred manner of working with clients to understand the relationship between Goals and Guardrails is to share the rideshare example with them. Sharing the story and then asking them the following types of questions has been a helpful way to get governance team members talking through the concepts:
Why did I tell the driver which one route not to take rather than saying which one route to take?
In this story, what have I been doing for the past few hours vs what has the driver been doing?
Who is governing the vehicle? Who is managing the vehicle? What's the difference and why does this matter?
What's the difference between the Goal I gave the driver and the Guardrail I gave them and why does this difference matter?
Question: How do I explain why Guardrails are needed at all beyond the basic response of, 'they represent the values of the community' since any type of policy can arguably do that? -- Coach in Ohio
TESBC: This is a fair question. It comes down to communities' tendency to reject results that violate their values in the process -- even if they are the results they want.
Imagine a sports team wins a championship, but later someone discovers that the athletes used performance-enhancing drugs. Even though the goal (winning) was achieved, the public overwhelmingly rejects the result. Why? Because how the result was achieved violated the core value of fairness. This demonstrates a key insight: communities don’t just care about what is achieved; they care deeply about how it is achieved. Goals articulate the “what”; Guardrails protect the “how”.
Communities want improved self-regulation, literacy, and college/career readiness skills. But they also want these student outcomes achieved in ways that reflect their values. Guardrails are the governance mechanism for ensuring that values are protected even in the pursuit of ambitious Student Outcome Goals. They provide the board a way to say, “We’re giving the superintendent broad latitude to pursue these results, but not at any cost.”
Question: What’s the rule on how long guardrails last? -- Coach in Texas
TESBC: This isn't explicit like it is with Goals which are SMART and include a built-in ending date. So our coaching is that Guardrails should track the Goals. If the Goals last five years, so do the Guardrails. There isn't a firm reason that this has to be true, it just makes it simpler for the board to have both Goals and Guardrails on the same adoption timeline.
WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
In the last newsletter, we shared about a district where the local newspaper — relying on unnamed sources — reported that the superintendent is being accused of being abusive. You all had many perspectives. Some said they'd ignore unnamed sources (which, as the paper pointed out, is different from anonymous sources). Some said they'd immediately put the superintendent on leave. Some said it's not the board's job to deal with staff level drama.
Allegations against the superintendent are board work. But the school board typically lacks enough information. Thus, these situations likely warrant an independent, external investigation. The independent investigator's task is to return a finding that the allegations are either substantiated or unsubstantiated. Having the discipline and professionalism to not comment on ongoing personnel/investigative matters is an important first step. Getting more information is usually the next step.
In this district, the school board is considering what to do about a social media post by the superintendent. What would you do? Go here to share what you would do in this situation. In the next newsletter, we'll share your responses and our coaches' thoughts.
INTERESTING READS & LISTENS
A useful reminder of the interaction between verbal and non-verbal communication with the two are inconsistent -- or when technology erases some of them.
An interesting take from the thoughtful folks at Measure What Matters on inputs, outputs, and outcomes and examples of their use in other organizations.
BOARD MEETING ANALYSIS
A subscriber asked us to watch the meeting of a school board in Arkansas. Here are the highlights from the Regular Board Meeting:
Total Minutes: 78mins
Minutes Focused on Student Outcomes: 0mins
Key Topics: student recognition, success-ready graduates, budget & finance, and handbooks
What Coach Celebrates:
We always enjoy seeing meetings that prioritize student recognitions at the beginning like this one. We strongly coach boards to prioritize reports about student outcomes at the beginning. This one did exactly that.
What Coach Recommends:
We reviewed the strategic plan but did not find any SMART goals about student outcomes, and the only reference to any type of student outcomes data -- data about what students know or are able to do -- mentioned 3rd grade literacy. All other strategies and desired outcomes mentioned were adult inputs -- what adults will do to try to improve student outcomes. In our coding, we only indicate time as monitoring student outcomes if the board is receiving data about progress relative to their Goals. This is why the one segment about success ready graduates was not coded as being student outcomes focused. Given the overall professionalism of the board meeting and the quality of the strategic plan (except for lacking measurable Goals about student outcomes), it would be easy for the board to adopt SMART goals about student outcomes and then direct the superintendent to align reports to those goals.
UPCOMING OPPORTUNITIES
What Is The Board's Role In Strategic Planning?
We are hosting a 30-minute webinar on the elements of a strategic plan, which elements belong to whom, who implements, and how to monitor.
11am central on Friday, June 6th, 2025
Did you miss last month's 30-minute free webinar? Email Greg for a make-up session on any of our growing list of topics, including governance policy, delegation policy, effective budgeting, superintendent evaluation, professional services management, strategic planning, consent agendas, and more.
We are considering conducting a national school board member survey. If you could ask any question of school board members nationwide, what would you ask and why?
Interested in attending either the ESB 2-day school board transformation workshop or the 2-day staff version to observe how they have evolved? We are scheduling workshop locations for the second half of the year and are considering requests from interested school boards. Contact us for more details.
BONUS MATERIALS
For paid subscribers, here are links to additional resources (to gain access to the links below, please consider subscribing):
Additional details about the analyzed meeting:
Board Meeting Video
Meeting Agenda
Strategic Plan
Time Use Analysis
Guidance documents related to this issue:
Effective Guardrail setting
What Guardrails are and are not
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