Media, Policy, & Sneaking

TESBC: Yes. We don't see it often, but occasionally we get asked to analyze the positive/neutral/negative distribution of media mentions of a school board. I've seen a couple of school boards include pos/neu to neg media mention ratios as the data it uses to monitor a Guardrail the board placed on itself.

This has changed over the years and the latest version of our tool for this is heavily automated using AI. It can be time intensive, but if the board's Guardrail for itself has to do with perception, I find a media mention analysis can be more useful than a survey of board members.

TESBC: Five common ways a school board fails to lead through policy include:

It sets policy outside of its area of expertise without seeking expertise (the board is not an ed, fin, hr, etc expert)

It allows the administration to set policy for which only the board has expertise (i.e: representing the vision and values of the community)

It fails to monitor whether each of its policies is being implemented

It fails to review whether each of its policies is still relevant

And then the failure that often triggers all of the other failures: it adopts so many policies that there's no clarity regarding priorities

School board policy exists to represent the prioritized, codified version of the community's vision and values. When a person or body owns so much policy that they begin making the aforementioned mistakes, policy loses its potency. At that point, the school board is pretending to lead through policy, but not truly doing so. This pretending -- creating/retaining ownership of policies beyond the point of expertise, monitoring, reviewing -- allows school boards to look good and feel protected, while not effectively representing the vision and values of the community.

In the last newsletter, we shared about a board that tried to meet without the superintendent -- but failed. You all were mostly looking to be reasonable ("is she on vacation?", "can someone fill in for her?", "can the board just schedule another time?") but I think you're largely missing the point. This felt intentional, like a board trying to sneak around and do something without getting caught by the superintendent.

For us, sneaking is the problem, but probably not for the reason you think.

Why should a school board feel compelled to sneak around its own employee? That suggests that the more likely scenario is that the board members are trying to do something they know to be inappropriate OR the board has been so captured by the superintendent that it thinks it needs permission from the superintendent to remove the superintendent. And we see this a lot: school boards that don't realize they're the school board.

So here's the better plan: get clear about the community's vision (Goals) and values (Guardrails). Then evaluate the superintendent based on those. Then determine -- without hiding or obfuscation -- whether or not they should return based on performance data.

You often hear that you should "put the big rocks in first" regarding prioritization. Turns out, this isn't just sound advice, it's also common sense physics. 

All too often, Goals fall short of being powerful because instead of being focused on student outcomes, they're just a checklist of adult inputs.

We are hosting a 30-minute webinar on how the board puts in place policies that effectively clarify the relationship between the board and its direct reports.

11am central on Friday, August 8th, 2025

RSVP Here