Social Media, Board Work, & Micromanagement

TESBC: Various versions of this question are frustratingly common. It often suggests that political fighting rather than policy making has taken hold and that social media rather than the board room has become the venue. The short answer remains the same: save for legal situations, you can’t reliably or sustainably restrict what a public official is going to say and where they’re going to say it.

From a coaching perspective, it’s generally more useful to invite the board members sharing these concerns to replay their own video and look for areas where their choices may have made it harder for the board to function effectively. The real coaching situation is that your client is expressing a sense of powerlessness — they can’t get this person to shut up and they can’t get them to stay off their phone. Supporting your client at returning to a place of agency is a more productive approach than helping them figure out how to policy their opponents to death.

Another approach is a mediated one. If you have the skills and training to moderate a conversation between the two board members that creates a space in which they can restore their sense of connection with each other, that’s worth considering. That takes a lot of training and practice, however. An adjacent approach to restoring their sense of connection is to have your client think of a person who they and their colleague both trust, and then ask that person to invite them both to a meal. Sometimes the trusted third party community leader can get a lot done over burgers and fries.

TESBC: It's actually more sad than that. It's not that delegation and governing policy are left out. It's the opposite.

You'd think that representing the vision and values of the community -- Goals and Guardrails -- would be part of every school board's legal mandate. Sadly it is not. In the overwhelming majority of school boards we have supported and whose board meetings we've coded, the school board never developed and/or adopted Goals based on the community's values. If the school system had them, it's typically because the superintendent developed them and the board co-signed. All states demand that school systems have a superintendent and norms of self governance; almost none of them demand that boards adopt a prioritized set of SMART goals that describe, grounded in the community’s vision, what students should know or be able to do. And almost none even encourage adoption of a prioritized set of protections for the community's values. So of all of the board's duties, arguably the two most important aren't even required in most places. If they were, “board work” would be one item long: legal requirements.

TESBC: We’ve actually developed a fairly extensive list of common governance ideas that we avoid. We generally avoid them because they’re too arbitrary, too silencing, or simply insulting.

Micromanagement could have a very clear meaning: any time a person or body establishes a line of delegation and then crosses their own line. That’s fairly straightforward and could apply at any level of the organization. But the way it’s commonly used isn’t that at all; more often it’s used as a bludgeon to tell the school board or a board member to stop doing what the superintendent doesn’t want them doing without ever clarifying whether or not a line of delegation exists. More disturbingly, I’ve heard it used frequently to suggest that boards shouldn’t be setting Goals or asking too many questions — both assertions we’d want to explore further.

Rubberstamp could have a very clear meaning: any time a person or body has been delegated a task for which they are responsible and then lets someone lower in the chain of command complete the task without either offering direction before or providing verification after. That’s fairly straightforward and could apply at any level of the organization. But the way it’s commonly used isn’t that at all; more often it’s used in an attempt to humiliate a school board or a board member into doing what they want them to do. More disturbingly, I’ve heard it used in response to a board not disciplining a superintendent when a monitoring report indicated that progress was off track — an assertion that could be dangerous to the entire notion of monitoring.

Much of the last 100 years of school board nomenclature has slowly developed to infantalize the school board and its members. This is not something we agree with or will perpetuate. Hence concepts which could have some utility but are ultimately used as ways to have power over the school board or its members — “balcony vs dance floor”, “stay in your lane”, etc — we actively avoid and instead use more descriptive language that makes our meaning clear without relying on tired tropes.

Insights on dealing with conflicts of interest during a board meeting.

The importance of distinguishing between outcomes and outputs.

An aggressive take on the different types of boards.

Minutes Focused on Student Outcomes: 0mins

Key Topics: Budget reductions discussion, Staffing reductions (RIF), Facilities master planning, Policy and bylaws review, Student discipline actions

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In many places, candidates are in the final stages of deciding whether or not to put their names forward to serve on their local school board. Making now the best time to begin offering trainings for aspiring school board members. Join us to discuss why and what that looks like. 

11am central on Friday, August 14, 2026

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