QUESTIONS AND RESPONSES
Question: How do I facilitate a board in creating a fair, procedural complaint process for superintendent performance issues that protects due process and preserves board-superintendent trust? -- Coach in Minnesota
TESBC: The most important thing to establish before you design any process is the distinction between two very different situations. The first is a community member or staff complaint about the superintendent. The second is a board member’s or the board's own performance concern. These need different processes because they're different governance situations and conflating them is where most boards get lost.
For community complaints, the board isn't the first stop. The superintendent is. The board's role is aggregate oversight, not grievance arbitration. Design a process that routes individual complaints about the superintendent through the superintendent first, and only escalates to the board when there's a pattern the superintendent hasn't addressed.
For board-level performance concerns, the process needs three things to hold up:
The concern has to be tied to a specific Goal or Guardrail the board already established, or a policy/law that the superintendent is alleged to have personally violated.
The full board has to be involved -- not a subset of the board acting independently.
The superintendent gets a genuine opportunity to respond before any formal action happens.
That structure protects due process. It also protects the board because a defined process is much harder to characterize as retaliation than one invented in the middle of a conflict.
Question: How do you coach a board chair to timebox monitoring conversations and still allow rigorous questioning? -- Coach in Massachusetts
TESBC: This tension usually comes from a misunderstanding of what rigorous questioning actually means in a governance context. Rigor isn't about how long a conversation runs. Rigor in a governance context is about strategic alignment. Asking three hours’ worth of questions about the color of the apples being served does accomplish rigor. Exhaustion, yes, but rigor, no. The distinction you’re actually looking for is technical vs tactical vs strategic.
Technical questions are about trying to understand how something is measured. Questions like:
What's the alignment of the portfolio assessment with the SAT or ACT?
How do we know the validity of the portfolio assessment?
Tactical questions are about trying to understand how something is done. Questions like:
To whom is the assessment administered?
Which staff have been trained to administer the assessment?
Strategic questions are about trying to understand how something aligns to the priorities. Questions like:
Looking at the data in Table 1, which strategy was most effective with our target student population?
What is a strategy we deployed that didn’t work, given the data in Table 2, and what did we learn?
Timeboxing a Goal monitoring conversation for time’s sake is counterproductive. Timeboxing it because the conversation is mostly technical and tactical just means that effort needs to be put into supporting board members with the development of strategic questions.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of boards run out of time not because questions are too deep, but because too much time is spent on explanations, background, or side topics. Watching a two hour slideshow presentation also isn’t rigorous and is just as much a squanderance of board time as are technical and tactical questions when delivered under the guise of being strategic. So the coaching isn’t really about limiting questions; it’s about protecting space for effective ones. Here’s how it can be approached:
First, get clear on what an effective monitoring conversation looks like.
It’s not everyone asking everything they’re curious about. It’s a focused discussion on whether students are meeting the vision, if not are they growing, and if not is there a plan sufficiently aggressive to get them back on track.Then shift expectations around prep. If board members come in already familiar with the monitoring report, you don’t need to spend time re-explaining it in lengthy presentations. That alone frees up room for effective questions.
I’d also coach the chair to gently interrupt when needed -- not to shut people down, but to refocus. Something like: “That’s helpful, but can we connect that back to what the data is telling us about progress?” or “That sounds like a tactical question. Would you rather get an answer to that from staff in the next weekly update, or is there a strategic version of the question you can pivot to?”
Question: How would you help a district that’s going through strategic planning convince the board to simultaneously set specific, time-bound student outcome goals while staying out of the implementation aspects of the process? -- Coach in Michigan
TESBC: The framing here is ineffective, and fixing it will make your job easier. You don't need to convince the board to do two things at once -- set Goals and stay out of implementation. Those are actually the same thing. A board that does the work to set specific, measurable, attainable, results-focused, and time-bound outcome (SMART) Goals has already self-defined its role. For the board, the Goal is the destination and everything else is about monitoring progress toward the destination and ensuring the alignment of resources with the destination. It’s only things outside of that self-defined body of work that the board is fully delegating to the superintendent.
I’ve never been able to convince a board to stop doing things it really enjoyed doing. All of the energy I see in our space that is filled with telling boards what NOT to do is ineffective. “Don’t micromanage.” “Don’t rubberstamp.” “Stay in your lane.” These are more are all the language of control over a board, this is inappropriate since the board represents the vision and values of the community. Instead, support the board in focusing on what it wants students to know and be able to do -- starting with clarifying the priorities. I’ve found this is the most effective path toward helping boards become highly effective.
So don't bother trying to sell the board on restraint. Sell them on specificity. Walk them through what it looks like to name a real Goal -- not "improve reading" but "by June 2030, 80% of our third graders will read at grade level, up from 61% today." When a board commits to that kind of precision and then focuses 50% of its time during board meetings on monitoring progress toward the goals, much of the natural slide into implementation becomes easier to notice and avoid.
Where boards drift into implementation during strategic planning, it's almost always because the Goal isn't concrete enough or isn’t actually about student outcomes. Sharpen the Goal, and the boundary that makes the most sense to the board to observe become more obvious to the board.
INTERESTING READS & LISTENS
Many people talk about board accountability. Here’s Rick Maloney’s way of defining it.
Ever feel sad about governance practices you’ve seen? So has Susan Mogensen.
BOARD MEETING ANALYSIS
A subscriber asked us to watch the December meeting of a school board in North Carolina. Here are the highlights from the Board of Education Business Meeting:
Total Minutes: 169mins
Minutes Focused on Student Outcomes: 6mins
Key Topics: Policy modifications, Community concerns, Reports, Consent agenda approvals
What Coach Celebrates:
The board has formally adopted a Student Focused Outcomes Governance structure and continues to place Goal and Guardrail monitoring on the agenda.
Meeting procedures were orderly, and transitions between agenda sections were efficient.
What Coach Recommends:
Significantly increase the amount of time devoted to Goal monitoring, with a clear expectation of board questioning focused on strategies, measures, and results.
Shift lengthy adult-input reports to written form to reclaim meeting time for student outcomes discussions.
Establish a predictable cadence and protected time block for Goal monitoring to move toward the 50% student outcomes focus standard.
UPCOMING OPPORTUNITIES
Effective Meeting Disruption Management
Have some of your meetings gotten a bit challenging to manage. Have tempers flared or things been said that can’t easily been taken back? Whether those decorum challenges are coming from staff, community members, or board members, there are more and less effective ways to management the disruptions. Let’s get into it together.
11am central on Friday, July 10, 2026
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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:
Technical, Tactical, Strategic
Effective Strategic Planning
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