Summer Leadership Summit is One Week Away!
Join Us for the TALAS & Central TALAS Summer Leadership Summit
TALAS and Central TALAS invite you to the annual Summer Leadership Summit, a powerful two-day gathering of superintendents, senior district leaders, and educational partners dedicated to advancing Latino leadership across Texas.
“Fuerza in Our Roots, Poder in Our People” celebrates the cultural heritage, collective strength, and shared commitment that unite Latino educational leaders. This summit honors the power of our history, values, and purpose in driving student success and shaping the future of education.
June 22–23, 2026 | Concordia University
June 22, 2026
Lunch and two breakout sessions
Evening Inaugural President’s Dinner (additional cost) recognizing outstanding chapter leadership and L3 Cohort 12 participants
June 23, 2026
Breakfast and lunch
Three breakout sessions
Featured breakout with Miguel Cardona, former U.S. Secretary of Education
Closing keynote and book signing with author Robert Alfaro, Baloney, Baloney, Baloney!
Together, we will explore how our roots ground us, our people uplift us, and our unity empowers the future of education.
Early Bird registration is available through March 30, 2026.Don’t miss this inspiring and impactful leadership experience!
Cancellation & Refund Policy
All registration and sponsorship fees are non-refundable. If you are unable to attend, your registration or sponsorship fee will be considered a donation to TALAS. Upon request, a donation acknowledgment letter will be provided for your records.
3-2-1: On improving the world, feeling wealthy, and managing your three selves
.
“You don’t need to solve every problem right now, only those that stand in your way.”
II.
“If you are bummed by the state of the world, go build something.”
III.
“Be forgiving with your past self. What’s done is done. No sense in beating yourself up about it.
Be strict with your present self. Win the moment in front of you right now.
Be flexible with your future self. There are many paths to success. You don’t need life to be a certain way to live well.”
Why Principals Are Key to Solving Schools’ Biggest Problems
Schools face numerous pressing challenges, from chronic absenteeism and falling grades to more structural problems like retaining teachers and workforce development. District and state-level leaders have approached these problems separately, but often they neglect the most strategic lever in the education system: principals.
Effective principals, in both high- and low-performing schools, play a critical role in retaining teachers, improving students’ academic outcomes, and maintaining a positive school culture, according to a new report by the Learning Policy Institute, a California-based research organization and think tank. Released in May, the report, titled “The Principal Effect: How Investing in School Leaders Is Key to Solving Education’s Challenges,” synthesizes several studies on principal effectiveness and school performance.
School board culture war conflicts are rare—and declining
Only about one in 10 U.S. school districts had any media-documented conflict over COVID masking, critical race theory, book bans or transgender student issues between 2018 and 2024, but those districts enrolled roughly three in 10 of the nation’s public school students.
The finding comes from a Brookings Institution analysis of web-scraped news articles covering a nationally representative sample of 2,337 school districts. Researchers manually reviewed each article to confirm whether a genuine conflict between a community and its school board had occurred, rather than simply noting policy activity.
The 3 Predicable Struggles That Thwart Education Leadership Teams
Educational leaders are under enormous pressure. They are expected to improve student outcomes, support teacher learning, navigate competing initiatives, manage budgets, respond to community concerns, and maintain a coherent vision for improvement. And they are asked to do this at the same time they are leading through increasingly complex conditions.
Given those demands, it is surprising that many districts do not offer more than one-day workshops or conferences for leaders to attend. Unfortunately, they do not often attend these workshops and conferences with other leaders, or many times, their leadership teams, which can negatively impact the team’s ability to create a common understanding about some of the biggest issues within their schools or districts.
Nation’s Report Card shows an uneven pandemic recovery
Nine-year-olds are recovering academic ground lost during the pandemic, with reading scores now statistically on par with pre-COVID levels and a growing share of students demonstrating foundational math and literacy skills.
The findings come from the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress Long-Term Trend Assessment, released by the National Center for Education Statistics. The assessment tracks reading and mathematics performance among 9- and 13-year-olds and provides a historical record dating back to the 1970s.