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.
How to get even more out of evaluation and testing
High-pressure situations, such as evaluation and testing, can amplify your district’s strengths—or expose its weaknesses.
Evaluation and testing reflect what happens before the processes start, and also gauge district credibility. That’s according to a group of 50 superintendents convened by the DA Leadership Institute to produce a new “Field Guide for People Leadership in Public Education.”
The full guide, which also covers budgeting, retention and morale, is available with a free DA+ trial. After signing up, navigate to the People section of the Content Hub, which is listed on the left-side menu of DA+.
Teacher evaluations build growth and student testing measures learning, but the two procedures can also cause stress if they feel late or inconsistent. “Credibility rises when feedback is fair, familiar and useful long before the stakes heighten,” the DALI superintendents agreed.
The majority of these leaders, however, do not consider evaluation and testing as strengths. They acknowledge that success in these areas relies heavily on principals to set a tone that reduces anxiety and clarifies instruction.
5 Strategies to Help Students End the Year With Calm Confidence
The end of the school year brings a wave of emotions for teachers and students alike. Between performances, finals, presentations, and games, what should feel exciting can quickly become overwhelming. The pressure to demonstrate a full year of growth in a short window can weigh heavily on students, often manifesting as difficulty maintaining stamina, persistence, and emotional control.
This showed up in my own classroom. As spring arrived and the end of the year approached, I watched students who had thrived all year begin to unravel—losing confidence, feeling overwhelmed, and struggling to meet expectations that had seemed manageable just months before. After asking myself what was going on with my students, and trying to decide what I could do to help, I found my answer in social and emotional learning (SEL) skills.
How to prevent your team from re-opening the same decisions
There’s a meeting that happens in almost every organization, in some form or another. Someone brings up a decision that was supposedly made three weeks ago. A few people look confused. Someone else says they thought it was still being discussed. The original decision-maker — if there even was one — goes quiet.
Sound familiar?
This isn’t a communication problem. It isn’t a culture problem. It’s a structural problem, and it has a very specific cause: nobody was ever clearly named as the decision-maker.
How to cultivate a school board that sticks to its vision
Improving student outcomes trumps personal agendas in Tuscaloosa City Schools’ school board. Its superintendent attributes its success to a culture of trust and cohesion.
“They know their role is vision, mission, policy and budget,” says Dr. Mike Daria, the district’s superintendent. “If they ever kind of get out of that lane, they either individually push themselves back into the right lane or they’ll do it with each other.”
The board recently earned the world’s first certification recommendation from Cognia, a global accrediting organization. Cognia cited unification and strong collaboration among board members with a consistent focus on student success, equity and continuous improvement.
Does Virtual Professional Development Tie Directly To Young Students’ Academic Outcomes?
A new, rigorous study is taking a look at a critical question for the K-12 industry: Can virtually-provided professional development for teachers move the academic needle for young students?
The exploration is especially timely as school districts across the country are under pressure to improve student outcomes at the same time that budget conditions constrict.
Virtual professional development is one solution that both vendors and school administrators may consider as a relatively low-cost way to increase support for teachers. Research across the field is starting to offer insight into whether it can ultimately improve learning in the classroom.
How to Set Up and Then Evaluate School Initiatives
When Principal Scott Palladino assigned a faculty committee to reexamine Wareham High School’s cell phone policy, he assumed they would arrive at a cut-and-dried policy proposal: a blanket, all-day ban. Palladino was prepared to enforce that initiative—he saw the logic in it and was well aware of staffers’ complaints about how phones were interrupting learning at the Massachusetts school.
The committee returned with a compromise in which phones weren’t outright banned but needed to be placed in classroom cubbies during instruction. The proposal, which mirrors many other school districts’ approach to cell phones, wasn’t what Palladino expected, but he chose to follow the recommendation. A former teacher himself, Palladino had asked the committee to make a tough call, and they had put in the requisite time, effort, and research. If he didn’t listen to them now, why would they listen to him in the future when he made his own policy recommendations?
5 ways schools can reduce chronic absenteeism and boost student engagement
Schools have a 77% chance of reducing chronic absenteeism when using effective approaches, such as implementing early warning systems to analyze attendance and sharing attendance data with parents, according to a report released Monday by the HEDCO Institute for Evidence-Based Educational Practice at the University of Oregon.
Students exposed to any attendance intervention were about 9% less likely to be chronically absent compared to those who attended schools that did not have any attendance interventions, the report said.
How to Build Systems That Sustain Student Achievement
The first time I walked into that fourth-grade classroom as an administrator, the walls were covered in anchor charts. The objective was posted. The teacher was working hard. This was traditionally considered ideal teaching. Yet, when I asked students what they were learning and why it mattered, some guessed, while others remained silent. One student looked at the board, then back at me, and said, “I don’t know… we’re just doing this.” I knew this wasn’t the fault of a single teacher. It was a systems problem. You’re probably thinking of the irony in that statement, but let me explain.