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Colleagues and friends,
Many of the school leaders we’re working with are grappling with tough choices as they begin to plan for post-ESSER-funded budgets. TLA’s work with teams over the last decade would point to three crucial lessons for navigating these moments of uncertainty and change.
First, ground decisions in equity and make choices with proximity. Aligning choices to established strategy is good, but taking the time to test strategic assumptions and surface emerging priorities directly with students, families, and teachers is critical. Our Real-Time Redesign toolkit has some terrific examples of ways teams can do this.
Second, consider constraints as innovation opportunities. When faced with urgent resource challenges, our instinct can be to ruthlessly prioritize and cut costs. But we’ve also worked with teams who use these moments to reorganize their resource use and re-think work in creative ways (we documented many of these in our Hop, Skip, Leapfrog project.) As one of my former doctoral colleagues and Hopkins Public Schools superintendent urged her team during the pandemic, “We can’t do more with less; we have to do differently with less.”
Third, be explicit about the tensions faced and have conversations about how to balance them. In our study of school system change management, we found certain decisions surface again and again. These decisions are linked to competing priorities, and systems that managed to sustain innovation and change figured out how to hit the right tension to maximize value in their context. Crucially, these decisions can feel opaque to external stakeholders (“Wait, why are we choosing X over Y?”). Leaders can manage this by having explicit conversations about what they’re weighing and by being clear on why they are choosing to value one objective over another.
More than ever, we need to invest in capacity to collectively learn, sharing the best ideas, tools, and connections to ensure every kid can reach their full and unique potential. Thank you for being with us in this work.
Yours in partnership,
Beth Rabbitt, Chief Executive Officer (she/her)
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