District leaders across the country are pulled in a million competing directions. They carry an immense responsibility to run safe, effective schools, all while centering student needs and mitigating crises. But no matter how well leaders execute on each of those individual priorities, it won’t add up to the results everyone wants for students without a comprehensive and unifying strategy.
What’s too often lost in the churn of competing priorities — to the detriment of strengthening student supports and setting a district up for effective implementation — is the essence of good strategy. A districtwide strategic plan creates the bandwidth to effect focused short- and long-term change through a set of clear, aligned, and high-impact priorities. Although district leaders recognize the need for strategic plans, developing them takes what many leaders don’t have: time.
To accommodate limited bandwidth, district leaders may find themselves rushing toward a fixed end result on a compressed timeline. In doing so, they might miss the benefits of investing in a comprehensive strategy building process that includes recurring and authentic community engagement; data-informed assessments of strengths and opportunities for improvement; and an outsider’s honest take on performance. These components of good strategic planning are especially important to get right given external factors district leaders face, including the looming fiscal cliff as federal COVID-19 funds expire in the 2024-25 school year, and rightsizing long-term strategies amid belt tightening and lingering effects of pandemic-era learning loss.
Investment in a strong, transparent process to shape and guide a strategic plan is a critical first step — one as important as the strategy itself. The most effective strategic planning process begins with an assessment of where the district is today. What’s working or achieving the desired results, and why? What’s not, and why? Thoughtfully digging into the root causes through an established and transparent strategic planning process is vital. From there, it’s important to identify North Star goals — the most important outcomes the district can pursue over the next three to five years in an effort to fully realize its ultimate vision for students. With a shared understanding of where the district is today, plus a shared vision of where the district wants to go by the end of the strategic plan, district stakeholders can determine the highest-leverage priorities to bridge the current state and desired future state (Figure).
Before district leaders roll up their sleeves to build a multiyear strategy focused on meeting student needs, it’s important to consider how the process will unfold, whose voices and inputs will be centered and when, and how to ensure that empathy and equity are at the core. This process sets a foundation of trust for a district’s entire strategic plan in the short term and accelerates smooth implementation over the long term.
When intentionally built and executed, these processes create opportunities to see the district through key stakeholders’ (students and families) eyes, reflect on the work to date, build capacity, and align around a plan as it coalesces in the following ways.
Opportunity No. 1: Center community engagement every step of the way and plant seeds to create champions of the plan. An intentional strategic planning process is anchored in broad stakeholder engagement. When new strategic plans are developed primarily by a central office-led group, consisting of a superintendent and their senior leadership team, it takes a lot of groundwork to get buy-in among the broader community of principals, teachers, students and families, central office staff, and community stakeholders in a plan’s rollout.
Flipping that process to use community engagement as a tool early on in the strategic planning process ensures that system leaders engage stakeholders at multiple levels in the work and build a solid understanding of the current districtwide landscape. It’s an opportunity for leaders to immerse themselves in the experiences of a wide range of stakeholders, including students, and see the system through their eyes. Doing so allows leaders to create a plan that meets stakeholders’ needs and echoes inputs they made during the process by listening, synthesizing, designing, gathering feedback, and refining.
Think of engagement like an accordion. Although senior leaders have the knowledge and visibility across a district to make decisions, in doing so alone and contracting the process, they miss a valuable opportunity to shape the plan based on the voices of those who will lead and perform everyday work as well as the voices of those the work is ultimately intended to benefit (students and families). Being intentional about expanding engagement to involve school-specific leaders and staff enables senior leadership to develop a broader understanding of a district’s landscape, gather insights, and contract knowledge gleaned to a smaller group of decision-makers to synthesize trends and test hypotheses. From there, the “accordion” expands to gather stakeholder feedback on the draft strategic plan to align with team needs on the ground and contracts once again for senior leadership to iterate and finalize plan components.
Centering end-users in this way throughout the process, and not just once a plan is almost final, builds authentic (and early) buy-in, engagement, and overall effectiveness. And it broadens senior leadership’s aperture to look left to right across the district as it builds a go-forward strategy and cycles in on-the-ground feedback. The end result: a strategic plan that is more closely aligned with what’s happening in school buildings and classrooms every day.
Opportunity No 2: Take a systemwide look at what is and isn’t working and spend the time to engage deeply in root cause analysis. A strategic planning process is an opportunity to look backward before planning forward. As a district closes out its last strategic plan, it’s helpful to understand how priorities and ways of working identified in that plan resulted in intended (or unintended) outcomes. Learning from the “why” behind outcomes achieved during the last strategic plan helps to identify strengths to build into in the next plan as well as opportunities to seize.
Understanding the district’s current state requires analysis of quantitative and qualitative data across multiple aspects of the district’s operations including academics, school culture, leadership and talent, operations and finance, governance, and planning. Once again, engaging a wide range of stakeholders in this phase of the strategic planning process is critical. For example, central office leaders focused on teaching and learning might experience efforts to adopt and fully implement a new curriculum quite differently than principals, teachers, students, and families. And understanding how each of these groups experiences the same work reveals what a district should consider maintaining as part of its practice going forward and, importantly, what opportunities for improvement it might prioritize addressing as it develops its next strategic plan.
It’s equally important to balance qualitative data and insights with those gleaned from quantitative data. District leaders should engage in analysis to make meaning of datasets and surface insights to inform decision-making. The analysis and associated insights, shaped into a meaningful narrative, create a shared understanding of the district’s current state and facilitate discussions that can turn insights into go-forward options and recommendations toward North Star goals.
Opportunity No. 3: Leverage the strategic planning process to strengthen internal capacity. Central office and school-based staff know their school community and students’ needs best. They also have informed perspectives regarding how well — or not — past initiatives and approaches to implementation have worked. It’s important to engage the voices of these individuals to understand the district’s current state and inform go-forward goals and priorities. And it’s equally important to make them a part of the work to define initiatives that represent “how” the district will act on its priorities to achieve desired outcomes as it implements its strategic plan.
A comprehensive strategic planning process that includes a number of cross-functional working teams — each aligned to a district priority to define what the work of that priority will look like vertically at various levels of the organization and horizontally across multiple interdependent teams — capitalizes on in-house expertise. It also ensures that these teams build important norms and ways of working together that will support the ongoing implementation of the strategic plan.
To help districts take advantage of these opportunities amid time and bandwidth constraints, there is value in bringing an external partner along, like Bellwether, in the strategic planning process to be the arms and legs of the process as well as a critical friend. With the give and take of feedback cycles, including, at times, tough feedback, an external partner can facilitate intradistrict discussions among different stakeholder groups, monitor trends, and capture and synthesize feedback to build go-forward recommendations in the strategic plan. A trusted external partner can also connect disparate dots to ensure that tie-ins with middle managers leading teams executing the work in school buildings aren’t overlooked, and to build coherence into an overall plan.
A strategic plan is a key part of any well-performing district; a good strategic plan is broadly owned by the greater district community of school-site leaders, teachers, and families. When leaders seize these three opportunities and better align around a strong process, stakeholder engagement, and a planning partner, it sets the foundation for strong strategic plan implementation.
Up next in the series: How an intentional investment in strategic plan implementation can build better alignment and continuous improvement among teams.
