The Propeller

A couple of weeks ago I met up with a school leader I hadn’t seen in a long time. We caught up on each other’s lives and ended up having one of those winding, provocative, and sparky conversations about what school could be. We parted more hopeful, inspired and energized. It had me thinking that we all should have a regular cadence of these types of conversations.

In this edition we explore why board retreats are important, but often aren’t designed well, how too often strategy problems masquerade as development problems, and we examine Karina Mangu-Ward’s approach to making tradeoffs between two good things. She calls them Even Overs. We’ve got news on our friend Yong Zhao and his new initiative The Courageous Minority. What if you discovered your school was simply average? What would you do about it? And we’ve got a couple of book recommendations that we think are particularly worthy reads in this era of AI.