When students do well, we tend to celebrate our schools. When they struggle, we tend to point to individual motivation, family circumstances, or problems in the wider community. Both habits let the school off the hook. Where families have more resources, strong results can owe as much to those advantages as to anything happening in classrooms, and it is easy to take the credit and stop asking questions. Where families have less, it is easy to blame circumstances instead of looking hard at how the school is built.

I have spent over two decades in public education as a teacher, a school founder, a principal, a chief academic officer, and now a superintendent, in rural, urban, and suburban districts. The lesson I keep coming back to is that a school's results depend heavily on how deliberately it is designed for the students it actually serves. That puts the responsibility on us.

So I start by learning the community. I talk with students and families, meet with business and community groups, run surveys with open-ended questions, and spend time in the neighborhoods where students live. In Bay City, our administrators walked neighborhoods and interviewed students about their experience of school. In Haslett, our strategic plan came out of 35 listening sessions and more than 35,000 survey ratings and comments.

From there the work is steady and unglamorous. We set goals the community recognizes, put people and money behind them, check progress, and adjust. At Meridian, that meant redesigning the high school as an early middle college over seven years, and first-year college completion roughly doubled. I report what we find in public, including the results we did not want to see.

We decide how our schools are designed. Students' circumstances should shape that design, not excuse its results. Building learning experiences that challenge and support every student is our job.

About this Site

I launched my first website while teaching in 2005, aiming to create a space on the internet where students could easily access course materials, participate in online quizzes, and engage in discussion boards. Since then, maintaining a website has been a consistent part of my professional journey.

Today, this site is where I link to my resume and share my thoughts on various educational topics and readings that spark my interest. While this site reflects my professional work, the thoughts and opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not represent those of my employer.