EXPLO Elevate shares good ideas, practices, and wisdom to help
schools and their communities flourish.

Dear Friend,

In this issue, we explore how leaders need to build a door policy that allows filtering out the noise and picking up on the signal. Ask three people in your building how the school is doing and you'll likely get three different answers. We walk through a tool built with MISBO for putting those views side by side and report out on the national data we’ve gathered so far from schools that have taken the assessment. A reader pushed back on last year's Table Stakes Aren't Strategy, and we're back with an even sharper test for what actually makes a choice strategic. And net tuition revenue is telling you less than you think. Here's why discount rate by division is important to track. And what if working within constraints is actually the catalyst for real change?

Leadership Advice to My Younger Self

I grew up in the days of television antennas. Rabbit ears and later we had a markedly better one on the roof with a motor that you could dial in on a channel. (I can hear my younger colleagues saying, Whaaat?) Contending with static was just part of homing in on the signal. When I moved into school leadership, no one told me that a good portion of my job would have me submerged in static looking for the signal.

What I needed was a door policy. I started thinking about all of the folks starting new leadership positions this year and that got me thinking about the notion of big ears, filtering out the noise, and advice I would give my younger self. And so I jotted down some thoughts in Welcome to Leadership.

I’ll be sharing some other thoughts on leadership in Chatanooga, TN at the SAIS annual conference. Reach out if you’ll be there. Always happy to find time for a coffee and good conversation.

Are we talking about the same school? What happens when no one agrees on what they’re looking at?

Ask your CFO how the school is doing, and then your dean of faculty, and then your lower school head. There is a good chance you will get responses that have you shaking your head because the responses describe three different schools. Not because anyone is wrong, but because each of them is looking at a different part of the enterprise and in most independent schools, no one has ever put those views side by side to see how far apart they actually are.

Then ask your board chair who has been on the board for nine years and another trustee with less than a year under her belt the same question.

There are likely gaps within the senior leadership team, within the board, and between the senior leadership team and the board.

These gaps are the starting point for a tool EXPLO Elevate built with MISBO over the past year: the School Vitality Assessment (SVA). We introduced it at the 2026 NAIS Thrive Conference, under the name the DEFCON Scale and the dataset from early participants has now grown large enough to tell us some very interesting things that point to important work ahead for both leadership teams and boards. You can’t build or deliver on a strategy when fundamentally you can’t align on the various dimensions of the institution. Check out what the current national SVA dataset reveals.

In as little as 2.5 hours, we can help your leadership team or your board explore their levels of alignment on a whole host of dimensions. It’s a great kick off to the new school year for leadership teams and boards and a powerful prompt for strategic and generative conversation. It surfaces misalignment within a board or leadership team that can impede progress and lead to institutional drift. It can also set up an honest and transparent conversation between the top administrative leadership and the board regarding the current position of the school.

Get in touch to take the assessment and to see how we can help you use the results to make meaningful progress in strengthening your school.

The Specificity Test: A Second Look at What Makes a Choice Strategic

The article I wrote at the end of last year, Table Stakes Aren't Strategy, generated quite a bit of interest and I appreciate all of those who reached out with such kind words. But you can never appeal to everyone and one reader wrote you can't tell a school serving 400 current families to go make a bold strategic pivot the way you'd tell a company to exit a product line. It’s a good point. And yet, embedded in the critique is the assumption that what I meant was that strategy requires discontinuity. It doesn't. What it requires is specificity.

I’ve combined Martin’s “opposite on its face isn’t stupid” strategy test with a specificity test and I think it’s a useful way to help schools understand how to think about defining their distinctive place in the market.

The Limitations of Using Net Tuition Revenue As a Metric for Healthy Finances

When we work with schools on strategy and enrollment projects, we look at, not surprisingly, a fair bit of financial and enrollment data. One of the things I’m noticing is that too many schools are not tracking their discount rate by division. Everyone is tracking net revenue, but net revenue has real limitations in terms of assessing financial health. I’ve done a dive into why you really need to know your discount rate. Too many higher education institutions did not manage their discount rates and we’re now seeing the closure announcements racking up every month. Here’s a primer on what the senior leadership team and the board should know about discount rates.

In an era of pinched budgets, limited time, and frayed trust, I found some excellent takeaways in the pages of David Eptstein’s, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. It’s a great combo of strong research, good storytelling, and practical advice.

Want to do things better or differently? You may simply need a partner to help you think about things from a different perspective. Reach out and we can find a time to think together.

Next issue we focus on enrollment.

Until then, wishing you all a smooth and joyful start to the new school year.

Moira

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