Schools
A school can be well run and still know too little about learning.
I have built or run three schools. I use three questions to look past smooth routines and examine what changed for the student.
Schools run on ordinary days
A school has to coordinate students, teachers, parents, subjects, schedules, assessment, behaviour, and care. Its routines must work when no exceptional leader or teacher is in the room.
Attendance, homework, lesson coverage, test marks, observations, and reports all help. The mistake is asking any one of them to prove more than it can.
A completed plan does not show what a student understood. A mark does not explain why an answer failed. Good behaviour does not prove that unfinished thinking feels safe to show.
Three questions help me look beneath the smooth running.
The institution record
Nixor College
I was a member of the founding team and exited two years after launch.
Cedar College
I was the founder, CEO and dean, and exited after six years.
The Ivy School
I am a co-founder and remain a board member.
Alt Academy is an additional online education platform. It is not counted as a fourth school.
1. What did the assessment change?
An assessment earns its place when it changes what happens next.
What did the student misunderstand? What will the teacher explain, practise, or check differently? When will the idea return? What would show that the response worked?
The question is not only whether an assessment happened. It is whether anyone learned enough from it to make a better decision.
2. Does pressure reveal confusion, or teach students to hide it?
High expectations matter. Students should experience challenge, deadlines, and the consequences of unfinished work.
Pressure becomes unhelpful when appearing certain matters more than showing where the thinking broke. If the same error keeps returning, the school needs more than another warning to work harder. It needs to identify the missing idea and test a different response.
3. What does each signal actually mean?
A mark shows performance on one task. Attendance shows presence. Completion shows that an activity ended. Behaviour records what was visible.
Each signal can support a decision. None should quietly become a complete account of the child.
The larger the school, the more important it becomes to define a signal before it shapes reports, interventions, subject choices, or parent expectations.
What I ask leaders to show
- a recurring misunderstanding and what teachers tried next;
- student work that transfers an idea to an unfamiliar problem;
- a teaching decision changed by assessment information;
- parent communication that separates effort, performance, and readiness;
- a case where the school stopped doing something because the evidence did not support it.
The standard
A good school should not promise to remove struggle. It should make struggle more informative.
Students should know what they are trying to improve. Teachers should know which response they are testing. Parents should know what the current information does and does not show.
The institution should become better at seeing learning, not merely better at recording school.