What is the School Growth Story: A Podcast Interview

I had the privilege of joining Simon Jones on "The School Marketing & Enrollment Podcast" as we explored how our team works with school leaders to pursue authentic excellence. Overcoming the significant forces that compel mediocrity and contentment with the status quo requires courageous leadership that can articulate a compelling vision and produce real results. 

Today on the podcast, I have Scott Barron, the founder and what he calls Chief Reinvention Officer at School Growth. Very keen to find out more about that.

Scott has spent more than two decades leading schools before going on to help hundreds of schools across all of North America grow stronger, not just through better marketing, but also through better leadership, stronger culture, and a clearer strategy.

One thing I like about Scott's approach is that he challenges the idea that enrollment is simply a marketing problem; instead, he argues that sustainable growth comes from building schools families genuinely trust and want to be part of.

Scott, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here today. How are you?

My pleasure, Simon. 

It's a toasty summer here in the United States, and we just got back from a journey over to South Africa, where it was the  fall season. That was a very good experience! It's a joy to take the journey with educators around the world as you do.

Amazing. Fantastic.

Let me just ask: South Africa. Great place. I've never been there, always wanted to go.

Which part of South Africa were you in?

Well, we did quite the tour. We started off in Johannesburg, and then went down to Cape Town, and then to Pretoria, and then over to Durban, and then back to Johannesburg. So it was a very intense visit over about 2 weeks. My wife and I, Tammy, were able to speak into the lives of a lot of educators.

What we love to do in our work is provide both encouragement, as well as equipping. Those are the 2 sides of what we do. One is to say, “Hey, come on, we can do this!”

Is it hard? Of course it's hard. I mean, you're trying to change lives. If it was easy, anybody would do it.

But to take on the challenge of being an educator is—that's a noble calling!

It's something that truly does transform lives, especially if we accept the challenge that it's not just being a dispenser of curriculum, but instead being an enabler of dreams.

That's all about perspective.

And so that's what we try to do in our work. Every week we share a Weekly Encouragement for Educators email, and we also have a corresponding podcast.

We all know there's going to be conflict in this work. There's going to be confusion. There's going to be all kinds of things that will seek to steal the joy of the work.

But don’t forget who you are and what you're called to do.

That's the message that we shared in South Africa, and then provided guidance on being a leader, understanding that every leader is an educator, and every educator is a leader.

Embrace the idea that whether you're in the classroom, whether you're working as a counselor, a coach, an administrator on the board, or whatever your role is [within a school or education system], you're an educator!

Embrace the role and understand your influence, because your influence is significant.

Love to hear that. Absolutely love that. Thank you for that, Scott.

Chief Reinvention Officer. I've gotta ask you about this. Where did that come from?

I served as a head of school for about 14 years, and before that, I ran an education technology company, and what I realized in the transition from running an education business to running a school is that there are very significant differences that I didn't realize. I discovered that a lot of other people don't realize it either, especially those who are on boards or in other places. 

And then there's this idea that Schools have been fairly the same—haven't changed a lot over the last 50 years.

Fundamentally, you mean?

Yes, in the overall design of schools, and so we set our mission as being: We grow schools and the people who have the courage to lead them.

We want to help schools figure it out—figure out how to innovate, how to grow within the context of our target market and our community.

But do it authentically! That's the key word that I landed on as we were building our organization.

It's funny how many schools will talk about excellence. Okay, well, how do you know? Because with accreditation, it gets confusing because accreditation is the meeting of standards. Predetermined standards that get you in the game, but if you confuse accreditation with winning the prize of excellence, that’s a problem.

That's like giving everybody a trophy. When everybody showed up for the World Cup, they didn't just go, “Hey, everybody gets a trophy.” You have to win. You’ve got to bring it. You have to compete.

And so part of this is acknowledging that we've got to compete. We have to figure this out. That's what we try to do in our work through School Growth: begin to help school leaders gain clarity on excellence.

Excellence isn't meeting standards. Excellence is setting standards. It's redefining what's possible.

So part of what we try to do is help each school’s leadership begin to embrace the idea that if you're going to say you're excellent, well, let's go! Let's really become excellent.

We typically use a lot of the methodology proposed in the book Good to Great. (Jim Collins)

Because the research that Collins’ team put into that material was significant.

We have seen a lot of change happening in education, but there are certain anchor points where things aren’t changing.

We help schools cast a vision and learn how to tell their story. That still works! That's a principle that you can anchor in.

The same is true with developing certain disciplines of leadership.

That's what was proposed in that material: there's a certain set of disciplines around people, around thinking, and around execution. If you practice those, you'll be able to reach a level of excellence that sets the standard.

And so that's what we try to do.

So, in other words, excellence is the result of habits, rather than goals.

Interesting.

That's where we sometimes have confusion. Everybody wants to talk about goals. Goals are great, but if you don't have the habits of excellence, you're never gonna get there.

That's what reinvention is:  It's acknowledging the habits, it's creating a personal vision, creating an organizational vision, and then it’s having the authentic commitment to get there.

I love this. Absolutely love this. Thank you, Scott.

I'd love to talk about enrollment for a moment. One of the things that you say is that it's really not a marketing problem, and instead of it being a marketing problem, it's something else. Tell us what that something else is.

With marketing, of course, we're trying to feed the funnel with enrollment inquiries. But enrollment growth is also trying to become really attractive to a target market of families. Who is that? Who are the right families and students that would be a great fit for our school?

And then how do we become irresistible to them—to those decision-makers? Sometimes it's the parents, sometimes it's the kids. Depends on the target market, right? In the K-12 space (it's a different approach for higher ed or from other learning organizations with which we work) particularly, you have to figure out how to become a place where they trust us, and they're willing to be our ambassadors.

Anchor in those proven principles.

This is the idea that Ken Blanchard proposed many, many years ago in his book called Raving Fans. If you can have people who are so excited about what you do that they're willing to go and tell the story, then you don't have to bribe them with other things. If you're that good, then you're excellent. They're going to go tell the story. They're going to, because how could they not?

You're changing lives. You're giving them something they can believe in.

That's where authenticity comes into play. You can't just put some stuff up on a website that’s not true. As we would say in the southeastern United States, “that's putting lipstick on a pig.” We're dressing something up, but it is what it is no matter how attractive you talk about it.

We still have these embedded points of conflict, embedded gaps in delivery, that don’t line up. Some marketing person came up with it, but it’s not even true. Our own people don't believe it. That's where you have a tension: sometimes we go out and market things that our teachers, our staff, are not committed to.

So one of the things that we teach in our approach to school leadership is that we have to do such a great job on delivery that people want to go tell the story. Everybody in the building, every adult in the building, has to understand their primary responsibility is retention. It's keeping our families, our students here.

My wife, Tammy, always teaches me that the biggest thing that you have to understand is that raving fans are the cheapest, most effective marketing strategy.

There is nothing that beats that marketing. I don't care what you do with social media or postcards or the website. Nothing beats excited families who want to go tell the story in their networks. Part of the problem in schools is we sometimes have people on the team who fail to understand that we're running a business—an education business.

You may have educators who will say, “I don't have customers. I'm a teacher.”

Well, no, actually, that's not true. Whether you're running a government-funded school or however you're funded, we all have customers—families who have choices. And most schools are working in an economic environment where families have even more choices than they've ever had before. In many parts of the world, the barriers to entry to start up a new school are as low as they've ever been.

That's hard if you don't like to compete. If you like to have a dominant place in the market, a monopoly, that's bad news for you because you can get complacent when you've got a monopoly. You begin to build some fallacies or confirmation bias into the culture.

“We are so amazing. I just can't believe that all families don't want to just line up here to enroll.”

Being able to be authentic is wise—to understand what's really happening and then to provide ways to listen, to actually listen to our families. I don't care what kind of school you're running, you're not perfect. You could think you got straight A’s, but there are some people that would say, no, you actually have a C in this area, or you actually have an...You have an F. I mean, you're failing.

Possibly.

The problem is you're not willing to face the brutal facts.

Sometimes leaders need someone from the outside to come in and say, “Hey, I know that's what you're saying, but I can tell you that's not true. You're actually delivering some very weak areas here or there. This is where you're failing, and you’ve got to figure this out because you're saying one thing and doing another, and that causes gaps in integrity.”

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in some of the conversations that you've had with school leaders. Scott, I'd love to explore the difference between short-term fixes and long-term solutions. And if you're talking to a leader in a school, maybe the head of school or a principal, and they're saying something like, you know, our admissions numbers are down. 

Can you tell that they're looking for some kind of a quick fix? How do you get that balance right between a quick fix and a long-term solution?

Typically, you're looking at your data, and one of the things that we will want to do is look at the school’s historical timeline. With a specific spreadsheet, we can review the data that shows major decisions and milestones that have happened over the past 10 or 15 years. The data reveals enrollment patterns, net revenue patterns, and leadership consistency patterns. If I have that data, I can fairly accurately tell you what's true.

Some situations show growth, but I can overlay this with your demographic data from your area. Sometimes it shows growth by default. How could you not grow? You're in an area where you're growing because of what's happening externally, not because of internal excellence.

Schools in Dubai, actually. A lot of schools here are growing. A lot of schools are opening out here because there's a huge influx of people, especially from Europe, who are choosing to come and move here, and there are no public schools to send your children to. So any family that moves here, they have to put their children into private schools.

So there are schools that are opening out here to fulfill that need. Absolutely.

What we have seen is that those environments can cultivate complacency. Then we start to confuse excellence with mediocrity, because we get comfortable. There's no competitive pressure.

That's the advantage of capitalism: you don't have a bureaucratic monopoly. That's the unfortunate part in certain parts of the United States, where there's a commitment to a bureaucratic system that is having a very hard time competing in an innovation economy. It has nothing to do with politics or anything else.

It's just the realities of the organizational structures and the politics around it—it’s more about economies and politics.

But there are some schools that grow because of the local economy in which they’re located. If you're trying to grow a school, say in Nashville, Tennessee, you almost can't miss because the city is growing so fast. Housing values are up, and so many families are moving into the area.

If you're leading a K-12 school and you can't grow a school in Nashville, you probably ought to change careers. If you're over in Memphis, just 3 hours west, it’s a completely different demographic and story.

If you can grow a school in Memphis, then you're pretty good because you have to figure out a way to compete and build a culture. You're fighting against some of the demographic trends.

We have what we call tapestry schools, Simon. A tapestry school is one that, on the outside, looks beautiful. It’s like the front side of a tapestry as a work of art.

But if you flip it over, what do you see? It’s knots and threads and chaos. That's what happens to a lot of schools: on the outside, they look amazing, but if you flip them over, they're quite a disaster, with all kinds of conflict and chaos and dysfunction going on.

Sometimes they don't even like each other, much less know how to resolve conflict.

That’s the hard part. That's the really hard part in education: schools are actually designed for conflict.

Think about it: If you were a farmer and you wanted to raise conflict as a crop, you would naturally start a school because schools plant all these families with their features and faults—they've been through divorce and various levels of trauma and experiences. 

Then you're going to put them all together? Well, those features and flaws don't just go away. They actually get magnified because now they're combined.

And then we double down by expecting them to grow. Get outside your comfort zone, start to challenge your thinking, start to challenge your mental models.

Of course you're going to have conflict. That's not even a question.

Kumbaya schools don't exist. There are no oasis schools where you escape from all the ills of life.

Schools are petri dishes of society. They are the places where you put things together, you try things, you experiment. 

Where we see schools that really are reaching a level of excellence is when they embrace that. They're not running from conflict. They understand this is part of the journey. And they're using it—they're actually turning the conflict into educational experiences. They're leveraging those moments to learn and to grow, to ask better questions, and they're reinventing themselves, constantly. They're constantly finding out: how do we adapt to meet the needs of our families?

They're really willing to have humility. That's a key element that I think is going to be important for schools going forward: having humility and wisdom.

Because here are the facts. As a leader of educators, I don't care how smart you are, Simon, or what you know. I now have plenty of resources of knowledge—more knowledge than you could even imagine, and you can't even keep up because of the pace at which knowledge is being created.

However, what stays stable and in high demand? Wisdom! The ability to connect the dots, the ability to resolve conflict, the ability to negotiate, to sustain relationships even in debate.

Wisdom is actually the biggest element of demand in education.

And that's hard because so many educators have created their own personal value proposition based on their knowledge. That's going to  be hard to sustain in this new economy.

Big shift, isn't it?

It's a big shift.

And then if anyone's been listening to this and they wanted to get hold of you, what's the best way they should do that?

Schoolgrowth.com is our website and we work with schools around the world. Most of our members right now are in North America, but we have expanded a lot of our work in South America and Europe and other places, providing some encouragement and providing better tools.

We partner with regional people like yourself in some of these areas where there's some local expertise to figure out how to we put all this together. How do we reinvent our story and authentically our culture?

That's the biggest value-add that we bring through School Growth is helping to redefine how we could actually love and lead each other more effectively.

That's the name of our book on Amazon.com: Love’em and Lead’em.

The calling of school leadership is to love and lead educators. Educators can be different. Educators can be difficult. Educators can be dynamic. And effective school leadership is always learning how to lead adult educators.

That’s far more about andragogy than pedagogy. That's our calling!

Send us an email and sign up for the Weekly Encouragement Educators email. 

We would love to be a part of your journey.