When the Superintendent Becomes the Chief Advocate, Everything Shifts
About this episode
Dr. Michael J. Barnes discusses the transformative role of superintendents as chief advocates for children in education.
The superintendent isn't a budget manager, they're the chief advocate for all children. Dr. Michael J. Barnes rebuilt Mayfield City Schools around this principle, and the results speak for themselves. The superintendent is the chief advocate for all children in their community. Nobody else can say that, not the mayor, not the school board, not the superintendent of the next district over. But somewhere along the way, superintendents drifted from the instructional chair into operations and politics. Dr. Michael J. Barnes reversed that drift entirely. At Mayfield City Schools (Ohio), Barnes built a four-track personalized learning model that blew up the time/learning equation. Traditional, Cross-Curricular, Self-Paced, and The Option. When students got agency over their learning design, attendance skyrocketed, not because of better discipline policies, but because students were actually designing their own learning. Time stopped being the constant. Learning became it. In this conversation with Dr. Conner, Barnes walks the AC-Stage reframe: what does instructional leadership look like when the industrial model is obsolete? What's the role of the superintendent in an Innovation Core…
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