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Your board can adopt goals over the superintendent's objection. The legal authority is yours. But doing so without the superintendent's buy-in produces goals that look good in a policy binder and accomplish nothing in the classroom. The board sets direction. The superintendent drives execution. When those two pull apart, students lose.

The confusion comes from conflating two separate authorities. Your board has governing authority over what outcomes the district should pursue. That is your role as the elected body accountable to the public. The superintendent has operational authority over how to achieve those outcomes. That is the scope of the executive role you hired to fill. Legally, you can vote to adopt any goal you choose. Practically, a goal the superintendent publicly opposes becomes a press release, not a plan. The board sets the destination. The superintendent builds the road. You can dictate the destination, but you cannot build the road for them, and you cannot make them build it if they believe the destination is wrong.

The most common mistake boards make here is treating goal-setting as a vote rather than a conversation. When the superintendent resists, the board either backs down entirely or overrides and declares victory. Both approaches fail. Backing down means the board has ceded its governing authority to the executive. Overriding without alignment means the board has exercised authority without responsibility. You have voted for something you cannot deliver, and the superintendent now has no incentive to make it work. The goal becomes a political gesture rather than an operational target.

What works is forcing the disagreement into the open. When your superintendent objects to a goal, the question is not whether they will support it. It is what would make it supportable. Often the objection is not the goal itself but the timeline, the metrics, or the resource assumptions underneath it. A superintendent who says "we cannot prioritize third-grade reading" might actually be saying "I cannot prioritize third-grade reading without cutting the arts program, and the board has not given me permission to do that." Untangling that distinction transforms a conflict into a calibration.

There is an honest complication worth naming: sometimes the superintendent is wrong. Not every resistance reflects legitimate operational concern. Sometimes it reflects institutional inertia, personal preference, or a competing priority the board has not explicitly ranked. In those cases, your board's role is to clarify the ranking, not to wait for the superintendent to volunteer it. The board's job is to make the trade-offs explicit and let the superintendent respond to them. If the superintendent continues to resist after you have clarified the priority and the resources, that is a different conversation about execution rather than goal-setting.

Here is what to do:

1. At your next one-on-one with the superintendent, ask directly: "What would you need from the board to make this goal achievable?" Do not ask whether they agree. Ask what would change their answer from no to yes.
2. If the answer involves trade-offs, bring those trade-offs to the full board in a work session. Name them explicitly: "To prioritize third-grade reading, we would need to reduce funding to [X]. Is that acceptable?" Let the board decide the ranking, not the superintendent by default.
3. Once the board has clarified its priorities and the trade-offs they entail, ask the superintendent to draft the interim goals that would operationalize the board's direction. The board calibrates. The superintendent drafts. This is the correct sequence.
4. If the superintendent still refuses to draft goals aligned to the board's direction after trade-offs have been made explicit, document that refusal and schedule a formal evaluation conversation. The board's authority over goals is not a suggestion, but exercising it without clarity about what blocks the superintendent's buy-in is governance by edict, not by design.
5. Plan for this to take more than one meeting. Goal alignment that has broken down over months will not repair in a single work session. Set a timeline for recalibration and monitor it like any other goal.

When your board does this work, something shifts. The superintendent stops treating goals as something the board imposes and starts treating them as something the board has earned through clear priority-setting. The board stops treating the superintendent's resistance as insubordination and starts treating it as a diagnostic signal. Something is in the way, and now you know where to look. The distance between your authority and their execution shrinks, not because either side has conceded, but because both sides now understand what the other needs to act. That is what makes goal-setting governance rather than politics.