Yes, immediately. A board with 47 goals has no priorities. It has a wish list.
Here’s why this matters: a board that cannot monitor all its goals won’t monitor any of them consistently. Goals that aren’t monitored are aspirations, not commitments. The community is owed commitments.
What makes a goal worth keeping
An outcomes-focused board goal must meet all of these criteria:
- It measures what students know or can do, not what adults are doing for students
- It is specific enough that two different people could look at the same data and agree whether the goal is being met
- It has a measurable target with a specific month and year (e.g., “80% of students reading at grade level by June 2028”)
- Your board can receive a progress report on it at least four times per year without heroic data collection
The “inputs vs. outcomes” test
Go through your 47 goals and ask for each one: is this a student outcome goal, or is it describing what adults will do? Common goals that fail this test:
- ”Hire a Director of Equity” (input, not outcome)
- ”Implement a new literacy curriculum” (output, not outcome)
- ”Increase community engagement” (adult activity, not student outcome)
- ”Improve teacher retention” (adult outcome, not student outcome; important, but not a board goal)
How to cut without creating conflict
Don’t repeal goals. Reframe them. Most of those 47 items reflect real things the community cares about. The task isn’t to abandon them; it’s to reorganize them into three buckets:
- 1–5 true student outcome goals: what students will know and be able to do by a specific month and year — this is the only category that belongs on your board’s monitoring calendar. Aim for one to three; never exceed five.
- Board guardrails: community values and non-negotiables the superintendent must operate within (here “increase community engagement” often belongs, reframed as a constraint on how the superintendent operates)
- Superintendent work: things the superintendent should track and execute internally but that don’t belong in board policy at all
What your board should commit to
After cutting, your board should be able to say: “These are our student outcome goals, and we receive a progress report on each of them at least four times per year on our public agenda.” If your board can’t make that statement honestly, it doesn’t have goals. It has a document.
Steps to get there
- Print the list and sort it. Put every goal into one of three columns: student outcome, adult activity, or community value. Work fast — your gut reaction is usually right. Anything that can be accomplished without students improving goes in the adult activity column.
- Cut everything that isn’t a student outcome. Adult activity goals move to the superintendent’s work plan. Community values get reframed as guardrails. Neither category belongs in your goal list.
- Consolidate what remains. If you still have more than five student outcome goals after step two, look for overlap. Multiple goals often measure different facets of the same underlying priority and can be combined without losing substance.
- Test each survivor. For every goal that made it through, confirm you have baseline data today and a realistic path to report progress at least four times per year. If you can’t meet that bar, cut or defer until the data exists.
- Set a monitoring schedule before you adopt. Don’t adopt goals without scheduling the first four progress reports. If you can’t fit them into your board calendar, you have too many goals — cut more.