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 timeframe (e.g., “80% of students reading at grade level by 2028”)
- The board can actually monitor progress on it quarterly or annually 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:
- 3–7 true student outcome goals: what students will know and be able to do by specific dates
- Board guardrails: community values and non-negotiables the superintendent must operate within (this is where “increase community engagement” often belongs, reframed as a requirement)
- Operational priorities: things the superintendent should track internally but that don’t belong on the board’s monitoring calendar
What the board should commit to
After cutting, the board should be able to say: “These are our 5 student outcome goals, and we monitor progress on each of them at least once per year on our public agenda.” If a board can’t make that statement honestly, it doesn’t have goals. It has a document.