What Boards Without Adopted Goals Should Be Doing Right Now — The October Through January Path
September 28, 2027
Nearly 40 percent of school boards have not adopted annual goals by October 1.
That statistic comes from the NSBA 2023 governance survey, and it has remained consistent across every state-level survey I have reviewed. I have seen it in Texas, in Missouri, in Kansas, in the Carolinas. The number moves a few percentage points year to year, but the pattern stays the same: more than a third of boards enter October without clearly defined annual goals.
If your board is one of them, I want to say something you may not expect.
This is not a governance failure. It is a timing choice.
The boards that adopt goals in August and September are not better boards. They are boards that started their goal-setting process earlier — usually in the spring or early summer. They followed a different calendar. That is not the same as better governance.
What matters is not when you adopt your goals. What matters is that the goals you eventually adopt are grounded in real data, not in assumptions made in August before you had any information.
Here is the path I recommend for boards that are entering October without adopted goals: use October through December as a baseline-gathering quarter, draft goals in December and January, and formally adopt goals by the end of January.
That is what this piece is about.
The baseline quarter framework
The ESB framework calls this the baseline quarter. It is a three-month window — October, November, December — during which the board does not set targets. The board collects data. The board understands the current reality. The board builds the foundation that will make its January goals credible, measurable, and defensible.
Kansas City Public Schools used this framework when I worked with them. Their board entered the fall without adopted goals. Instead of rushing to adopt goals without data, they spent October through December tracking three metrics: third-grade reading proficiency, attendance rates, and on-time graduation. One data point per month. No targets. No public commitments. Just data collection.
By January, the board had four months of baseline data. They knew the trajectory for each metric. They knew whether each metric was stable, improving, or declining. And when they adopted their goals in January, every goal had a data reference point behind it. The board could say: “We are setting a target because we know where we are starting from.”
That is the difference between a goal that governs and a goal that decorates a board meeting document.
Phase one: baseline collection — October through December
Here is what a baseline quarter looks like in practice.
The board selects two to three metrics. Not ten. Not the full student outcome dashboard. The board picks the two or three metrics that represent the board’s highest priorities. If the board does not have a clear sense of its priorities yet, the board picks the metrics that matter most to student outcomes in the district — reading proficiency, math proficiency, attendance, graduation rate. Pick two or three and commit to tracking them.
The board tracks one data point per month for each metric. That means the board sees three data points for each metric by the end of December. Enough data to establish a trajectory but not so much data that the board drowns in it.
The board does not set targets during this phase. I cannot emphasize this enough. The temptation in October is to adopt goals quickly to demonstrate that the board is governing. That temptation produces goals that look good in a press release and fail in a data review. A goal adopted without baseline data is a guess. A goal adopted with baseline data is a commitment.
The board documents what it learns each month. Not in formal language. A one-page note per metric. What is the data point this month? How does it compare to last month? What questions does the data raise? The board president collects these notes and shares them with the full board. By December, the board has a baseline document that becomes the foundation for goal drafting.
What Wichita USD 259 teaches us about the wrong approach
Wichita USD 259 in Kansas shows the alternative path. Their board members told me their goal-adoption process had slipped from August to October in consecutive years. The slip was gradual — one month the first year, a few weeks the next. The board was not failing to adopt goals. The board was adopting goals late and adopting goals that were not connected to the data cycle.
The consequence was subtle at first. The board was adopting goals in October, but the data reviews were still running on the August calendar. The goals and the data were out of sync. The board was governing, but the governance was not connected to the information the board was receiving.
The lesson is this: adopting goals in October is not the problem. Adopting goals in October without adjusting the data calendar to match is the problem. The board that adopts goals in January but has been collecting data since October has a cleaner governance cycle than the board that adopts goals in October using data from last year.
Phase two: goal drafting — December through January
In December, the board president and the superintendent begin drafting goals. This is a collaborative process. The board president brings the board’s understanding of the baseline data and the board’s priorities. The superintendent brings the operational knowledge — what is realistic, what resources are available, what timelines are feasible.
The goal-drafting phase produces three to five goals. Not more. The board that adopts twelve goals has not adopted any goals. Three to five goals ensure the board can monitor every goal in every data review without running out of time.
Each goal must include a specific metric, a measurable target, and a timeline. A goal that says “improve reading” is not a goal. A goal that says “increase third-grade reading proficiency from 42 percent to 50 percent by May 2028” is a goal. The baseline data from October through December provides the starting point for the target.
The board president and superintendent present the draft goals to the full board at the December board meeting or a special January goal-setting session. The full board discusses and refines the goals. The board president facilitates the discussion. The superintendent provides input on feasibility and resources. The board reaches consensus on the final language.
Phase three: formal adoption — January
The board formally adopts the goals at the January board meeting. The adoption is a board vote. The vote is recorded in the minutes. The goals are published to the community.
After adoption, the board resets its governance calendar. The data review schedule moves from baseline collection to progress monitoring. The board establishes the target data points for each goal and the timeline for each data review. The board confirms the format for data reviews moving forward — the dashboard format, the comparison frame, the decision protocol.
The board that follows this path enters February with adopted goals, baseline data behind every goal, a reset governance calendar, and a clear data review protocol. That board is more prepared than the board that adopted goals in August without baseline data.
What not to do
Let me name four things I see boards do that make this path harder than it needs to be.
First, do not adopt goals without baseline data. I said it earlier. I will say it again. A goal without a starting point is not a goal. It is a wish. The board that adopts a goal in October because the board wants to show it has goals is making a decision that will haunt the board in every subsequent data review.
Second, do not skip the October, November, and December data reviews just because the board has not adopted goals yet. The data review is the board’s primary accountability mechanism. The board reviews data against the previous cycle’s goals — or, if the board has no previous goals, the board reviews data to understand the current reality. The data review does not pause because the board has not set targets. The OctReady piece I published last week covered the format and protocol for these reviews.
Third, do not let the goal-setting process run past January. The data shows that only 28 percent of boards that miss the October goal window go on to adopt goals before the following June. The risk is not the delay. The risk is that the delay becomes permanent. Setting a January deadline and committing to it publicly — with the community, with the superintendent, with the board itself — creates the accountability that keeps the process moving.
I mentioned earlier that 18 to 22 percent of boards that do not adopt goals by October hold a January goal-setting retreat. That is the cohort I want your board to join. The retreat does not need to be expensive or elaborate. A two-hour special meeting in January with the board, the superintendent, and a draft goal document produces more governance progress than three months of email discussion.
Fourth, do not assume that because the board has no adopted goals, the superintendent is running the district without governance direction. The opposite is usually true. The superintendent is running the district based on the district’s strategic plan, the previous governing cycle’s priorities, and the superintendent’s professional judgment. The board’s job is to provide clear governance direction so the superintendent does not have to guess what the board wants. That is different from saying the superintendent is unmoored.
The GPISD example
Grand Prairie ISD in Texas is a cautionary example of what this looks like at the extreme. A review of thirteen consecutive BoardBook meeting agendas found zero references to board-adopted goals. Not in the superintendent’s report. Not in the board discussion summaries. Not in the consent agenda. The board was meeting, voting, and publishing agendas. But the board’s governance was not anchored to any adopted outcome.
The board was not failing in a dramatic way. There was no scandal. There was no state intervention. There was just a board that had stopped governing toward specific outcomes. The governance cycle had become procedural. The meetings happened. The votes happened. But the connection between the board’s work and student outcomes had been lost.
That is the risk. Not a dramatic failure. A quiet drift from governance to procedure.
The path I am describing in this piece — the baseline quarter, the goal-drafting phase, the January adoption — is designed to prevent that drift. It is not about catching up. It is about building a governance cycle that starts from real data and produces real commitments.
The research that backs this approach
The University of Iowa published a study in 2022 that tracked boards that adopted goals by October 1 against boards that adopted goals later. The finding was striking: boards that adopted goals by October 1 were 2.3 times more likely to report measurable achievement gains.
That finding is not an argument that boards should rush to adopt goals by October 1. It is an argument that boards should have a clear goal-adoption timeline and a clear process for how they will get there. The boards that adopted goals by October 1 did not adopt them in August with no data. They started their process earlier — often in the spring or early summer — and built their goals methodically.
Your board can do the same thing starting now. The timeline is different. The method is the same.
The key is to stop looking at the calendar as a countdown to failure and start looking at it as an opportunity to build a better governance cycle.
Your free CTA: Reply to this email with the keyword BaselineNow and I will send you the Baseline Quarter Toolkit — the two-to-three metric selection template, the monthly data note template for each metric, the board-president-and-superintendent goal-drafting checklist, and the January goal-adoption meeting agenda. Use it to turn October through January into your board’s most productive governance quarter.
Your paid CTA: I offer a January Goal-Adoption Facilitation Session — a two-hour virtual session with your board president and superintendent to review your baseline data, draft three to five goals, and build the January adoption agenda. The session produces adopted goals and a reset governance calendar. Reply to this email for pricing and availability.
This is the third piece in the late-September fall operations transition arc. The September 21 piece, “The October Data Review Is Coming,” covered what every board needs to have ready for the October data review — including the brief bridge section on what to do if the board has not adopted new goals yet. The September 23 piece covered the superintendent partnership in the fall operating rhythm. This piece expands on the “what to do if no new goals” section from the September 21 piece, providing the full baseline quarter framework for boards that will adopt goals in January. The arc concludes September 30 with the board self-evaluation preparation piece. Subscribe at effectiveschoolboards.com.
Backlinks: This piece extends the goal-setting framework from the July 28 piece on fall goal-setting groundwork. The baseline quarter framework builds on the data-review protocol established in the September 21 piece (the OctReady piece) — the dashboard format, the comparison frame, and the decision protocol all apply once the board has adopted its January goals. The KCPS reference draws from ESB coaching engagements with urban districts during transition years. The GPISD reference illustrates the systemic risk of procedural governance without adopted outcomes. The January goal-setting retreat statistic (18-22% of late boards) comes from School Boards Association of the Carolinas data. The 2.3x achievement gain finding is from the University of Iowa 2022 study on board goal-adoption timing and measurable outcomes. The “28% adopt before June” statistic is from NASBE 2024 survey data on late-adopting boards.