What People Actually Use When Trying to Turn Around a Struggling School
I picked up Leverage Leadership A Practical Guide To Building Exceptional Schools because the district was asking me to mentor a handful of new principals who kept running into the same walls. The book is exactly what it sounds like — a procedural manual for school leadership built from the practices observed in high-performing charter networks, mostly KIPP and Uncommon Schools. It reads less like philosophy and more like an operations checklist. The biggest mistake I see people make is treating the protocols as suggestions they can adapt around. The whole system is designed so that if you skip one step, the next step collapses. Take the daily data tracking protocol. You can try to wing it with a shared spreadsheet. It works for two weeks. Then it breaks because nobody updated the math column and the intervention block the next day has no actionable data to work from. The book is explicit about this — you have to run the routine exactly as written before you modify anything. Here is the part most summaries leave out. The book is not actually about leadership development. It is about behavioral compliance in a high-stakes environment where teacher turnover is high and institutional memory is low. That is why every protocol is written in a way that a new hire can execute it on day three without needing a mentor. The trade-off is that it feels mechanical. It is supposed to. The authors acknowledge this directly in the introduction.
The Core Protocols and How They Stack Up
There are roughly 40 core protocols organized into categories: opening strong, managing culture, teaching to excellence, and optimizing operations. The ones that consistently matter most in practice are the daily schedule audit, the positive framing language bank, the error correction procedure, and the Friday afternoon data review. Everything else is support structure. The daily schedule audit takes about twelve minutes. You walk the building during transition periods and log off-task behavior by location and grade level. This is not theoretical. In my experience, doing this for three weeks straight reveals exactly where your instructional time is leaking. Usually it is homeroom transitions in middle grades and the area outside the cafeteria in elementary. You fix one leak at a time. The book recommends prioritizing by frequency and impact on learning time. The language bank is the most polarizing section. It gives principals and teachers scripted phrases for redirection, praise, and instruction. The scripts sound stiff at first. They work because consistency matters more than style when you are managing behavioral expectations across multiple classrooms. I ran into a specific problem where a veteran teacher refused to use the positive framing scripts because she said her students would see right through it. Her class climate scores dropped the rest of the quarter. I had her co-teach with a new teacher who used the scripts for two weeks, then we compared student engagement data. The new teacher's class had 34 percent more on-task behavior during direct instruction. The veteran teacher adopted a modified version of the scripts after that. Nothing else convinced her.
The Protocol Sequence That Actually Moves the Needle
People try to implement everything at once. That is the fastest way to get abandonment by week four. Run them in this order: First, master the schedule and the daily walkthrough. Two weeks minimum. This establishes baseline visibility. Second, introduce the error correction and academic language protocols in your own classroom or with one volunteer teacher. You need to experience the friction before asking staff to adopt it.
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Third, roll out the data review routine. This depends on the first two working. If teachers are not using consistent language and schedules are still chaotic, the data will be noisy and useless. Fourth, layer in the parent communication templates and the recruitment/onboarding scripts. These are later-stage optimizations that only matter once the instructional core is stable.
Where the Book Is Wrong or Outdated
The original edition predates pandemic-era learning recovery by several years. Some of the baseline assumptions about student behavior and family engagement do not map cleanly onto post-2020 classrooms. I have seen principals apply the attendance protocol literally and alienate families who were dealing with health-related absences that the template does not account for. The workaround is to keep the frequency and accountability but add a human check-in layer before any escalation call goes out. Another limitation: the book assumes a certain level of administrative control over staffing and scheduling. If you are in a district where the union contract locks your schedule modifications or where hiring requires a ten-week procurement cycle, several of the operational protocols become theoretical. You can still use the instructional language pieces and the data review structure. The hiring and scheduling shortcuts just don't exist for you. The book also understates the emotional labor required to sustain this model. The protocols create predictability, which reduces cognitive load for teachers. But they also create a monitoring environment that some staff find exhausting. Turnover in the second year is real. I have watched three principals leave schools where the Leverage framework was implemented rigidly without any adaptation for teacher autonomy. The framework itself was not the problem. The lack of psychological safety was.
What to Do If Your Situation Does Not Fit
If you are in a small rural district with twenty teachers and a single administrative team, you do not need forty protocols. Pick the schedule audit, the data review, and the academic language pieces. That is it. The rest will feel like bureaucracy. If you are leading a school with high teacher tenure and low compliance culture, the book will feel like it was written for a different profession. Start with the walkthroughs and data reviews. Build trust before you build structure. The sequence matters more than the content. The most useful thing about this book is not any single protocol. It is the insistence that leadership is a set of learnable behaviors, not a personality trait. That point alone is worth the cover price. The execution is where people either succeed or burn out.
