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Great on Their Behalf: Why School Boards Fail, How Yours Can Become Effective
School systems nationwide are struggling to excel as they lurch from crisis to crisis—teacher shortages, school shootings, high turnover rates, weak discipline systems, and more. These things can pull the focus of school boards away from why school systems to educate students.
airick journey crabill has a track record of helping school systems improve student literacy, numeracy, and career- and college-readiness rates while simultaneously strengthening the school’s financial and operational standing. Great on Their Behalf is your practical guide to igniting the transformation of your school board and enabling it to create the conditions for improving what students know and are able to do.
Step by step, the exercises in this book inspire board members to adopt a student-outcomes-focused mindset as they reevaluate their impact on those they serve. It challenges them to explore effective ways to focus on what students need. Then, it provides the necessary knowledge and skills for school boards to empower their students for success.
airick journey crabill has a track record of helping school systems improve student literacy, numeracy, and career- and college-readiness rates while simultaneously strengthening the school’s financial and operational standing. Great on Their Behalf is your practical guide to igniting the transformation of your school board and enabling it to create the conditions for improving what students know and are able to do.
Step by step, the exercises in this book inspire board members to adopt a student-outcomes-focused mindset as they reevaluate their impact on those they serve. It challenges them to explore effective ways to focus on what students need. Then, it provides the necessary knowledge and skills for school boards to empower their students for success.
- GenresEducationNonfiction
253 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 28, 2023
25 people are currently reading
43 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 18, 2025
I serve on my local public school board. Great on Their Behalf is a game changer and is a must read for school board members (and superintendents, to be honest). The author is an experienced school board leader, as board chair of Kansas City Public Schools, and has deep experience turning around failing schools.
Crabill has a firm bottom line. Serving on a school board requires placing students before adults. Period! Student outcomes are your primary responsibility and should be the focus of most of your meetings and work as a board. Unfortunately, that is not always or even often the case.
Crabill details how and why school boards fail students. And he offers ways that board members can move from failing to genuinely meeting the needs of the students in their schools.
Early in the book, Crabill recounts the story of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, the Hungarian physician who is credited with developing antiseptic procedures we now take for granted. Before Semmelweis, mothers often died after childbirth because they contracted puerperal fever. Semmelweis reasoned that it was doctors themselves who were infecting the women by going from dissecting a cadaver to delivering a baby — without washing their hands. Doctors refused to pay attention to his ideas because it required them to change their practice. They called him insane. Semmelweis had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital by his colleagues, where he was beaten by guards and died of gangrene from wounds he suffered at their hands. But Semmelweis came to be known as "the savior of mothers."
Grabill takes the example of Semmelweis and addresses school board members in no uncertain terms. "In school systems where the tendency is to stick with how things have always been done, someone needs to be Semmelweis — someone needs to take that first important step in a new, more effective direction that can create better outcomes for students. You can be that someone, but only if you are first willing to confront your behaviors that may have made it harder for students to be successful. Definitively, if you are unwilling or unable to do so, you are not the leader our students deserve or require."
Grabill makes it eminently clear that our students pay for our behaviors. And he offers guidance as to how we can be more effective as school board members, driving change for the betterment of our students.
He begins by describing the three major ways that school boards fail: knowledge-based failures, skill-based failures, and mindset-based failures. The rest of the book explains how to overcome those failures by creating a focus mindset, clarifying priorities, monitoring progress, aligning resources, and communicating results. He describes how and why to involve the community more actively in their schools, how to hire and evaluate your superintendent, and how to evaluate yourself as a board.
The book is both practical and inspirational. There are lots and lots of suggestions for things you can do to be more effective ... like evaluating your agenda for the percentage of time devoted to student outcomes vs. everything else or routinely hosting well-advertised listening sessions because "community members should never have to feel satisfied with the unsatisfying one-way communication opportunity that is the 'public comments' section of most school board meetings."
Reading Great on Their Behalf has given me a wealth of ideas for how I might be a better board member, and I'm grateful for that.
Crabill has a firm bottom line. Serving on a school board requires placing students before adults. Period! Student outcomes are your primary responsibility and should be the focus of most of your meetings and work as a board. Unfortunately, that is not always or even often the case.
Crabill details how and why school boards fail students. And he offers ways that board members can move from failing to genuinely meeting the needs of the students in their schools.
Early in the book, Crabill recounts the story of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, the Hungarian physician who is credited with developing antiseptic procedures we now take for granted. Before Semmelweis, mothers often died after childbirth because they contracted puerperal fever. Semmelweis reasoned that it was doctors themselves who were infecting the women by going from dissecting a cadaver to delivering a baby — without washing their hands. Doctors refused to pay attention to his ideas because it required them to change their practice. They called him insane. Semmelweis had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital by his colleagues, where he was beaten by guards and died of gangrene from wounds he suffered at their hands. But Semmelweis came to be known as "the savior of mothers."
Grabill takes the example of Semmelweis and addresses school board members in no uncertain terms. "In school systems where the tendency is to stick with how things have always been done, someone needs to be Semmelweis — someone needs to take that first important step in a new, more effective direction that can create better outcomes for students. You can be that someone, but only if you are first willing to confront your behaviors that may have made it harder for students to be successful. Definitively, if you are unwilling or unable to do so, you are not the leader our students deserve or require."
Grabill makes it eminently clear that our students pay for our behaviors. And he offers guidance as to how we can be more effective as school board members, driving change for the betterment of our students.
He begins by describing the three major ways that school boards fail: knowledge-based failures, skill-based failures, and mindset-based failures. The rest of the book explains how to overcome those failures by creating a focus mindset, clarifying priorities, monitoring progress, aligning resources, and communicating results. He describes how and why to involve the community more actively in their schools, how to hire and evaluate your superintendent, and how to evaluate yourself as a board.
The book is both practical and inspirational. There are lots and lots of suggestions for things you can do to be more effective ... like evaluating your agenda for the percentage of time devoted to student outcomes vs. everything else or routinely hosting well-advertised listening sessions because "community members should never have to feel satisfied with the unsatisfying one-way communication opportunity that is the 'public comments' section of most school board meetings."
Reading Great on Their Behalf has given me a wealth of ideas for how I might be a better board member, and I'm grateful for that.
April 11, 2023
When it comes to serving on school boards, there are school board members across the country serving with a good heart and good intentions. That is not enough. Children and families are counting on you to get it right. They don’t have time to wait on anything (especially adult agendas, yours and others) getting in the way of good policy focusing intently on achieving student outcomes. This book will show you clearly how to focus on things that really matter for students and their futures. The resources and how to’s provided in the book and on the website are helpful and specific. If you are serious about changing the world for children in your community through a great education, this is the way!
March 30, 2023
The Bible of School Board Effectiveness
AJ Crabill has set the stage for how school boards must change the way they govern to improve student outcomes. This book gives Board Members the roadmap to change their adult behaviors necessary to focus on what students know and are able to do! Thank you AJ for all your hard work. Dr. Marcia McMahon, Texas and North Dakota
AJ Crabill has set the stage for how school boards must change the way they govern to improve student outcomes. This book gives Board Members the roadmap to change their adult behaviors necessary to focus on what students know and are able to do! Thank you AJ for all your hard work. Dr. Marcia McMahon, Texas and North Dakota
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews