Neither Side Was Lying. Nobody Had Checked.
In “The State of Head Turnover,” published by NAIS this past March, heads of school and board chairs were asked the same question, separately: whether trustees were giving the head full support. The two groups answered differently. Chairs said yes at a much higher rate than heads did.
Neither side was lying. That is what misalignment actually looks like up close. Not a fight, not a single bad meeting, but two people describing the same relationship honestly and arriving at two different answers, because nobody has checked in on it in a while.
The topline turnover number in that same report is almost reassuring: departures have eased since they peaked at over 13 percent of schools in 2018, settling closer to 10 percent last year. But sit with the numbers underneath that one, and the reassurance thins out. Roughly one in five heads hired in the last few years is already gone, most of them sooner than anyone planned. And 44 percent of heads said they had seriously considered leaving in just the past year, not because of a scandal, but because of accumulated stress.
October is an easy month to read this kind of data and nod along without acting on it. The fall rhythm is still mostly intact, the first parent complaints of real substance haven’t landed yet, budget season is still a few months out, and most of the friction a school year eventually produces hasn’t surfaced. That is exactly why this is worth raising now rather than later. The gaps NAIS is describing do not appear in October. They compound quietly from October to March, and by the time a board or a head notices them, the question is no longer “are we aligned” but “can this be repaired.”
NAIS’s own researchers point to a few things behind the numbers: hiring language that sounds aligned but turns out vague once the job actually starts, priorities that quietly drift apart even between a head and a board that genuinely like each other, and trustees who believe they are giving full support more often than heads feel it. None of that is one person making one bad decision. It is a series of small gaps, left unchecked long enough to become a pattern.
That is the part the data cannot capture, because it is not a policy failure. Most boards want their head to succeed. Most heads want to meet their board well. What erodes over time is smaller than conflict: a goal nobody revisited after the first year, a hard season nobody checked in about, an assumption on one side that was never actually confirmed on the other.
I coach heads of school, and the chairs who sit across from them, because I spent thirty years in schools watching how often that gap opens quietly, long before anyone names it out loud.
If you are a head of school, or you chair a board that has one, the question worth sitting with this month is not “are we aligned.” Almost everyone believes they are. It is: when did we last check, out loud, together, and not assume the silence meant yes.
