Much of my career has been built in underserved communities, and in communities with enormous potential for students to grow and excel. What I found again and again in those places was not a lack of ability. It was a status quo that had quietly become the standard. Students didn’t always realize what they were capable of, not because they weren’t capable, but because the systems around them had never asked.
I have carried one belief into every system I have served, whether as a principal, a Chief of Schools, or an adjunct professor teaching at the college level: students are capable of learning and growing, all of them, without exception. That belief has a name I use often. I am a warm demander of equity and excellence. Warmth without high expectations becomes low expectations dressed up as kindness. High expectations without warmth becomes a standard no one feels supported enough to reach. Real growth requires both, held at the same time, for every single student.
What This Looked Like in Practice
When I worked with aspiring administrators at the college level, one of the clearest places this philosophy showed up was in how they wrote School Improvement Plans. It was important to me that these plans were data driven and focused on how every student would grow, not just some of them. I remember reading plans that stated a goal like “10 percent of students will meet proficiency.” On the surface, that sounds like a reasonable, measurable target. But sit with it a moment longer, and a harder question surfaces: what happens to the other 90 percent? A goal written that way inevitably suggests that most students were never really part of the plan at all. As a warm demander of equity and excellence, I expected every aspiring administrator to see the potential in every student, not a subset of them, and to write plans that reflected a genuine belief that all students could reach their personal best.
I have never asked staff to hold a standard I was not also willing to hold myself. As an administrator, I asked staff to have students write in both their reading and math journals, responding to prompts that grade level teams decided on together. For students to grow as writers, they needed real feedback, and I could not ask that of staff without doing it myself first. So, one weekend, I sat down and read through approximately 800 reading and math journal entries, writing feedback in every single one. What I found was that in many of those journals, the student had never actually responded to the prompt at all. I needed to see that for myself.
Seeing It for Myself
Unfortunately, students not demonstrating strong writing skills was not an isolated event. At another school I served, staff participated in a writing workshop and were expected to use what they learned to help students develop as writers. The plan was for staff to return within two weeks with samples of student work showing that growth. Instead, staff came back and told me that our students were simply not writers.
That sentence made me sad. Not because staff were wrong for being honest with me, but because it meant that somewhere along the way, people had stopped believing our students were capable of writing at all. It taught me something I have carried ever since: the importance of being a visible leader, someone who checks in and sees for myself what our students are actually capable of, rather than accepting a ceiling someone else has quietly decided on their behalf.
What I found, once I started checking in daily, is that our students were very capable. What they needed was for someone to identify their incremental growth, set goals with them so that every student and every teacher understood both the starting point and the target, and then hold the line that the target was reachable. In one instance, a parent told me he could not believe his son was capable of writing, let alone typing, a complete project like the one he had just brought home. That moment has stayed with me. It is why I believe so strongly that knowing students by name, strength, and need is what actually makes it possible to believe that all students are capable of learning. Belief without that knowledge is just a hope. Belief built on knowing a child is a plan.
Setting the Bar and Watching Students Meet It
That same conviction is what led me to declare, in one district, that all students would grow a minimum of 2.5 years academically in a single school year. More than 5,000 of them did.
That kind of growth does not happen by declaring it and walking away. After Beginning of Year assessments were administered, staff were expected to sit down with students, review the results together, and set goals with them directly, so that every lesson from that point forward served as a deliberate step toward the target they had agreed on. By the time Middle of Year assessments came around, in case after case, students had already met that 2.5 years of growth, months ahead of schedule. That result did not come from lowering the bar to something safer. It came from raising it, and then making sure every student had exactly what they needed to clear it.
Where It All Points
Being a warm demander has led students, again and again, to represent what I call a Portrait of a Graduate: young people who are competent, culturally aware, collaborators, communicators, critical thinkers, and change agents who are college and career ready.
None of those seven traits are things a student develops by accident, and none of them are things adults can demand without first offering warmth, support, and genuinely high expectations in return. A student does not become a critical thinker because someone told them to think critically. They become one because a teacher gave them real feedback, believed they could act on it, and held them to a standard that assumed they would rise to meet it.
Why I Hold This Standard
I did not arrive at this philosophy in the abstract. I arrived at it reading approximately 800 journal entries on a weekend, sitting with the disappointment of hearing “our students are not writers,” and watching a father’s disbelief turn into pride over his son’s work. I arrived at it by declaring a growth target that many people called unrealistic and then watching more than 5,000 students meet it early. Being a warm demander is not a slogan I keep on a wall. It is the standard I have asked of myself, of the administrators I have trained, of the teachers in every building I have led, and of every student I have ever had the privilege of serving. Every student is capable of learning and growing. I have built my entire career on making sure the systems around them actually believe that too.