Coherence in Times of Constraint
Alex Maegdlin | May 1, 2026
Recently, we informally polled the Partners at Educators Collaborative about what school leaders are more worried about today than they were five years ago.
A clear theme emerged: enrollment, school size, and financial viability.
The answers included:
“Admissions and retention”
“Enrollment and staying open”
“Less clarity of vision and more worry about keeping parents ‘happy’—likely linked to enrollment concerns”
“Enrollment”
“Faculty demands, burnout, retention, turnover”
“Admissions and retention + development”
“Recruiting high-quality faculty and attrition”
“Schools are more worried about enrollment—especially smaller schools. The margins are razor thin.”
“Can they continue to exist? What’s the ‘Plan B’?”
“Survival—enrollment and faculty retention”
That was Monday.
On Tuesday, the team at Ian Symmonds & Associates published a thoughtful piece pointing to a deeper trend: this isn’t just an execution problem—it’s structural.
That distinction matters. It reflects what I’ve seen firsthand.
Last summer, I received news that is always hard to hear. The school where I began my career in independent schools would not reopen for the 2025–26 school year. It wasn’t a shock, exactly, but rather the culmination of a long, quiet decline.
In the end, it came down to a familiar moment: when the dollars simply weren’t there.
When I worked there, enrollment was already a challenge. We talked about telling the story better—improving the website, sharpening the value proposition. Important work, and necessary. But even then, there were deeper forces at play.
The school was small, all-girls, faith-based, and located in a rural area whose population could not economically support a robust day student population. It did not have a hefty endowment to draw upon. It was a deeply special place and its addressable market had dried up.
As an educator, my heart hurt seeing former students share memories and grief. As a professional, it raised harder questions: How does this happen? How can it be avoided? Can it be avoided? What questions should be asked—and when?
There are no easy answers.
In many regions, demographic trends are shrinking the pool of students while the number of available seats remains steady or grows. At the same time, rising costs continue to outpace tuition increases. These pressures fall most heavily on small, tuition-dependent schools.
Meanwhile, the landscape itself is shifting. Educational options are diversifying. (Look at the rise of microschools.) Trust in traditional institutions is declining. Though not directly in the trust crosshares yet, schools are not immune. This combination makes independent school value proposition and accompanying price tag that much harder to justify to parents.
And yet, rather than an acknowledgement of these seismic shifts, what I often hear is a search for the right enrollment leader or the right Head of School, as if the right individual can resolve what may be a fundamentally structural challenge.
This is not to diminish the critical, complex work of enrollment and school leadership. But it is to question the weight we place on those roles when the underlying conditions may not support the outcome we hope for.
Sometimes, the issue is missing data. School leadership simply does not see the looming cliff until upon it. A 2024 Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia study found that colleges that ultimately closed often showed patterns of incomplete financial data, particularly around liquidity, leverage, and operational performance.
But in my experience, having the data is not the hardest part. Believing it—and acting on it—is.
And that is increasingly the work of Boards.
Good schools close.
Questionable schools continue to operate.
Many continue to survive but not thrive.
So what does courageous leadership look like at this moment?
I don’t pretend to have the answers. And there are certainly smarter minds than mine tending to these questions. But, I do see some common threads in schools that are positioning themselves to navigate what’s ahead:
- Strong, trusting, strategically aligned relationships between Heads and Boards, supported by structures that surface and address misalignment early. Too many school communities are suffering the fallout of rocky Board-Head dynamics.
- Access to accurate, credible enrollment and financial data, and the discipline to actually use it in decision-making. I have found that independent schools are lovers of anecdotes. Story is powerful, but the right data is essential to knowing to whom to tell the story and if it’s resonating.
- A forward-looking posture that acknowledges shifting market realities and creates the space and runway to respond. Reactivity is rampant as schools are trying to do more with less; the skill to get beyond this school year to see directionally where one might go is essential to creating long-term vitality.
- A faculty culture that tends to the essential relationship between families and the school, building trust, connection, and a genuine sense of belonging.
None of these are simple. None are quick fixes. But together, they point to something deeper than strategy alone. They point to coherence.
And in a moment like this, coherence may be one of the most important forms of leadership we have.
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