Returns

I wrote the article that precedes this one on my blog almost exactly a year ago. From 2017 until August of 2025, I published a new piece or two each month as well as a monthly newsletter, some 130 little essays and 96 newsletters. I'm proud of some of them and reprise them occasionally on LinkedIn, or pass them along to consulting clients and friends when they seem like they might be useful. Others, particularly those that chronicle the fever dream of the pandemic--that strange blend of terror and tedium--I routinely consider dumping over a cliff, a la Alice's Restaurant, or quarantining (haha! whoop!) on a subpage on the awful chance they might be relevant again someday. I've done neither; they remain suffused with inertia.

My absence from the scene is not an interesting story. I was not abducted by aliens, nor did I join and deprogram from a cult. Gods be praised, I did not endure a horrible health condition or personal calamity. I just got busy. I have 4 streams of independent school projects: Knuckleball Consulting (mostly searches), The Gowan Group (mostly strategic planning and enrollment strategy), the Association of Independent Michigan Schools where I am the Executive Director, and Building Solutions where I do a handful of facilities operations reviews a year, because that was one of the arcane things I learned a lot about as a Head. I did more projects in each of those streams and traveled more than in any other year, and indeed, the projects competed for my time in zero sum ways that felt every bit like headship.

In any case, something had to give, and reluctantly the blog took the hit. I don't kid myself to think the world lost an important voice last year, but I do know that I lost an important reflection routine and opportunity to keep practicing as a writer. As a teacher of writing, I was convinced that the act of making thoughts material through writing generates thinking that one could never achieve by silently mulling or conversing, and that testing and organizing those thoughts and preparing them for a specific audience is the profoundest kind of learning that one can achieve. Everything in my experience since I left the classroom 18 years ago has only made me more sure of that conviction. Last year, I wrote plenty for my consulting and association work--reports, updates, announcements, etc.--but those are all entirely practical documents circumscribed by a client contract and a narrow audience. I missed the opportunities the blog provided to reflect on ideas and emerging trends, to walk around in my thoughts and to ready them for independent school peers.

So, I'm returning to the routine of writing and will do my best to have something engaging to put in front of you. Much has happened this year: educators finally coming to see that much of the edtech industry has no clothes; independent school leaders leveraging our freedom from federal extortion (and some being bullied into obeying in advance); some evidence that schools are finally getting serious about faculty compensation and finding other successful strategies for retaining faculty; a gloriously stubborn refusal among educators to take the many paths of equivocation the AI industry has invited us to travel. All of these topics and more, as the intro line goes for 60 Minutes (RIP), I look forward to unpacking, examining, and re-packaging in the coming months.