The seeds of division are often planted long before they blossom. We sometimes forget that lesson when conflict sparks and takes on a life of its own. Our immediate reaction is one of exasperation: This is ridiculous! What are they thinking? We can’t let this happen!
Patrick Burke, the former principal of South Burlington High School in Vermont, took a different approach in 2015 when a movement began to simmer over the name of the school mascot, the “Rebels.” The movement was prompted by a Black student at the mostly white school who took issue with having to wear a Rebel uniform for his track meets, because he associated the mascot with the pro-slavery Confederacy, as did some of his Black classmates.
Burke took a deep breath. He listened. He researched. He questioned his own commitment to the Rebel name.
That was not easy. Burke, who retired at the end of this past school year, was the dean of students and the boys ice hockey coach before becoming South Burlington’s principal in 2001. To him—and to me, a 1981 graduate of the school—a Rebel was one of the original rebels, a Revolutionary War soldier who fought to gain our independence from Britain. Not, as he would come to find out, a Confederate soldier fighting to defend slavery.
While researching the history of the school’s mascot, Burke read old newspaper articles from the 1960s and ‘70s that a local newspaper reporter had dug up that showed pictures of South Burlington students carrying the Confederate flag during sporting events. Even the images in some of the old yearbooks were clearly Confederate Rebels.
“I was the biggest Rebel fan in the world for 15 years,” Burke recalls. “All of a sudden, I’m like, ‘Wow, maybe we need to do something different.’”
He now had to build a bridge from the past to the present and the future—and get community buy-in along the way.
That’s when “it got really ugly,” he remembers. The small city was roiled for nearly a year over the mascot debate, according to local reports. Several people were arrested. A resident filed a lawsuit. A recent graduate of the school pleaded guilty to painting racist graffiti on the school’s lacrosse field, targeting the Black student who was on the track team. A parent from the district was convicted of stalking that same student. “Kids were scared. Teachers were scared,” Burke said. Some adults even channeled their feelings about the name change into their decision about how to vote on the school district budget.
Some students and alumni carried a fierce, sentimental attachment to the “Rebel” mascot because of the sports they played or their friendships at South Burlington High School. That attachment led others to accuse them of being racist—an unjust charge in many cases.
Burke navigated his way through the conflict, listening to people on both sides of the argument even as he promoted the idea that a mascot should ultimately be a unifying force, not one that carves divisions. The school went through a process of vetting new names eventually landing on the “Wolves.” When my daughter graduated from South Burlington High School in 2021, she was a Wolf, not a Rebel. And as a former Rebel, I am OK with that.
Looking back, Burke—who is a veteran of four battles against cancer over the years and, at times, literally worked on resolving the conflict from a hospital room at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston—said in a video interview with me recently, “My wife asked me: ‘Do you think that was the hardest thing you did the whole time you were there?’ And I had to think about it and I think the answer is yes, that was the hardest.”
This project is part of a special report called Big Ideas in which school district leaders, Education Week reporters, and the EdWeek Research Center ask hard questions about K-12 education’s biggest challenges and offer insights based on their extensive expertise and coverage.
Learning how to navigate through conflict and division in school communities and build bridges to the future is now more complicated than ever. An unwillingness or inability to negotiate or compromise to achieve common ground, tightening budgets that create divisions over financial priorities, rising use of AI and worries about how it will shape K-12 education, emotionally charged concerns about technology overuse in schools hurting kids’ mental health, as well as debates about school vaccine requirements, immigration policy, and the teaching of history are piling up. Throw social media’s ability to amplify outrage on top of that, and you have a nightmare scenario heating up.
In that volatile environment, the stakes, at first, might seem low for high conflict—say, for example, a school mascot name change. “But, then, suddenly, they’re not low,” said Amy Edmondson, the Novartis professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School and the author of The Fearless Organization.
Fearless leadership, Edmondson emphasizes in her book, is about encouraging candor and curiosity—and modeling those traits. It’s an approach known as “psychological safety,” a term coined in the mid-20th century that Edmonson popularized by applying it to the workplace. The Harvard professor makes the point that psychological safety is not about being nice and avoiding conflict. Instead, psychological safety demands healthy, productive conflict.
“If you want to be great, if you want to be excellent as an institution, you’ve got to create environments where people are willing to take the interpersonal risks of candor,” Edmondson added in a video interview with me.
In her book, the Harvard professor tells a story, based on field research that she and others conducted in 23 neonatal intensive care units (NICU) years ago, about the dangers when colleagues eschew candor that still makes me shudder.
Tiny newborn twins born prematurely were moved to a NICU at a busy urban hospital, according to her account. A young nurse practitioner and a seasoned doctor were tending to the babies. In her training, the nurse practitioner had learned about a newly established practice recommending the use of a specific medicine to promote lung development as soon as possible for high-risk newborns. But the doctor had not ordered it. The nurse practitioner was about to remind the doctor. But she hesitated and said nothing because she had witnessed him publicly berate a nurse for questioning one of his orders. Given the nature of field research, Edmondson did not learn the outcome of that decision. But she emphasizes that the situation demonstrates how a status-oriented work culture can result in bad decisions—and, potentially, dangerous ones.
School district leaders and principals do not typically deal with issues of life and death, except in cases such as school shootings and natural disasters. But they do make decisions that can have long-term consequences for the lives of their students and employees, such as discipline suspensions or expulsions, promotions or firings, individualized education program modifications, or access to academic and mental health support services. And there are a good number of parallels between how leadership works in healthcare and how it plays out in K-12 education.
So concludes a journal article Edmondson co-authored in 2016 with a professor of education leadership in the Harvard Graduate School of Education and two other researchers. In “Understanding Psychological Safety in Health Care and Education Organizations: A Comparative Perspective,” they argue that education and healthcare both have rigid hierarchical organizational structures that are often reflexively deferential to status (i.e., doctor-nurse, superintendent-principal, principal-teacher). “This hierarchy, coupled with the intense accountability environment, can create a sense of vulnerability, even fear, limiting teachers’ motivation to speak up or share their needs for growth,” they write. That fear can lead to unnecessary conflict and division.
Inviting people to speak up is critical, adds Steven L. Johnson, who served as superintendent of two rural school districts in North Dakota and had to reorganize one in the last few years. Johnson, who writes about his experiences in our Big Ideas special report, explains that one of the lessons he learned in his 50-year career “is that successful reorganizations rarely happen because everyone suddenly agrees. They happen because enough people are willing to listen, ask difficult questions, examine the facts, and place the long-term interests of students above personal preferences.”
One of the best ways to begin to encourage candor and dismantle that hierarchy in school districts can start, for example, with a simple, regularly scheduled in-person conversation between the superintendent and the head of the local teachers’ union. Curiosity and candor in those get-togethers can build better relationships and pick away at the negative effects of an entrenched hierarchy. And that approach can be used with other key stakeholders in the school community.
The negative effects of a rigid chain of command cut both ways—from top to bottom and bottom to top. If a superintendent asks for feedback from staff (or the community, as in Johnson’s case) on a critical issue but then regularly responds defensively when the feedback isn’t what he or she wants to hear, that kills trust.
On the flip side, if some union leaders, teachers, or staff consistently take an oppositional and emotionally charged stance against management, that, too, can erode psychological safety. Leadership experts say this can also put the brakes on other, less vocal people speaking up. If those who struggle to speak up worry about getting blowback from oppositional colleagues for not towing the party line, groupthink pressure can crush their sense of psychological safety.
“Some people blurt out every single thought that passes through their heads, helpful or not,” Edmondson told me in a video interview. “And that’s actually not optimal. They, too, need and deserve our help and feedback” about how to play a role in helping create psychologically safe work cultures.
Nicki McCann, the superintendent of the Caldwell Parish school district in Louisiana, knows all too well how difficult and tricky it can be for a school district leader to balance competing perspectives when taking a strategic risk in the best interests of students, Education Week Assistant Editor Alyson Klein chronicles in an August 2025 Education Week magazine cover story. The story was one of the best examples about navigating potential conflict and division that Education Week has ever published. And it made me want to talk more with McCann about the experience.
According to Klein’s story, a once-segregated elementary school in McCann’s district was in a downward spiral of sputtering academic achievement and plummeting enrollment some years back. The other two elementaries in the district were straining to absorb that school’s students whose families were taking advantage of a state law allowing children at struggling schools to transfer to better-performing ones.
McCann’s plan to correct that problem was to propose breaking up the traditional K-5 grade structures of the three schools to create three districtwide elementaries for grades K-1, 2-3, and 4-5. To pull it off, Klein writes, McCann had to navigate parents’ unease about transportation and their children’s safety. There was also the issue of needing to confront the deep-seated feelings about race and class connected to parents’ and students’ attachments to their neighborhood schools in this politically conservative community. (President Donald Trump won the county in the 2024 election in a landslide.)
She would need to follow the advice of leadership experts like Edmondson and be willing to listen to perspectives she did not agree with and be open to adjusting her plan based on what she heard. She would also need to have the courage to stick to her vision, if she truly believed it would improve the academic and social lives of the children in her district.
In the end, McCann succeeded in transforming the district’s three elementary schools following a razor-thin 4-3 vote of approval for the plan from the school board on April 20, 2023.
I caught up with McCann via phone this summer when she was driving a group of kids to a church-sponsored youth event. What I quickly learned is that the road ahead for Caldwell Parish is not going to be easy, even three years after the vote. Academic performance concerns and budget struggles have recently emerged.
A year ago, McCann and the school district were riding high after the Louisiana state education department named Caldwell its most improved district in progressing students at all grade levels and subjects to “mastery” on state assessments.
This year, student achievement in the district dipped a bit, although it remains higher than before the “center schools” were put in place, according to McCann. The community rejected a new 1% sales tax that would have helped the school district address some serious budget challenges, and the costs of sustaining the district are rising.
“This is the hardest year of my [26-year] career,” said McCann, who was a teacher and principal in the district before becoming superintendent six years ago, which had been her dream job before she assumed the role.
That’s an important lesson for all educators to remember: Things are changing faster than ever—one day you’re up, and the next you’re down. An ambitious initiative succeeds, another one fails.
To stay positive and energized and keep the district on a path of progress when life is so uncertain, complex, and fast-changing, McCann echoes much of the advice given by Edmondson: listen, even to responses or perspectives you don’t want to hear; ask questions and encourage others to do the same; and try to help your school communities see that, ultimately, we are all in this together.
“I’ve always appreciated genuine feedback,” McCann says. “That’s how you find out [what people are thinking], by asking those tough questions and not getting defensive about criticism. You’ve got to develop some thick skin.”
Thick skin will be in high demand nationwide this school year as district leaders navigate an emerging division within school communities that pits advocates of dialing back the use of technology in schools in big ways against those who wholeheartedly embrace the value of technology in education.
In this debate, it’s tempting to embrace one extreme or another when evaluating the potential of technology’s impact on academic achievement and student well-being. And it’s a lively debate—one that is playing out across the country in schools, at educational conferences, and in school board meetings and state legislatures.
Kirsten Baesler, the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education at the U.S. Department of Education, recently weighed in on that debate. In a “Dear Colleague” letter released Aug. 20, she writes that the “public policy debate should not be framed as a choice between technology and no technology, nor should every screen be viewed as serving the same purpose.”
The seeds of this tech conflict—called the ed-tech backlash or “techlash”—were planted nearly 20 years ago with the introduction of the iPhone and then supercharged when schools massively expanded their use of technology during the pandemic.
Now, many parents and others are passionately advocating that schools decrease screen time in classrooms, with some calling for a big shift back to paper and pencil learning to protect students from tech overuse. But others are pushing back against the pushback, raising the question: Is the backlash against tech in schools going too far?
How the techlash shakes out this coming school year will depend largely on how well school district leaders encourage their communities to ask questions about technology use in schools—and, in turn, challenge their own beliefs as leaders about its use, argues Jeff Wetzler, co-founder of Transcend, an education innovation organization, and the author of Ask, a book about how to pose the right questions in the right ways and encourage others to do the same. Wetzler makes the case that adults are typically not enthusiastic about, or good at, asking the kinds of questions that can build relationships and bridge differences. But they need to try.
“This [debate] is a particularly intense one, because the AI wave is coming at us all,” Wetzler told me in an interview. “The risk” of not listening carefully to different perspectives about tech use in schools “is enormous.”
Caitlin Sullivan agrees. She is the CEO and co-founder of Leading Now, a nonprofit organization that works with superintendents to help them develop their skills as civic leaders.
That is why her organization will be making it a priority this school year to work with superintendents on how to navigate strategic budgeting and the ed-tech backlash with curiosity and meaningful public engagement. “This could be something that catches superintendents off guard if they’re caught flat-footed,” Sullivan predicts. “It could actually take on a life of its own at the expense of high-quality instruction.”
With so much complexity and volatility surrounding us, seemingly simple solutions to big problems can be attractive. They give us a quick-hit feeling of clarity and closure. But, too often, they backfire, because they are not accompanied by a true understanding of the potential unintended consequences of decisions. Then, when problems arise, tempers flare, and “I told you so” divisions arise. Again.
That’s why it’s critical to put candor and curiosity front and center. You might not hear what you want to hear. But you will hear what you need to hear. And that could be a powerful defense against seeds of conflict and division blossoming in your school community.
Better yet, it could be the start of a productive, ongoing conversation that proves to be a superpower in tackling the big challenges ahead.
