It’s been 20 years since ERS first started partnering with districts to transform schooling. As we celebrate this anniversary, we want to honor all our incredible partners, past and present. This is the second in our series of interviews where we’ll chat with our partners about their successes, lessons learned, and hopes for the future.

Being a great leader and growing the next generation of great leaders require similar commitments to transparency, strategic planning, and unwavering student-centered thinking. In his decades-long career in school and district leadership, Jim McIntyre has driven remarkable results by foregrounding these elements in every role he’s held.

Now, as the Dean of the College of Education and Assistant Provost for Academic Excellence at Belmont University, McIntyre helps teach future educators and leaders the lessons he’s learned along the way. Here, McIntyre shares those insights and how working with ERS helped support his journey.

You first worked with ERS when you were with Boston Public Schools. What do you remember about that partnership?

I remember Karen Hawley Miles [ERS’ founder and CEO] and I working with school principals in a basement computer lab, helping them think more strategically about their resources and budgets. I was the Budget Director for Boston Public Schools (BPS) and had only been in my role for a short time.

What I remember most is the principals’ reactions. It was eye-opening for them to think more broadly about their resources and about how their general funds and grant resources could align to help them achieve their educational goals. They were very used to an incremental budget approach that was the same as what they did the year before. And here we were, talking with them about thinking differently about centering their students’ needs in their budget.

There was a sense of disbelief: “Wait, we can do this?” I remember telling them that—as long as they live within their means—they can organize resources to best support their students. It was shocking to the principals, but we gave them concrete strategies and got into the nuts and bolts of the work to make it possible for them.

That’s a key theme of ERS: You don’t just advocate for being strategic in theory. You give specific strategies that leaders can apply every day. It fueled so much of the great success we saw at BPS and helped us provide our students with a high-quality education. A few years later, BPS won the Broad Prize for the best urban school district in America.

You became Superintendent of Knox County Schools in 2008. How did your understanding of strategic resource use help the district reach its goals?

At the time, we had about 61,000 students and 90 schools, and on my first day, I instituted a hiring and budget freeze, primarily because we didn’t have an approved budget and I wanted to know what we were going to be spending money on. Because of the lessons I learned at BPS in partnership with ERS, I wanted to ensure we were spending strategically. That was my first day.

I learned the power of transparency, being open about our priorities, how we were going to allocate resources, and the tradeoffs we were willing to make. John McDonough, the former CFO for BPS, would always say, “When in doubt, tell ‘em what you know.” It’s a beautiful perspective on being a public servant that I tried to bring with me into Knoxville.

Working with ERS also enabled me to learn that investment matters. Where you put your dollars is going to make a difference, so we worked hard to develop a clear allocation methodology that aligned to our priorities. We stratified by the concentration of students in poverty, which allowed us to invest in the students with the greatest needs.

In my seventh year as superintendent, Knox County Schools was named an exemplary school district by the state of Tennessee. Our graduation rates in inner-city high schools went from around 50% to more than 80%. Students were achieving more and we were narrowing achievement gaps because of the strategic resource decisions we made.

Can you tell us a bit about your time leading The Leadership Academy? Why were leadership development and principal preparation so important to your work?

So much of this work is about shifting mindsets and empowering leaders. What advice do you have for other leaders who are working to make the case for that kind of change?

It’s challenging to measure the impact of this work. But when you give a school principal the tools, skills, and knowledge to embrace strategic resource management, they’re going to flourish. Educators are intuitively excellent resource managers, so the key is to demystify the components of resources use and budgets so they can succeed.

This is the magic of what ERS can do. The work is based on sophisticated research and analysis, and it’s accessible to all leaders. They begin to see—almost immediately—the difference it makes when they’re strategic in their use of resources. It’s really powerful, and it has a positive influence on principals’ leadership for the rest of their career.

In fact, there are some things I’ve said for 25 years because Karen Hawley Miles said them in 1999, like “You can do anything you want. You just can’t do everything you want.” This kind of knowledge and wisdom helps people understand complex concepts like investing in core instruction or lowering group sizes. It’s powerful.

How do you support school transformation in your current role at Belmont University?

My role now is a continuation of my past work, thinking about how we can develop great educators and leaders across multiple public school districts, independent schools, private schools, and charter schools. How do we ensure that aspiring teachers will have the skill sets to be effective in a variety of settings? How do we help schools use resources strategically to enable this success?

Most of our students will graduate with a degree in education and a secondary certification in special education or English as a second language. There’s a pedagogical reason for that, but also a resource rationale: It makes these educators more flexible. Districts can deploy them where they’re most needed.

We think about all of these resource issues as we prepare educators and leaders. We also consider how we can partner with schools, districts, and CMOs to help them think about things like teacher preparation, induction, retention, and professional learning.

What insights would you share with district leaders today who are facing more pressure and bigger challenges than previous leaders?

The most important thing for superintendents to do right now is educate and take care of our children. There are a lot of distractions right now, but we have to keep our focus on making sure we provide great instruction to every child in every school and every classroom every day.

That’s no easy feat. We operate in an increasingly complex and political environment, and the best way to engage is to help our students achieve their greatest successes.

I’ve also learned from ERS the importance of having a plan. That sounds so simple and unglamorous, but inviting community stakeholders into the strategic planning process, executing your plan, and monitoring it afterward is a critical part of leadership today—but it’s often overlooked.

At Knox County Schools, we were executing against a solid strategic plan, and the Gates Foundation offered us funding for another initiative. We actually turned them down because it wasn’t in our plan. We weren’t ready for that initiative at that time, and we knew we needed to keep our focus on our core priorities.

That discipline allowed us to succeed at our initial plan and then reengage with Gates down the road when we were ready. It’s all about focusing on your budget, working toward your educational mission, and aligning your resources to that effort.

This year marks ERS’ 20th anniversary. What do you think is important about our work at this moment?

School and district leaders need ERS more than ever before. It’s challenging to keep your focus on great instruction and maintain your education priorities when you’re in a positive resource environment. It’s even more important when you’re in a limited-resource environment.

ERS gives leaders tools and capabilities around prioritization, making appropriate tradeoffs, maximizing resources, and identifying the most efficient ways to get the most out of your time, people, and money. Leaders need the perspectives, skills, and tools that ERS offers.

How do you stay hopeful and optimistic amid these uncertain, challenging times?

This work is hard. There are all kinds of constraints, and political challenges are finding their way into education right now. It’s important to remind ourselves that we do this work for the children.

Whenever I had a challenging school board meeting on a Wednesday night, I’d always schedule myself to be in an elementary school on a Thursday morning. I’d get in a kindergarten class, get on a multicolored rug, and read to a kid to remember why I do this work.

There’s great joy in this work. There’s great purpose in this work. There’s great impact in this work. And we’re making a brighter future for children, so it’s worth the fight for our kids.

Learn how we partner with education leaders like Dr. Jim McIntyre to create high-performing school systems.