When public education was under attack, Doctor Ellis All Day stood her ground.

Here's what I learned from my boss and our ex-superintendent, Dr. Stephanie Elizalde

I want to tell you what I learned from my last boss. The automatic transcription service would always mistype her name as “Doctor Ellis All Day,” but you probably know her as Dr. Stephanie Elizalde. She was hired as the superintendent here in Austin in August 2020. The following spring, she hired me as her chief of communications and community engagement. “We had the choice to hire someone normal, but we chose you,” she said.

She talked that way in private, and I encouraged her to talk that way in public. As a political consultant, strategist, and staff aide, I’ve worked for hundreds of politicians and leaders with varying degrees of closeness. From when she hired me to when she announced she was leaving in May 2022, I learned more from her than I learned from anyone I’d ever worked for before, and as a way, I suppose, of honoring her contribution to my life, I’d like to share the leadership lessons she left me with.

If you were looking at her from the outside, you probably saw the pedagogical equivalent of Miley Cyrus. She came in like a wrecking ball in the worst part of the pandemic — no vaccines, no classrooms open, everyone working and learning remotely. She opened up the classrooms, offered vaccinations to staff and families of our students, and looked ahead to what she predicted would be a healing year. Instead, public schools became the latest front in the culture war, which placed her in opposition to the governor when it came to masks and the attorney general when it came to our trans students and celebrating Pride. She did not run our public schools during peacetime, which suited me fine, because I’m not wired for that anyway.

In private — or at least the privacy of meetings — a different Dr. Elizalde emerged. She spent a lot of time teaching us to be leaders. There’s a funny thing about school districts. About 99% of the people working in a district worked their way up from teaching. So the chief of technology first taught school in South Dallas. Our chief of human capital started out as a math teacher. This has the benefit of keeping them close to the purpose of their work, but people are put into positions of leadership less for their leadership experience than their potential.

The leadership team Dr. Elizalde assembled was knowledgeable about how to run classrooms and schools, but we’d never lead a school district before at this level, so she took it upon herself to teach us about leadership. Here’s what I learned:

Talk like a normal person. There is something called the Curse of Knowledge. The more you know, the harder it is to talk about it in an intelligible way. And this is compounded when everyone around you has a similar background.

Imagine you’ve only got the benefit of a bachelor’s degree in a room full of Ph.D’s, and they’re talking about things that are completely new to you. We could never get too far into a presentation without me raising my hand, asking for a definition of one thing or another.

“What are we going to do, people, when we don’t have someone like Jason who feels comfortable raising his hand?” she said once.

“That’s a lot of acronyms. Let’s try to calm our acronyms,” she said another time.

You can’t lead unless you create a shared understanding, even with people who haven’t spent their careers in graduate school and public education. So if you can’t communicate easily with the people on your own team, you’re not going to get far with your customers and employees.

---

“That’s a lot of acronyms. Let’s try to calm our acronyms.”

---

Pick your team — and trust them. It took a bit for me to find my footing, new as I was to leading a team of 30-plus people, let alone being completely new to public education. I thought it wise to run my ideas by the chief of staff and Dr. Elizalde before making changes, even though that’s exactly why they picked me. In fact, she wanted me to do things the way I would do them and not the way every other school district would. Remember, she could have hired someone normal.

One day, I asked for permission one too many times, and she said something that still stuns me.

“Jason,” she began, “you’re the chief. Lead your department as you think best, and if I have feedback, I’ll give it to you.”

Everything went hazy. I mumbled some words and left her office in a daze. Is this what trust feels like? I can just… I don’t know, do my job? With one exception — when I gave Mayor Adler comedy bits to do — no one has ever put that amount of trust in me. When I tell former colleagues in public service and politics what Dr. Elizalde told me, they stare at me in naked disbelief. I have not been this envied since I married S.

Trust your people, and they will take a bullet for you.

Pick the right fight, and fight it with urgency. Pride Month comes in June when kids are out for summer break. Our school district celebrates Pride during the school year so the kids and staff can take part. There are activities during the week culminating in a district-wide Pride celebration at one of our campuses.

This year, the rightwing outrage machine focused on our district because of Pride. And whatever you think about celebrating Pride in schools is fine, or not. But you probably wouldn’t call us what what we were routinely called by media outlets all the way on up to Fox News: groomers. Apparently wanting children to love whoever they are and be cool with kids who are different from them is just pedophilia by another name. The Texas Attorney General even accused the school district of breaking child abuse laws.

The controversy didn’t bother Dr. Elizalde. The majority of our parents supported Pride, as did every member of the school board. She knew she didn’t need to worry what the reactionary news media said. In fact, she didn’t even plan on going to the Pride celebration because there was a competing event for the Latino community.

The day before the Pride party, she popped into my office to talk about the brouhaha and how out-of-proportion things had gotten. Sure had, I said, and I told her that we’d even gotten death threats about the Pride celebration the next day.

“Well, now I’m going,” she said.

There were a lot of big, public controversies on her watch, none bigger than the challenge of opening up classrooms during a pandemic. The Delta wave was rising just as we were going back to school, and the Governor ordered schools not to require masks.

At the time, only adults could get vaccinated, and parents were understandably worried about sending their children into buildings where masks weren’t required. We thought of workarounds, even to the point of considering revising the dress code to require masks. Dr. Elizalde worried about kids staying home, or worse, getting sick in classrooms. We even considered delaying the start of school to let Delta peter out.

Finally, she did what she was told she couldn’t. She required everyone on our campuses to wear masks.

“I am responsible for the safety, the health and welfare of each and every one of our students and our staff, and if I err, I must err on the side of ensuring that we have been overly cautious, not that we have fallen short,” she said. “What if a child dies on my watch?” She was honestly worried that the Governor would haul her off in leg irons. And then, when the possibility of pictures of her in an orange jumpsuit danced in my head, she was worried about my soul. But as it turns out, doing the right thing is still a pretty popular thing to do.

Those were the fights that drew national news coverage. The more important ones to us was the tale of two districts. Thanks to segregation, our district and city are bisected by an interstate freeway. On one side, the schools score pretty high, and the families are for the most part financially OK. You cannot say the same for the schools and families on the other side of the freeway, and it might interest you to know that the freeway also describes a racial divide. In the aggregate, we look like we’re doing fine, but mileage varies greatly depending on very predictable factors.

This was the fight she focused us on.

“We can’t be OK that half our kids are being served poorly while the other half is being served pretty well,” she said over and over again.

---

“We can’t be OK that half our kids are being served poorly while the other half is being served pretty well.”

---

“We know there’s nothing wrong with the kids,” she would say, “so the problem is what we’re doing.”

Changing the way a school district teaches is tough in good times, and I don’t know if you’ve heard, but these ain’t them. We had to first create an online curriculum to support virtual instruction, and then the next year for in-person instruction. We had to break old habits that weren’t getting results to institute new methods proven to do so, but that still meant changing behaviors among your most-important frontline workers.

A lot of people told her she was making too many changes too quickly. Why don’t you do the new thing next year, she was told, after people have had a chance to feel more settled.

“Every year, in my mind that’s a whole group of kids that went by,” she said.

She instilled that urgency and focus in our work. What needed to be done to improve student academic outcomes needed to be done in time to help that student, because what is just a few years to an organization is an entire high school career for a kid. That’s where we put our time and treasure — changing what the adults did to improve how the kids did.

At the same time, there were a lot of other fights that we chose not to see to their completion. If making a change would lead to better student outcomes, heck yes, let’s put our mouth guards in, bite down and strap in. But if winning a fight would not lead directly to better scores, then it wasn’t worth fighting.

Or as she said once when she was telling us to stand down on something, “It’s not a hill I’d die on, and I’d die on a lot of hills.”

---

“It’s not a hill I’d die on, and I’d die on a lot of hills.”

---

Be honest. There’s a weird urge that comes with leadership. We all want to be Kevin Bacon at the end of Animal House, reassuring people that all is well despite the evidence to the contrary. We want not just to conceal the pimple but to deny its existence, but there it sits, right there on your face for all to see. “That? No, that’s not a zit,” you find yourself saying. “It’s…” and you debate internally whether to claim you’ve got herpes instead of admitting the obvious.

To a roomful of well-educated experts designing new systems to achieve what has never been done before in this city, she cautioned against paralysis by analysis. “The perfect house has never been built,” she said, quoting a contractor.

To those who prioritized our problems over our possibilities, she said, “That’s a deficit mindset. It’s like negotiating your divorce while you’re already married.”

---

“That’s a deficit mindset. It’s like negotiating your divorce while you’re already married.”

---

To those trying too hard to find the upside, she said, “We try hard to put lipstick on a pig. Everyone can tell it’s still a pig.”

To those who cautioned a go-slow approach on a training issue, she said, “You have to struggle to be a beautiful butterfly. No one can take you out of your cocoon.”

Be prepared. Much of my career has been spent in politics, which has been called the art of the possible, which means we have a bunch of smart people arguing about the truth of facts or the potential effects of things unknown. As an industry, politics has weaponized balderdash, and you can win by winging it.

Public education is different. The stakes are this kid, and you have to figure out which chair in which room with which teacher in which school with which principal on which day they are taught what and in which order. Also, you have to decide what’s for lunch every damn day. There isn’t a lot of time to argue about what the meaning of the word “is” is, though now that I write that, I’d love to hear a classroom discussion about that little amuse-bouche of U.S. history.

---

“A vision without a plan is a hallucination.”

---

You can’t wing it in public ed. People tried, though they never tried for long around Dr. Elizalde. You could be wrong, and you could disagree with her, but God help the stumblebum who wasn’t prepared.

“A vision without a plan is a hallucination,” she once said.

“People aren’t lucky, and they aren’t tough,” she said another time. “They are trained or not trained.”

“You can’t teach what you don’t know, and you can’t lead where you won’t go,” she said once, quoting an axiom in professional development for educators. I looked it up later and discovered it was also said by Malcom X.

The lesson for me about preparation? Always be learning about your job. You’re never done preparing yourself for what’s next.

---

“Learners need endless feedback more than they need endless teaching.”

---

Get feedback. If you ask anyone on Dr. Elizalde’s team what she thought about leadership, though, the first thing you’d hear about were the inspirational quotes she would text us every Monday morning. These weren’t her words. She always liked to quote other people. Some of the quotes were better than others, but the one she sent from Bill Gates reflected her vision of leadership better than any of them.

“Learners need endless feedback more than they need endless teaching.”

Dr. Elizalde loved the practice of feedback and reflection because that’s how change works. We can only change other people by changing ourselves. We can’t change other people directly. They have to change themselves. It doesn’t matter what you teach them as much as it matters what they learned.

“They are not going to give a yellow jelly bean what you teach them,” she said once.

She gave us the 3P rubric to coach up our teams: praise, probe, polish. You’re doing great at this part of your job, she’d say. I’d invite you to reflect on this other part. I’m no dummy. I knew not only that I’d screwed the pooch but also what the pooch’s name was. But her invitation took the place of criticism, which relieved me of having to defend myself. Instead, I was invited to suggest a self-diagnosis, which lead to a discussion in which we polished whatever I said into something I could take back to my team.

---

“It’s not what happened to us, but what did we learn.”

---

A big part of leadership for Dr. Elizalde is reflection. We did more reflecting on her team than a funhouse full of mirrors. This was a shocking change for me. In politics, we reflect on how those who criticize us are wrong as well as upon the method and timing of their destruction. But public ed has different stakes. Every August we get a few thousand new ones, and every May we graduate thousands more.

If we’re not taking every opportunity to get better, then we’re not keeping up. And the only way to get better isn’t to polish your trophies but to examine your losses.

“It’s not what happened to us,” she said once, “but what did we learn.”

Be the leader you wish you had. One time, I didn’t just screw the pooch. I bombed a kennel. I made a mistake so bad that when I apologized to my colleagues who were most affected by my mistake, they accepted my apology in a way that told me that I might be forgiven, but this wasn’t forgotten. And worse, we were at a big event together, so I couldn’t hide in my office. My mistake had made life harder for my team, so I had pulled off a trifecta: I had let down my boss, my colleagues, and my team. I had done a bang up job in making a mess of things.

I was standing in a room full of principals when Dr. Elizalde appeared at my elbow.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Uh… not good,” I said.

“Come here,” she said, and she led me into a space in the hall where no one could hear us.

“I can see how down you are,” she said. “You can’t lead anyone when you’re like this.” She told me how supported she felt by me, that she loved me, and she wanted me to be OK. Unprepared for such intimacy, I muttered that I loved her, too, and walked off instantly relieved of the gutter-level view of myself. She had broken the cycle of self-recrimination. By indulging in my low mood, I could not be the boss that my team deserved.

Her two years at the helm were not perfect, and I’m sure she’d say the same. Our new superintendent is leading with a different tone and style, which isn’t to say that Dr. Elizalde’s was wrong. She was a different person in a different time. But after my year with her, I’m different, too, and I’m grateful that she was so intentional about teaching us how to lead.

And to Dr. Elizalde, a personal note: Thanks, boss. You did good, even if you didn’t manage to get yourself arrested. Next time. And for the record, I absolutely would have taken a bullet for you.

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.

---

Thanks to Noom, I lost 40 pounds over 2020-21 and have kept it off since then. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works. No, this isn’t an ad. Yes, I really lost all that weight with Noom.

We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment. 

We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some

Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House. Out in paperback now!