AJ Crabill Scaling Leadership: Designing Effective National Cohorts for Education Leaders

Scaling What Works: How AJ Crabill is Redefining Leadership Development in Education

In his book Great On Their Behalf: Why School Boards Fail, How Yours Can Become Effective, AJ Crabill opens with two startling findings. First, only five states in the U.S. require school board members to receive training focused specifically on student outcomes. Second, in some school board conferences, fewer than 5% of sessions address student outcomes at all. That gap between what matters and what gets attention is what Crabill has spent years trying to close.

AJ Crabill is not doing it with flashy speeches or broad policy ideas. He is doing it by building highly disciplined, outcomes-focused national cohorts – intensive leadership development programs that change how school boards, superintendents, and other education leaders operate.

What Crabill’s Cohorts Actually Look Like

The cohorts AJ Crabill leads are not generic PD sessions or networking groups. They are structured, multi-month learning environments where participants do hard, focused work tied directly to student achievement. Each cohort is guided by a clear through-line: student outcomes are the priority, and everything else is secondary.

Participants – typically school board members, district leaders, or governance coaches – meet regularly in small groups, led by a national faculty of experienced education practitioners. These are people who have governed effectively, led instructional change, or turned around struggling districts. Their job is not to inspire from a distance – it is to challenge, coach, and push leaders to change what they do on the ground.

Each session builds on the last. Leaders are taught how to identify clear student outcome goals, monitor progress rigorously, and align board agendas and superintendent evaluations to those goals. They are expected to implement these changes in their own systems in between sessions – and bring back results, data, and reflections to share. That performance-driven culture is part of what makes Crabill’s model different. It is not about learning leadership – it is about practicing it in public.

Not Just Theory – A System for Capacity Building

AJ Crabill’s cohort model is not designed for one-time impact. It is built for sustained growth and internal replication. Participants often go on to become mentors, trainers, or certified governance coaches themselves, which means districts do not stay dependent on outside expertise.

That “train the trainer” strategy has helped Crabill seed leadership development ecosystems across urban, suburban, and rural districts. His national faculty model ensures that each cohort is led by people who understand both the technical and cultural challenges of educational governance.

Built for the Most Demanding Environments

A large share of AJ Crabill’s work takes place in complex urban districts, where leadership decisions have outsized consequences – and the margin for error is thin. These systems often struggle with high turnover, deep inequities, and constant political pressure.

Crabill’s cohorts are designed with these realities in mind. Leaders are trained not just to manage complexity, but to cut through it – by grounding every decision in student outcome data, prioritizing a small number of clear goals, and aligning adult behavior with student needs. That disciplined focus is a stabilizing force in chaotic systems.

Why It Works

Where traditional leadership development often chases breadth – covering dozens of loosely connected topics, AJ Crabill’s cohorts prioritize depth. The aim is not exposure, but mastery. Participants don’t leave with binders full of ideas; they leave having practiced and applied the habits of effective governance.

By stripping away distractions and zeroing in on the behaviors that drive student achievement, Crabill’s cohorts help leaders transform not just their thinking, but their systems.

Scaling What Works

Through partnerships with organizations like the Council of the Great City Schools and AJ Crabill’s national certification programs, he has made it possible for more districts to run these cohorts without reinventing the wheel. The tools are replicable. The frameworks are proven. And the results – when leaders stick with it – are real.

In an era where school systems are overloaded and under scrutiny, AJ Crabill’s leadership development model offers something rare: a practical, scalable way to make student success the center of the conversation again. Not just in theory – but in practice, week after week, meeting by meeting, decision by decision.