It’s been a few weeks since we’ve done a midweek email. So many folks shared their thoughts about the Salary Survey and I wanted to respond. We got many things right and definitely could’ve done some things better. My insights are in the longer read below.

Thanks again to everyone who participated. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it!

Here are a few other little tidbits to sweeten your coming holiday or make you chuckle a bit.

Four Things to Share This Week

Quick Hits:

1. How did you like the Salary Survey? A survey [10 sec]

2. The name game 😂😂 [10 sec]

3. Enjoy yourself [6 min video]

A Longer Read:

4. So, about that survey [4 min]

#1 Show Me the Money!

A couple weeks ago, I sent out the salary survey. Let me know what you thought:

#2 This works for lots of stuff

#3 You’ve got time for breakfast during the break

How to Make a Potato Chip Omelet

You’re welcome.

The Longer Read (4 min)

#4 My insights after looking at the salary survey for, like, a hundred hours or something

By now, I hope everyone has had the chance to access the ‘23-24 Salary Survey that my team put together. I want to acknowledge at the outset that I had a lot of help with the final report. The portion related to affordability ratios was particularly time-consuming. A shoutout to my research assistant, who looked up the median home value of each zip code represented, is warranted. There is no centralized source for this information, so it was quite time-consuming. Thanks for all the help!

I wanted to break this reflection into three sections: 1. My Key Takeaways from the Survey, 2. Where We Could Improve, and 3. Ideas for the Future. I’ll try to keep this as straightforward as possible.

1. My Key Takeaways from the Survey

A. Honestly, we need more data …

I’ll discuss this more in section two below, but it bears disclosing upfront. Quite simply, we didn’t have enough data to make a compelling case for comparing different groups, which I think many people find most valuable. That said, I think we did have enough to get a decent snapshot of one demographic - public female administrators. I know that happens to be many of you, so that’s great!

B. Cost of Living is Key

I posted preliminary results on several popular administrators’ Facebook groups. I fully expected the response that I received.

“Hey! I’m a principal and I make $30K (less/more) than these numbers! What’s the deal?!”

It’s important to understand that salary is primarily driven by one factor - location. More specifically, you must factor in the cost of owning a home in an area to understand how far your paycheck will go. (I know that there’s a lot more to cost of living than real estate. In the future, we hope to include some non-housing items for a more accurate picture).

Let’s look at an example:

San Diego, CA

One of the highest principal salaries submitted was about $170,000 in the San Diego metro area. That’s 57% higher than the national average of our survey ($108,000). However, the current average home cost in San Diego is $956,000. That’s 148% higher than the national home value in our survey ($385,000).

That salary equals roughly $9,500 monthly (after taxes, social security, etc.). A 30-year fixed mortgage on a million-dollar home is about $5,500 per month, assuming 20% down and a lower-than-average interest rate. This is about 57% of your net income, leaving you about $4,000 in expendable dollars after housing costs.

Pittsburgh, PA

We received several submissions from the Pittsburgh metro area. One such respondent was 9% below our national average at $98,000. However, the average home price was almost 40% below the national average at $238,000.

That equates to about $6,100 net monthly income and a mortgage of $1,700 - just 28% of net income, leaving about $4,400 in expendable income after housing.

That doesn’t make these salaries the same, but it certainly doesn’t make them seem as far apart when compared in simple dollar amounts.

Note: If you’re wondering how I got my gross vs. net pay figures, check out ADP’s paycheck calculator and Smart Asset’s state income tax calculator.

C. Gender pay gaps are hard to nail down … without more data

Many of you requested that I include gender information in the survey - and I’m glad I did. I think it’s a really helpful demographic category to analyze, and I appreciate the suggestion. And while I did hear back from several folks that they felt women were paid less than men, this was highly variable depending on many factors.

At the simplest level, many pay disparities could be attributed more to years of experience than gender. For instance, in the table above, you’ll notice that male assistant principals made less than their female counterparts, and the reverse is true of principals. But again, in both cases, years of experience tracked more closely with salary than gender.

However, one area where this theory seemed to fall apart was looking at salary by size of district enrollment.

In the table above, you’ll notice that male salaries outpaced female salaries in nearly every category. This could indeed indicate some level of disparity. The unfortunate limiting factor is, again, a lack of data. You’ll notice an asterisk next to many data points, indicating that we received less than five total respondents for these categories - frequently only one or two. This calls into serious question the validity of the averages for both males and females when applied at a national level.

This brings me to our next section …

2. Where We Could Improve

A. Broken record time: “We need more data.”

I’m saying it over and over because it’s true. There may indeed be a gender pay gap in several areas, but without good comparative data, it’ll be impossible to know for sure. That’s why we need more respondents - specifically for the following:

• male administrators at all levels (including district office)

• both male and female assistant principals

• both male and female private school administrators

• both male and female administrators from every part of every state

Basically, we need more of everyone!

Now, my subscriber audience is about 80% female, which I love! So, it’s no surprise that we received more female respondents than male, but that still leaves over 1,500 male subscribers. I’m hopeful if we send the form out once more, we’ll get a great second-round response.

Note: If we resend the form and you have already completed it, you won’t need to do it again. We will simply add to our current data.

B. Improve the affordability ratio

As I stated previously, we’d love to improve the affordability ratio to include more than just real estate prices. For example, taxes vary significantly by state. My salary as an administrator in Oregon was above average, but was almost completely offset by my high state income tax bracket. Factoring this comparison into our affordability ratio when comparing with no tax states like Texas or Tennessee could be helpful. Additionally, other factors like the cost of food and child care in different locations could be great.

As it happens, we gained (completely lawful) access to a data set from the Economic Policy Institute that will allow us to include all of these factors into a new affordability ratio. The hope is that this, combined with more data, will make for a much more robust, updated report.

C. Include Full Remuneration

We definitely learned a lot about what questions to ask and how to ask them. We included questions on retirement benefits, union status, professional learning allowances, and other details.

We learned that we went about this in two fundamentally flawed ways:

1. We asked open-ended questions

2. We made it anonymous

Now, normally it’s good to ask open-ended questions. But if you’re trying to get a good set of comparable data, it makes much of it difficult to compare. Especially if you have zero way of contacting respondents to ask clarifying questions.

I think we’ll likely table this ambitious section of the survey until ‘24-25, but we plan to revive it. I think it has the potential to yield some very helpful information. And I think we can do this while maintaining anonymity, we simply need to learn to ask better questions.

3. Ideas for the Future

A. More Surveys?

I’ll be honest. Working through survey results and developing a method of presentation is a LOT of work. But it’s also a lot of fun. And I’m hopeful that you find it beneficial.

I’ve wanted to produce more surveys for quite some time. I think anonymous surveys can be very helpful in supporting administrators across the country. For instance, I’d love to conduct an Administrator Morale survey. Imagine if you could learn the drivers of deep satisfaction and dissatisfaction from colleagues across the country (and globe) who bear the same burden as you. I think the anonymous component of this makes it very accessible for most folks, and the insights could be extraordinary.

B. Tips on Negotiating

I read recently that more than half of administrators in a particular state do not have a pay schedule. Instead, they negotiate their starting salary.

Since all future increases, retirement, and other factors are typically a percentage of your salary, this makes your negotiating skills the most important factor in your lifetime earning potential, second possibly to your local cost of living.

Now, I’m no Jedi when it comes to negotiating. However, I am a recovering accountant and did take advanced negotiations in business school. Also, I’m confident I could convince a school district HR director to give me anonymous tips to share on salary negotiation. Let me know if that would be useful to you.

Note: If you ARE an HR director who would be willing to chat off the record, reply to this message! I’d love to chat:)

Thanks for processing with me. Hang in there, folks! We’re almost to some fun family time.

Cheers,

Mike

I hope you all are making it through what I like to call The Fuzzy Week.

Has time slowed down? Sped up? Who can say? All I know is my kids are acting like they forgot how to sleep but learned how to get pickle juice on every hard surface in the house.

This, too, shall pass.

It’s been a couple of weeks. As I stated in the maiden voyage of Midweek Musings, I’ll post around midweek when I have something substantive to share. And this is one of those weeks. (They’ll typically fall about every other week).

You’ll notice the longer read is for paid subscribers only this week. I don’t want to bait and switch you with a paywall after reading half the story. That drives me nuts.

However, I will sometimes (not always) make parts of the longer reads paid. I do this for three reasons:

1. I have bills to pay, like everyone else!

2. I only do it on pieces that I’ve spent a significant amount of time researching and writing.

3. Paid subscribers are typically the first to respond with an encouraging word or a gentle rebuke. They have some skin in the game and feel personally invested in me. I appreciate that. There are some things I’d prefer to share with about 500 people that I wouldn’t necessarily share with 8,000. Though all 8,000 of you are more than welcome to become paid subscribers 😂

Just to nudge you a tiny bit, the article referenced in today’s longer read is so good that I printed it out, read it multiple times, annotated it, and will continue to think it over for months to come. It’s one of those rare finds!

Enjoy!

P.S. The results of the salary survey are in! Tons of interesting data to share with everyone … likely towards the end of the month. Thanks again for participating!

Four Things to Share This Week

Quick Hits:

1. How’s everyone doing? A survey [10 sec]

2. Three is the Magic Number [1 min]

3. Paging, Catherine! 😂😂 [20 sec]

A Longer Read:

4. Believe It Or Not, It’s Simple [6 min]

#1 Is it getting hot in here?

#2 The Rule of Three

As an administrator, I used the famous Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize my time. Did it work for me? Meh.

The problem was that I simply had too many things in the upper left quadrant (“Urgent” and “Important.”). You can never get it all done.

I’m a fan of simplifying. So, I’ve been trying the rule of three.

You could use it very easily with your whole leadership team in a simple shared Google Doc. Let me know what you think.

And from the same source listed above, I love this quote:

“We set very aggressive goals. And it’s okay not to hit them.”

#3 Nine Year Olds Know. It. All.

The Longer Read (6 min)

#4 Six Essential Skills for Connecting with Contentious Parents

Just so you know, you don’t have to do anything wrong to be sued. As a lawyer friend of mine likes to tell me, “Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason.”

Comforting thought. That should be on a coffee mug somewhere.

Keep that in mind when I tell you the following: I was named in four lawsuits during my first year as an administrator.

That’s right. Four. It was a tough year.

I think I could’ve avoided at least one of those if I had read the article I found last week.

For some context, I came from a small semi-rural district of about 4,000 students, with a lot of socio-economic diversity. Suddenly, I found myself in a district ten times the size and at a school nestled in a high-income neighborhood near Nike’s world headquarters and a large Intel office.

Read more

Welcome to the second installment of “Mike’s Midweek Musings” - a Wednesday message of helpful advice and a laugh of two.

Last week’s email was one of the most read of all time. Turns out folks are willing to put up with me in their inboxes a bit more often. (I promise I won’t overstay my welcome).

We’ve got a few cool things this week.

Of utmost importance is the salary survey (see item #4 below). Thanks to everyone who voted last week. The consensus is that this would be helpful, so it’s on! Takes about 2-3 minutes. It’ll generate some truly useful data and I’ll send out the results in a few weeks. Thanks again so much for taking the time!

Five Things to Share This Week

Quick Hits:

1. Those first few years … another survey [10 sec]

2. Twelve Sources of Advantage [45 sec]

3. Trick or Treat. (I love you!) [20 sec]

4. Take the Salary Survey (C’mon … please) [2-3 min]

A Longer Read:

5. I’m Mister Lonely [2 min]

The Midweek Musings special ends tonight! Save $7 bucks now! That’s like 1.5 Pumpkin Spice Lattes!

Get 10% off for 1 year

Click here to see all the goodies you get when you go paid!

#1 Why is this so hard?

In the Longer Read below, we’ll talk about loneliness, especially for new leaders. So, I (and a few thousand other folks) would love to know …

#2 Are you willing to look like an idiot?

As I mentioned last week, I like taking concepts from outside of education and seeing what can be reapplied. Today’s idea comes from one of my favorite writers at the Farnam Street blog.

Now, nearly every administrator I’ve worked with has an above-average competitive streak. This doesn’t mean they have to try to beat the person next to them, it often means they’re simply trying to become the best version of themselves.

With that in mind, check out the ‘12 Sources of Advantage’ below. Pretty much a direct copy from FS.blog, Aug 20, 2023. And if you’re not the competitive type, I think you could easily call it “12 Sources of Growth.”

As you read, make a mental note of how many of these are within your control.

12 Sources of Advantage

1. Raw talent/intelligence - Some people are just naturally better and smarter.

2. Hard work - Some people work harder.

3. Differentiation - Seeing the world differently. Doing something different. Reading different books. Interpreting the same information differently. (This is my personal favorite).

4. Process/Discipline - Creating a process and following it.

5. Talent Collector - The ability to hire the best people and get the most out of them.

6. Energy - Only an advantage when mixed with integrity.

7. Curiosity (Another underrated one, IMO - although this guy agrees)

8. Patience - A lack of patience changes the outcome.

9. Ability to take pain - Are you willing to look like an idiot to get better? How much risk are you willing to take, AND, importantly, can you handle the losses?

10. Temperament - Keeping your head when everyone else is losing theirs.

11. Partner - Having the right partner - not only in business but, more importantly, in LIFE. The right partner will 10x your life. The wrong one will hold you back.

12. Luck

#3 Love those nem nems 😂 😂

#4 Survey says …

Here it is in all its magnificence! The Salary Survey! Get after it!

(Also, I asked David Frankin of The Principal’s Desk FB group if I could cross-post it to get a great sample size. This should be a valuable report for everyone. Also, consider signing up for David’s newsletter.)

Take the Survey

The survey will be open until November 5th. A full-report will be sent to all subscribers a couple weeks after.

The Longer Read (2 min)

#5 The tumbleweed goes rolling past

What seems like a million years ago, I was at an administrators-only happy hour during my first year as an AP. One of my colleagues had just been promoted to principal of a large high school in our district. He was obviously excited and more than a little nervours. Everyone was toasting to his future success.

Any specific accolades or pieces of advice from the group?

“Well, say goodbye to your marriage!” someone burst out. The whole table laughed nervously.

At that time and in that district, you were expected to give your allegiance to school and community above all else. For many, family was a distant second or third on the priority list.

(Of course, there were plenty of examples of folks who maintained good balance, but it was not an easy environment in which to take such a stand).

Sadly, this is a pretty common sentiment all over.

Lately, I hear a common refrain from more administrators nearing the end of their careers, especially post-pandemic: “This job has taken more from me and my family than I should have given. I have real regrets.”

I have a couple buddies who are medical doctors. They talk about their experience in med school residency with a mix of nostalgia and PTSD. Historically, it’s been a rite of passage to nearly kill yourself (while not killing your patients) as you work 100+ hour weeks to earn your stripes. The old guard is reluctant to change the level of expectation becasue, “I had to go through it - why shouldn’t you?”

I find that experienced administrators are more understanding and supportive of their proteges, but not always by a large margin. There can definitely be a “tough it out, kid” mentality. After all, everyone has to pay their dues, right?

I recently came across a great article by a current district administrator, Elizabeth Dampf. Appropriately titled, No One Ever Really Tells You How Lonely It Is, Dampf suggests a roadmap for change.

Her take is that seasoned administrators can help pave the way toward a less-isolating experience for new school leaders. No one is asking that it be easy, it’ll never be that. Conflict and challenge are hardwired into the job. But it should be less lonely.

And she’s got some great ideas.

If you have three minutes, you should read the entire article, but she recommends a few practical things that supervisors and mentors of new administrators should consider:

• Model Vulnerability - New administrators are rarely going to wave the white flag to their superiors and yell, “Help! I’m slowly dying inside!” But they might open up more IF veteran leaders were more honest about how hard the first several years can be.

  What to do: If you’re a veteran leader, talk about your own experience with isolation. Normalize talking about the struggle.

• Support Boundary Setting - Nobody runs a marathon at their top speed. It’s unsustainable. And when young leaders (or any leaders) are expected to give everything to their jobs, they wind up cut off from their families, friends, and hobbies - the things that can be healthy outlets for all that stress.

  What to do: If you supervise a new leader, take things off their plate. Reduce after school events, insist on limiting weekend contacts, and talk about your own boundaries and work/family balance.

• Mentorship! - Young leaders need a mentor - one that they do not report to directly. The reflection and debriefing process is invaluable.

  What to do: If you don’t have a mentor program in your district, start one … like yesterday! It doesn’t have to be complicated to be effective.

• Rethink Incentives - Admin turnover these days is bonkers. And there’s a lot in the system that makes this worse. Considering contracts that run longer than a year, create a pipeline to promote internally, and incentivize loyalty.

  What to do: This is a tougher overhaul than many supervisors can take on, but you can at least start the conversation with district administrators. Keep those new leaders fresh and happy with their school or district and students will see the benefit.

As I read the article, I wondered if more of my friends could’ve avoided the pitfalls of leadership burn-out.

Do you have any thoughts on how to support new leaders? Are you a young adminstrator with specific needs? Think some of this is unrealistic? Let me know!

Leave a comment

Thanks so much for reading the first installment of “Mike’s Midweek Musings.” I’ll have more to share in the coming weeks. In the meantime, keep an eye out for our regularly scheduled “Inspo Vids” email this Saturday.

Cheers,

Mike

P.S. If you’d rather not receive these midweek messages but would still like to receive the Saturday emails, you can do the following:

1. Login to Substack

2. Go to “Settings” and select “Hey, Mike Alpert!”

3. Toggle the “Midweek Musings” notifications to “off”

Don’t forget 10% off your subscription! Expires tonight!

Get 10% off for 1 year

Need more reasons? Check out the insane value of becoming a paid subscriber!

Welcome to the first edition of Mike’s Midweek Musings - a place for me to share interesting tidbits that I come across in my line of work - creating and curating content for educators.

Herein you will find all the things that I hope you’ll find useful, interesting, or at least worth a chuckle. It’ll change from week to week and, indeed, probably will not be published each and every week - only when I have enough things to share.

Note: I’ll include 3-4 things that are super quick and to the point. I’ll also include one piece that takes a little more time, but I hope to make it worth your investment. Cheers.

Five Things to Share This Week

Quick Hits:

1. A Survey RE: Surveys (so meta) [30 sec]

2. Wow! [5 sec]

3. Just for the 😂 😂 [20 sec]

4. Why Have One Meeting When Two Will Do? [60 sec]

A Longer Read:

5. Death Match: K12 Teachers v. Ed Professors [3 min]

To commemorate the launch of Midweek Musings, we’re offering 10% off all subscriptions for one week! Expires October 25th!

Get 10% off for 1 year

Click here to see all the goodies you get when you go paid!

#1 Should I try it?

We have subscribers in every state, every Canadian province, and tens of countries around the world.

My question for you is this: Should I conduct a salary survey?

It would be anonymous and would include as much detail as I can get on the annual salary, benefits, etc. for common admin positions in each location. And, yes, results would be shared with both free and paid subscribers alike. Are you in?

#2 Fight the Clock

“The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.”

- Kevin Kelly (from his essay “103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known”)

#3 This required some planning 😂 😂

#4 Save Time By Holding MORE Meetings?

I became obsessed with the Tim Ferriss Show some time ago. His interviews of world-class leaders were fascinating while I was in business school and stole tons of strategies from the private sector and applied them as an administrator.

Here’s a great concept that I only recently stumbled upon - “The Two Meeting Rule.”

Whenever you have a problem to solve that requires input from staff, plan to hold two highly structured meetings instead of one less focused meeting.

Typically, we jump into a meeting without a clear idea of what it is we’re trying to solve. And attendees want to “check the box” of participation, so they regurgitate basic information and compete for airtime, without actually saying much of substance. This goes on for two-thirds of the meeting. The last third is spent rushing toward a mediocre solution to a poorly understood problem.

Instead, hold two meetings - one to define the problem and one to solve it. Here’s how it breaks down:

Meeting #1: Define the Problem

Send out any information as “required reading” prior to attending the meeting. Make it clear that only unique perspectives should be offered, and not everyone has to speak. Avoid restating basic information. Once you’ve clearly defined the problem, take the time to ask, “Is this a problem we actually want to solve?” You have limited resources. If the consequences aren’t too bad and your staff is already overwhelmed, maybe you stop here. There’s no shame in that.

In-between: Wait 1-7 days

Providing a gap between meetings is crucial. Oftentimes, someone comes up with a brilliant idea while they’re gardening or laying in bed a few days later, but they feel the time to contribute has lapsed. “Think Time” between meetings can lead to more and better options.

Meeting #2: Determine the Solution

Reconvene and allow folks to share their unique ideas (again, no rehashing basic facts). Once you land on a potential solution, ask the question, “And then what?” Are you going to have parent volunteers help coordinate the community event? Great. What expectations do you want to communicate? Who will train them? What if they cancel at the last minute? Be sure that the solution isn’t creating ten more problems. Finally, once you find an optimal solution, decide on the next steps and assign action items.

The Longer Read (3 min)

#5 BREAKING: Teachers and ED Professors Disagree (and what to do about it)

Warning: By the end of this article, I’m going to recommend obliterating teacher prep programs entirely. But hear me out. I think it’s worth considering.

Not sure why we needed a survey to figure this one out, but this article that EdWeek published is worth a read.

As it states, there’s a critical disconnect between academia and full-time classroom teachers. The focus is on math teachers, but recent research shows this is to be a problem at all disciplines and levels.

What’s going on here?

At first glance, it may seem like a cycle that starts with mentor teachers. Julie Booth, an education professor at Temple Univesity, claims that student teachers are often told by their mentors that the “newfangled” methods they learned in grad school won’t “actually work in the classroom.”

And, to be honest, it’s not hard to see why.

I do a lot of PD with schools where we center the experience of real teachers. I’ve spent hundreds (if not thousands) of hours interviewing great teachers about their day-to-day reality.

And I can tell you that nearly every single one of them felt woefully unprepared by their teacher prep program. Like, to the point of real vomit-inducing panic during their first few weeks (or even months) of school.

And these great teachers eventually take on student teachers. And when the student teacher wants to give a new strategy a spin, they’re often met with, “That’s not how real teachers do it, Junior.”

Of course, this is oversimplified. I’ve certainly had student teachers myself who tried something new and it worked. I sometimes even adopted it myself.

More often, however, seasoned teachers resist. This leads to statistics like the following that highlight the gap in beliefs between professors and teachers.

We work in a profession where theory can be easily (and almost instantaneously) tested. This isn’t physics. You don’t need a spendy particle accelerator to test an idea.

Any professor with a hypothesis could sign up to sub in one of the 128,961 public or private school buildings tomorrow and get some real, boots-on-the-ground feedback on their idea - assuming no research ethics issues. You and I both know schools could use the help.

But, of course, that’s not what happens.

As I think back to my own graduate experience, most of my professors spent some time in the classroom. Indeed, the promotional material for the program states “All our [faculty] are experienced PreK12 teachers who have gone on to become leaders in teacher education.”

But, I can only recall two of about a dozen who were either actively teaching at the time or had been in the classroom within the last 5-10 years. Many had taught for a few years, moved on to doctoral work, and hadn’t been in front of a class in decades.

Now, I’m certainly aware that there’s a bevy of adjunct professors out there who still teach part-time (or even full-time) and, in my experience, those were the best instructors! But it seems to be the exception. (If you know otherwise, please do respond and set me straight.)

So, how do we fix it?

As I mentioned, I have some hare-brained ideas. One is a minor tune-up and the other is a revolution. The real answer probably falls somewhere in between, but here we go:

Option 1:

All education professors (and consultants) should be required to do the following:

• Sub in a classroom at least one day a month or two unbroken weeks each school year

• Sub as an administrator for one week each year

In an ideal world:

• Take a sabbatical from university every 5-7 years to teach one full year in a K-12 classroom

[Honesty time: This is partly why I’m on sub-lists in a few districts near my home. Truthfully, I’m a bit of a hypocrite. I haven’t done it very much at all lately. I consult with schools and that’s my “excuse” - I’m around kids and educators all the time! But it’s not the same as actually teaching kids. I hereby commit to making the time to sub more soon. Hold me to it!]

Option 2:

Do away with ed prep programs entirely. Instead, take more of a vocational school approach. Districts “sponsor” promising individuals with bachelor’s degrees and require the following:

• Test for expertise in content knowledge like our current system (e.g. Praxis exams)

• Require future teachers to “apprentice” under 4-5 experienced teachers for at least a year

• Spend the final months of that year co-teaching and assuming increasing responsibility

  • This stint could serve as an extended job interview for the sponsoring district

• Accept a job with realistic expectations of the profession (and zero grad school debt)

I know this isn’t going to bridge the chasm between education theory and practice, but it seems like a step in the right direction.

Agree? Disagree? What would you add? Let me know in the comments, reply to this email, or complete this short poll.

Thanks so much for reading the first installment of “Mike’s Midweek Musings.” I’ll have more to share in the coming weeks. In the meantime, keep an eye out for our regularly scheduled “Inspo Vids” email this Saturday.

Cheers,

Mike

P.S. If you’d rather not receive these midweek messages but would still like to receive the Saturday emails, you can do the following:

1. Login to Substack

2. Go to “Settings” and select “Hey, Mike Alpert!”

3. Toggle the “Midweek Musings” notifications to “off”

Don’t forget 10% off your subscription! Expires October 25th!

Get 10% off for 1 year

Need more reasons? Check out the insane value of becoming a paid subscriber!

What?! Mike’s emailing me on a Monday?

Sorry. It won’t happen again.

But, I will start dropping you notes on the occasional Wednesday. I’m launching a new section of the newsletter called “Mike’s Midweek Musings.”

You see, I come across so many things of value in my day-to-day work as a content creator and curator for school leaders. Some include:

• Useful leadership concepts - often from outside of education

• Very short updates on edu research that I find fascinating

• LOL-worthy memes, quotes, and pics that just might help you make it through the week with your sanity (at least partially) intact

So, keep an eye out. The first volume will drop this Wednesday.

Notice that I said “occasional” Wednesdays above. I’ll only send these as I have truly valuable things to share. Not enough value = no email for that week. You can rest assured each message contains something you didn’t know you couldn’t live without.

If you’d like to continue receiving my regular Saturday and monthly emails, but not these new messages, simply go to Settings > Hey, Mike Alpert! and toggle “off” notifications for “Midweek Musings.”

Thanks again to all of you fine folks. I greatly appreciate your support. Have a fantastic week!

Mike