School districts face a new institutional knowledge challenge

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School district budget pressures and declining enrollment appear to be prompting difficult decisions about staffing, services, and school operations. According to RAND’s report, 54% of district leaders identified budget shortages as a top-three concern in 2026, while 36% cited declining enrollment. As districts consider personnel reductions and, in some cases, school consolidations, those decisions may also affect something less visible on a budget sheet: the institutional knowledge built through years of experience.

That distinction matters when districts evaluate the consequences of downsizing. A position could be filled through a conventional hiring process, while the knowledge accumulated by the person who previously occupied it may take considerably longer to recreate. A veteran teacher may understand how an intervention system evolved, which practices have worked with particular students, and why certain past reforms encountered resistance. A principal may know the history behind community relationships or board expectations. Much of this knowledge is often tacit, embedded in experience and professional judgment, making it difficult to capture through ordinary personnel records.

The financial environment can make this consideration especially relevant. RAND reports that district leaders have described rising costs for transportation, utilities, facilities, employee compensation, special education, and instructional materials, while revenues in some districts have struggled to keep pace. Leaders also reported that budget reductions can place additional pressure on staffing and services. For districts already managing declining enrollment, the resulting decisions may extend beyond a financial spreadsheet into questions about how expertise is retained as organizational structures change.

Teacher workforce conditions seem to add another dimension. RAND’s survey found that 55% of K–12 public school teachers reported frequent job-related stress, compared with 34% of similar working adults. Eighteen percent said they were likely to leave their current job by the end of the 2025–26 school year, while nearly one-third reported holding an additional job outside their school system. Such pressures may make institutional knowledge especially important. When experienced educators move on, districts may need systems capable of transferring expertise before it leaves with them.

For Dr. Thomas Maridada, founder of the Center for Strategic Leadership and Organizational Coherence (CSL) and CEO of the Institute for Organizational Coherence (IOC), the issue reaches beyond conventional succession planning. His experience spans district leadership, national education policy, leadership development, and organizational capacity building. His perspective suggests that turnover can create two distinct vacancies: the visible vacancy of a position and the less visible vacancy of knowledge. “The question is not simply who will replace the person,” Maridada says. “The deeper question is whether the organization has learned enough from that person to continue the work with institutional wisdom intact.”

That perspective could reframe succession as part of educational improvement itself. A district may spend years developing instructional practices, professional learning systems, coaching structures, and leadership routines. If the knowledge behind those systems remains concentrated among a small number of individuals, personnel movement could place some of that accumulated learning at risk. 

The practical implication may be a broader conception of talent development. Districts can often create leadership pipelines well before positions become available, giving teacher leaders, aspiring administrators, assistant principals, and central-office staff opportunities to develop through increasingly consequential responsibilities. Apprenticeships can allow emerging leaders to observe important decisions and understand the history behind major priorities. Peer networks can help expertise move across schools and departments, while mentoring can give experienced educators meaningful roles in developing their colleagues and building instructional capacity without requiring them to leave the classroom.

Maridada concludes that a coherent organization does not merely align its structures around a strategy. An organization could have thousands of collective years of employee experience and still repeatedly make the same mistakes if individuals do not transfer, integrate, implement, and retain their learning. According to Maridada, knowledge moves. It moves from veteran teachers to novices. It moves from effective schools to improving schools. It moves from outgoing leaders to emerging leaders. It moves from professional learning into classroom routines. It moves from individual experience into organizational practice. And eventually, the distinction between what certain people know and what the organization knows how to do begins to narrow.

This is where Maridada’s organizational work connects with a broader challenge facing education. The IOC focuses on leadership development, workforce systems, professional learning, strategic planning, and continuous improvement, reflecting a premise that organizational capability can be strengthened when leadership, talent, instruction, and strategy operate as connected systems. The broader opportunity may be to help districts treat expertise as a shared institutional resource, allowing knowledge to move from experienced educators to emerging leaders and from individual practice into organizational routines.

For teachers, leaders, and students, a knowledge-rich district could create conditions in which each new generation begins with more accumulated learning. A new teacher could draw upon the experience of veteran colleagues. An incoming principal could inherit context alongside a school improvement plan, while an emerging superintendent could gain access to the reasoning behind longstanding priorities. Educational improvement might then become more cumulative, with institutional memory supporting continuity even as people and roles change.

That possibility can often offer a useful test for school systems navigating an era of financial pressure and personnel movement. Organizational resilience may depend partly on whether districts can preserve and distribute the knowledge their people develop. “The strongest organizations may be those that become more capable because their people have shared what they know, developed who comes next, and transformed individual experience into collective capacity,” Maridada remarks. In that sense, succession planning may represent something larger than preparing for departures. It may be a way of ensuring that the learning of one generation can become the starting point for the next.