Our Survey History

Almost exactly one year ago, in September 2025, I came across the Gwinnett County Public Schools Effectiveness Survey.

Being a “word person,” one word immediately caught my attention:

Effectiveness.

It is a powerful word—and an important promise. If we are going to measure the effectiveness of an organization, particularly one as large, consequential, and publicly funded as our school district, I believe we should be asking questions that help us understand whether that organization is actually accomplishing what our community needs it to accomplish.

So I took the survey.

And I was surprised by what I found.

In my view, many of the questions collected data points that did not directly measure the effectiveness of the organization. A significant number focused on issues related to diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, identity, and perceptions surrounding those subjects. Whatever one's views on the importance of those topics, I was left wondering how many of the questions would ultimately help district leadership answer some very basic questions:

• Are we effectively educating our children?
• Are our schools improving?
• Are teachers receiving the support and resources they need?
• Can parents communicate meaningfully with their schools and district leadership?
• Are taxpayer dollars being used effectively?
• Is leadership accountable for results?
• Do families trust the organization?
• And are we measuring the things that matter most to student success?

The idea began with something that caught my attention at the very top of the organization.

In January 2025, the Gwinnett County Board of Education voted 3–2 to terminate Superintendent Dr. Calvin Watts'  before his contract expired. The district publicly explained that the Board believed “new leadership” was needed, but its announcement did not identify a specific performance failure or other concrete cause for ending his tenure early. 

What made this particularly striking was that it was not an isolated event.

Less than four years earlier, in 2021, the Board had also voted 3–2 to end longtime Superintendent J. Alvin Wilbanks' contract nearly a year early. That decision resulted in a contract payout exceeding $530,000. 

So within roughly four years, two superintendents had their tenures ended early by the Board of Education. 

And these were not leadership changes at a small organization. Gwinnett County Public Schools is Georgia's largest school district, serving approximately 179,000 students across 143 schools, with a current annual budget of approximately $3.4 billion. 

That raised a much larger question for me.

How does the public actually determine whether an organization of this size is effective?

The five elected members of the Board of Education hold enormous governance responsibility, including selecting and overseeing the superintendent. Yet I was surprised by how many families I encountered who knew very little about these leadership changes—or even about how consequential decisions at the district level were made.

The concern was not simply whether either superintendent should or should not have been replaced. Reasonable people can reach different conclusions about leadership.

The deeper issue was this:

What information should families, educators, taxpayers, and Board members have available to them to make those judgments intelligently?
 

If leadership is performing exceptionally well, the public should have meaningful evidence of that success.

If leadership is failing, the public should have meaningful evidence of those failures.

If a Board determines that a superintendent it previously selected is no longer the right person to lead the district, the community should be able to understand the organization's strengths, weaknesses, priorities, and results well enough to participate intelligently in the conversation about what needs to change and what kind of leadership should come next.

That realization became the starting point for the MEAG Effectiveness Survey.

In November 2026, we're bringing the MEAG Gwinnett County Schools Effectiveness Survey back .

The 2025 survey was a first attempt. What began as a desire for greater transparency has since developed into a much more ambitious question:

Can we build a framework capable of diagnosing how effectively our educational system is actually functioning—from the classroom, to the school, to the district? 

This year we are designing our survey not not merely to collect opinions, but to bring together the experiences of parents, students, teachers, school-based employees and leaders, district employees, and community members and examine those perspectives against common measures of organizational effectiveness.The goal is not to produce a scorecard of who is happy and who is unhappy.The goal is to produce diagnostic organizational information—information that can help identify what is working, where experiences diverge, where systems may be breaking down, and where evidence points toward opportunities for meaningful improvement.