Christopher HabetlerEducation systems builder · Brooklyn, NY
Give me a problem, I’ll make you a solution.
Custom tools, automated workflows, whatever the thing actually takes. It just so happens that these days the answer is almost always AI, and I know how to build it. Fifteen years inside schools before that, which is the part that makes the AI worth anything.
Forty-five minutes with me. Three hours of your week back, every week.That is one tool, built on your screen and running by the following Monday, for work or for yourself. Then we go find the next three hours.
We built an organization culture that aligned to our mission by working with Chris. He built the capacity of our leadership team, created the systems and tools, and showed us what REAL change management looks like.
Most of a morning on the all-staff email, and it still does not sound the way you wanted.
Thirty minutes after every meeting turning your notes into next steps somebody will actually track.
The daily coverage schedule, rebuilt from scratch, before most people are awake.
Fifty emails waiting when you wake up, and five minutes to work out which two actually matter.
Tracker entry. Nobody has ever enjoyed a minute of it.
And the academic data. Could a teacher act on it Tuesday, or does it sit in a spreadsheet until somebody has four hours?
Or wake up at 3am sure you have forgotten something?
None of that needed a person. Ten custom tools so far, built for school leaders, ops directors, principal managers and academic teams, and together they hand back more than 100 hours a week. Point me at one of these and you get something that pays for itself in days. Some examples:
Academic health system for academic leaders and principal managers
The weekly read on how ninth graders are actually doing, and the artifacts that put it in front of the people who can act: the regional memo, the cusp-student tracker, the meeting agenda, the teacher digest. Cutting it by hand ran about twenty hours over four days, so it did not happen. Now it is in hand every Tuesday.
Coverage schedule maker for ops directors
An ops leader at a mid-sized NY charter had a teammate at her desk before seven most mornings, building the day’s coverage by hand, and it was never a crisis so much as a paper cut she got every morning, the kind of thing that is begging for simple logic instead of a person. She was wary of AI, which I understood, and I built her the tool anyway. Three hours of her week came back, and she is asking what else can work this way.
In her hands now, a couple of iterations short of running itself.
Comms engine for principals, deans, and APs
The emails you dread, drafted in a voice that still sounds like you. Sixteen situations, from the upset family to the hard call to the message after something goes wrong, each one with the moves that make it land. Paste your own draft and it will tell you where it will cost you trust.
Meeting suite for anyone who runs the week in meetings
It writes the prep brief, so you walk in as the most prepared person in the room, captures the notes live and turns them into next steps somebody is actually tracking, and has the follow-ups drafted before you have left the room. All of it wired to your calendar.
In build now.
The house rules bot for anyone tired of hearing “I didn’t know”
Every policy, procedure, routine, expectation and value your school has, in one place a person can just ask. What is the phone policy in the cafeteria. Who covers a callout after 7am. What are we supposed to say to a parent about the new grading rule. It answers in seconds, out of your handbook, in your words.
Scoped and priced per school. Ask me what it would take.
Academic Health Coach live, and free to try
An AI that walks a school leader through their own data and the next move to make. What I am trying to put in there is the judgment I would bring to that conversation, so the read a principal needs is one question away instead of buried in a spreadsheet.
Point this at the work that never needed a person in the first place: the pulls, the formatting, the first drafts, the weekly report nobody wants to build, and the data that has to be reshaped before anyone can even look at it.
Every leadership team I have ever sat with already knows what it should be doing differently, and what it does not have is an hour on a Tuesday to go do it, which is why this rung goes first. Nothing else here is possible until the time exists.
Ten percent of your week is more than 250 hours a year, which is six-plus weeks of your life.
The risk: nothing student-facing, nothing that makes a decision, nothing that leaves the systems you already control, because student privacy comes first here and not in the fine print. If it breaks, somebody does it the old way for a week, and that is the whole of the downside.
Rung two
Systems
The manuals, the operating guides, the review cycles. The things that turn a decision made in August into what actually happens on a Tuesday in February.
A system with nobody free to run it is just a binder, and I have spent fifteen years watching that happen in schools that had done nothing wrong except run out of hours.
These are yours, written down and handed off and running without me, and when a system fails it is almost always because people quietly stopped using it, which you will see coming long before it costs you anything.
Rung three
Thought partnership
This is the part only a person can do: what to do next, which of these three problems is actually one problem, and whether the leader in front of you is struggling or is simply in the wrong seat.
It goes last, though it is the most expensive thing you buy from me, and frankly I would rather you spend that money on judgment than on work a machine should have handled.
It is a conversation, which makes it the lowest-risk thing in the building.
What the first month actually looks like
Week one
A call. You tell me what is eating the week. I tell you honestly whether I can help, and what I would do first. Costs you thirty minutes.
Week two
Forty-five minutes on your screen, in your account, and we build one thing that runs the following week. No prep from you. Nothing to install.
Weeks three and four
That thing runs. You use it, you break it, I fix it. If it is not giving you real time back by the end of the month, we stop, and the whole experiment cost you about an hour.
After that
We pick the next grind. Or we do not. Your call, every time.
The most this can cost you is an hour.
No retainer, nothing to install, no contract to get out of. If the first thing I build does not give you real time back, you have lost a Tuesday afternoon and you keep the tool anyway.
At KIPP, the data systems my team built turned network data into the answers leaders actually acted on. That year 46% of ninth graders across all 48 KIPP high schools finished Q3 at a 3.0 GPA or better, up 6 points year over year.
I was there for version one. Excel trackers, DeansList, the manuals, the playbooks, the audits. Systems were a revolution in schools, and for what it is worth I still think they worked. They also asked more of people than people had hours for, which is why the binder ends up on a shelf by October, not because the system was wrong but because nobody had the Tuesday.
We are not outsourcing the hard work so much as taking the grunt work off it, so that the systems you already believe in finally run the way they were designed to.
A chief operating officer at a large charter school network once told me:
“I don’t understand how you can tell a school everything they’re doing wrong and everything they need to change, and somehow everyone still loves you.”
Far enough from the problem to be objective, close enough to really get it. I brought solutions and I stayed. It is also why the AI never touches the part that needs a person.
The work with Chris deeply accelerated the trajectory of my school, and ultimately the network at large. It was nothing short of transformational, and I do not use that word lightly.
Jerel Bryant · CEO, Collegiate Academies · Louisiana State Principal of the Year
Our school leaders name his coaching and support as having very high impact, and they push hard to get as many ‘Chris days’ at their schools as possible. I would highly recommend Chris to any school, CMO, or district looking to make dramatic improvements.
Doug McCurry · Co-Founder, Achievement First
Chris spent two days with us, but his impression has left a mark for years. In minutes he could identify the root causes of culture breakdowns, and equally important, tools and strategies to dramatically and immediately change them. He is always there for us, to talk, share, empathize and then help me make tough decisions.
Rachel Yanof · Founder, ASU Prep South Phoenix
Chris’s monthly visits were a catalyst for dramatic growth. On our network’s evaluation system, we went from the lowest-performing middle school to the highest-performing in the history of our network. Truly, Chris was no small part of that.
Tom Kaiser · Founder, Authentic Leaders · former Principal, Achievement First Endeavor MS
Fifteen-plus years inside schools, on the side of the table that has to make things run. I coach the people who run schools and build the systems they run on. The AI is the newest tool in that job, not a new job.
The record
100+ engagements across 15+ states. 91% of clients came back year after year. 200+ leaders coached; one earned Louisiana Principal of the Year, then became a network CEO.
Most recently
Senior Director, High School Advancement, KIPP Foundation, 2024 to 2026.
Before that
Habetler Consulting, since 2010. Achievement First, Explore Schools, DREAM, NYC Public Schools, LA Unified, Collegiate Academies, Harvard GSE, UVA Darden.
I advise investors and education companies on the K-12 buying decision: who actually decides, what a school will renew, and why a product that demos beautifully in June is dead by March.
Fifteen-plus years, 100+ engagements across 15+ states, and every one of them from inside the leadership team rather than across the table from it. Four altitudes, four different sets of incentives, and most of what goes wrong in this category happens in the gaps between them.
Mid-level leaders
Deans, coaches, grade-level leads. The daily user, and whether the tool gets opened on a Tuesday in March.
School leaders
The discretionary buyer, and the person whose departure churns the account.
Regional leaders
Standardization pressure, and where school autonomy gets overruled.
Charter CMO executives
The enterprise contract, the procurement bar, the renewal decision.
I built one. I built DeansList and we grew it from 0 to 275 schools; it is now in 1,000+, though I am no longer affiliated with the company.
Then I bought them. At the KIPP Foundation I ran the $10M+ EdTech vendor portfolio, including the national ACT/SAT evaluation across 48 high schools, where we ran structured interviews and elimination rounds on efficacy and pricing and took 15 vendors down to 8 approved.
And I still do the work they are supposed to serve. Fifteen years of it, which is why I can tell you what a school will actually do with one.
Diligence and expert-network calls, category and market reads, go-to-market and pricing for education companies, and advisory retainers. Sessions run 30 to 60 minutes and I take them on short notice.
You do not have time to figure out AI, and you probably cannot afford to keep putting it off either.
I know that is not a fun place to be.
Call me. If you are heading into a launch, a leadership transition, or a stretch that has to go right, the first conversation is free and useful either way. Tell me what you are up against. I will tell you honestly whether I can help, and what I would do first.
Not ready for a call? Two other ways in. Take the three-minute scorecard and get a read on where your week is going. Or name the problem here and I will tell you what I would do first.
