Christopher HabetlerEducation systems builder · Brooklyn, NY
Get the time back to lead.
Low-risk AI takes the busywork. Then the systems that use the time. Then the hard part, which stays yours.
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.
Ten custom tools, and together they hand back 100+ hours a week.
Built for school leaders, ops directors, principal managers, and academic teams. Point me at a problem and you get something that pays for itself in days, sometimes hours, of your time back. Some examples:
Academic health systemfor 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.
An ops leader at a mid-sized NY charter had a teammate burning 6am to 9am every day building the day’s coverage by hand. Not a crisis, a paper cut she got every morning, and it was begging for simple logic instead of a person. She was wary of AI. I built her the tool anyway, and now she has three hours of her week back and is asking what else can work this way.
In her hands now, a couple of iterations short of running itself.
Comms enginefor 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 suitefor anyone who runs the week in meetings
Prep brief before, so you walk in the most prepared person in the room. Notes captured live and turned into tracked next steps. Follow-ups drafted before you have left the room, and the whole thing wired to your calendar.
In build now.
Academic Health Coachlive, and free to try
An AI that walks a school leader through their own data and the next move to make. Coaching judgment, encoded, so the read a principal needs sits one conversation away instead of buried in a spreadsheet.
Low-risk AI pointed at the work that never needed a person. The pulls, the formatting, the first drafts, the weekly report nobody wants to build, the data that has to be reshaped before anyone can look at it.
First because nothing else is possible until the time exists. Every leadership team already knows what it should be doing differently. They do not have an hour on Tuesday to do it.
The risk: nothing student-facing, nothing that makes a decision, nothing that leaves systems you already control. If it breaks, somebody does it the old way for a week. That is the whole 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.
Second because a system with no time to run it is a binder. I have watched this happen for fifteen years. The plan was never the problem.
The risk: they are yours. Written down, handed off, running without me. The failure mode of a system is that people stop using it, and you will see that long before it costs you anything.
Rung three
Thought partnership
The part only a person can do. What to do next. Which of these three problems is actually one problem. Whether the leader in front of you is struggling or in the wrong seat.
Last not because it matters least, but because it is the most expensive thing you buy from me, and I would rather you spend it on judgment than on things a machine should have handled.
The risk: it is a conversation. The lowest-risk thing in the building.
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 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. Because nobody had the Tuesday.
We are not outsourcing the hard work. We are taking the grunt work off it, so the systems you already believe in finally run the way they were designed to.
A chief operating officer at a large charter network once said to me, more or less:
“I don’t understand how you can tell a school everything they’re doing wrong and somehow everyone still loves you.”
That is the job. Say the true thing, and leave the team stronger than you found them. It is also why the AI never touches the part that requires 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
New Orleans. Post-COVID. Day one of school for my daughter. Overwhelmed with emotion, equally excited and terrified, I realized I was handing over the most precious thing in my life to complete strangers. I was putting a tremendous amount of trust in these people to treat her with the love and care that I did, and to see her as the beautiful, special person she is. And it really hit home: the weight of the trust that families had been putting in me for years, and the awesome responsibility that comes with it.
That is the standard the work gets held to. It is also why the same tools end up pointed at my own house.
With Isabel.
Saturday Night Sister Storiesnine chapters and counting
A bedtime series I write for Emmy and Isabel, in which they and their friends find a golden tree in the schoolyard that opens into a candy kingdom. It runs on a story bible and a build script, so nine chapters in, the world still holds together and nobody has been quietly written out.
Dad Slaterunning weekly
An agent that wakes up on its own every week, hunts down what is actually happening in Brooklyn, weighs it against our calendar and the weather, and against the test that counts: what a five and a seven year old will genuinely love. What lands in my inbox is a ranked slate with one starred pick.
The Expanding Galaxylive, and never finished
A Star Wars app I built for the girls and then could not stop improving: an interactive galaxy map, the Skywalker family tree, a full saga walkthrough, and a cockpit flight nav. Fifty-five characters and counting.
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.
Don’t have time to figure out AI, but know you don’t have time to not figure it out?
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.
