Education systems builder · Brooklyn, NY
Culture and academic systems for schools, networks, and the organizations that serve them. Built with the people who have to use them, so the work holds long after the engagement ends.
15+ years. 100+ engagements across 15+ states. 91% of clients came back year after year.
Some of the organizations I've partnered with
Who I am
Schools don't run on mission statements. They run on systems. For 15+ years I've been building the ones that carry a school from September to June.
I started in the classroom, and everything I've built since is in service of what happens there. That's where the magic happens. As Dean of Students at Excel Academy in Boston, the culture and operating systems I built carried the school's climb from 270th in Massachusetts to the #1 public school in the state, results that still hold today. Those early systems became DeansList, software I co-founded that now serves 1,000+ schools. Lift Consulting came next: fourteen years and 100+ multi-year engagements, with a client list that renewed at 91% year over year because the work was built to outlast me. The deepest partnerships turned into executive chapters, Chief Culture Officer at Collegiate Academies and Superintendent at Brooklyn LAB, before KIPP Foundation brought me in to help drive academic strategy for 50 high schools across 28 regions.
Different rooms, same discipline: find what actually works, build the system around it, train the people who will run it, and hand it off for good. That last part is the point.
Work with me
Fractional, interim, and advisory engagements. Six ways in, one underlying model: diagnose honestly, build the system, train the team, hand it off.
01
Senior strategic capacity on a fractional or interim basis for organizations heading into a launch, a leadership transition, or a year with too much riding on it. Every engagement is built to hand off: the plan, the cadence, and a team ready to run both. The 91% renewal rate happened anyway.
02
The manuals, playbooks, and operating guides that turn decisions into daily practice. I've built roughly 30 school-specific manuals spanning operations, curriculum, instruction, special education, and culture. The first one, Excel Academy's culture manual, became the model and standard for the Building Excellent Schools fellowship.
03
Cohort-based development for new and rising leaders, plus 1:1 coaching for principals and leadership teams. 200+ leaders trained through multi-year cohorts. One principal I coached earned Louisiana Principal of the Year and was promoted to network CEO.
04
Readiness planning and summer launch design, plus the structured review cycles that hold culture and academics through October, February, and the long middle of the year. At Collegiate, the 8-week cycle model produced average annual gains of 3% attendance, 10% student culture, and 14% classroom culture across the first three years.
05
Grading policy, assessment frameworks, progress-monitoring pipelines, and the data-review cadence that makes them stick, from school level to network level. At KIPP, my team's academic health work drove 46% of 9th graders to a 3.0+ GPA in Q3, up 6 points year over year.
06
The intervention architecture from KIPP's 12-region partnership: daily-call protocols, cusp-student tracking, a dedicated adult for every at-risk student, and the meeting cadence that keeps it running. Partner regions cut chronic absenteeism by 8 percentage points since midyear.
Not sure which one fits? Book a call and we'll figure it out together.
Portfolio · Published work
When schools came back from COVID, every leader faced the same question: how do you rebuild trust and put the joy back into a community that has been through it? In 2021, while leading Brooklyn LAB, I served as editor-in-chief of Building Culture Back Better, a practitioner volume on exactly that, written with seven contributing authors from networks across the sector.
It's not theory. It's the playbook we wished we'd had: frameworks a school could run the next morning, drawn from people who had actually done the work. My favorite part was the process itself, recruiting the right practitioners and then helping them shape messy, hard-won ideas into something other schools could use.
Read the full work (PDF)Free PDF. No email gate.
An AI coach that walks school leaders through academic-health routing conversations: what the data says, what to do about it, and who owns the next step. Built on Playlab. Free to use.
Open the appTrack record
Consulting that kept deepening into embedded leadership roles, because the work held.
2024 – 2026
Senior Director, High School Advancement
Drove academic-strategy support for 50 high schools in a network of 28 regions, 278 schools, and 120K students. My team's academic health system put 46% of 9th graders at a 3.0+ GPA, up 6 points year over year. A 12-region chronic absenteeism partnership cut CA by 8 points. Managed a $10M+ EdTech partnership portfolio.
2010 – 2024
Founder & CEO
100+ multi-year engagements across 15+ states, sustained $1M+ annual revenue, and a 91% year-over-year renewal rate. Achievement First's NY elementary schools averaged 11% gains in reading and math across the three years we worked together. Several of those partnerships became the executive roles below.
2021 – 2022
Superintendent
Retained as an executive after a consulting engagement, leading the network through the return from COVID. Edited and published Building Culture Back Better during this chapter.
2016 – 2021
Chief Culture Officer
Seven-school open-enrollment network in New Orleans. Suspensions down 75%, teacher retention at 98%, and the largest CREDO effect size in the country in those years.
Earlier
Co-Founder
School-culture software built from the systems we ran on paper. Now serving 1,000+ schools nationwide.
Earlier
Dean of Students
Led operations, culture, and student support through Excel's climb from 270th in Massachusetts to the #1 public school in the state and National Charter School of the Year. The results have held to this day, and my old job now belongs to a former student. If that's not the ultimate measure of success, I don't know what is.
0+
years building
school systems
0+
multi-year
engagements
0%
year-over-year
client renewal
0+
leaders trained
and coached
0+
schools on DeansList
today
What people say
“The work with Chris Habetler deeply accelerated the trajectory of my school and ultimately the network at large. To this day, when we make decisions, I think about the work that Chris and I did together. Chris's work was nothing short of transformational.”
Jerel Bryant
CEO, Collegiate Academies
“We built an organization culture that aligned to our mission by working with Chris. He built the capacity of our leadership team by increasing their ability to provide feedback, created systems and tools, and showed us what REAL change management looks like.”
Kinnari Patel-Smyth
President, KIPP Foundation
“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, Phoenix Collegiate Academy (now ASU Prep South Phoenix)
“Chris includes the full symphony of strong student classroom management, effective school-wide systems, student investment, teacher-student relationships, joy, character development, and parent relationships.”
Doug McCurry
Co-Founder, Achievement First
“Chris Habetler is one of the nation's leading experts in building high-performing schools. I routinely introduce him as ‘the Michael Jordan of instruction and school culture.’”
Chi Tschang
Founder, Excellence Reflex Consulting · former Chief of Schools, Achievement First
How I work now
The other thing I'm building now is AI operating systems. My own practice runs on one: 100+ custom skills and 18 scheduled automations on top of a 10-database knowledge architecture, handling research, drafting, and follow-through so the thinking time goes where it should.
At KIPP, the AI-driven data systems my team built turned network data into answers school leaders actually used. Your organization can run the same way: practical AI that serves the work, not the other way around.
The first conversation is free, and useful either way.
Book a callWork with me
If you're 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're up against. I'll tell you honestly whether I can help, and what I'd do first.
Book a call