School Counselors: You’re Advocating... So Why Isn’t Anything Changing?

You're standing at the copier, you're printing the ASCA appropriate and inappropriate duties list again,

The Meeting You Dread Again

because you have a meeting with your principal in 20 minutes and you're gonna make your case for comprehensive school counseling again. You've highlighted the important parts. You've pulled your use of time data and you rehearsed what you were gonna say in the car on the way to work. But somewhere between the copier and that meeting, a thought crosses your mind that you immediately try to push away. And that's this. This didn't work last time either. Hey school counselor, welcome back. If you've ever walked out of a meeting wondering why your best case for your school counseling role did not land, why the data, the standards, and the research did not move the needle at your school, today is going to explain a lot. And it's probably also gonna make you a little mad. Not at anybody in particular, but at the assumption underneath a lot of the advocacy advice that we've been given. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity on your work and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you are definitely in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. Let's start with where most of us learn this. When you went through your school counseling graduate program,

What ASCA Taught Us To Do

ASCA was probably everywhere. The national model, ethical standards, mindsets and behaviors, appropriate and inappropriate duties. And advocacy wasn't presented as some optional professional extra responsibility. It's built into the school counseling role. The ASCA national model connects leadership and advocacy directly to promoting systemic change. The ethical standards tell us to advocate for programs free from non-school counseling assignments and to exercise our leadership to create systemic change. And ASCA gets even more specific when it comes to administrators. Their position statement on school counselor performance appraisal says that because many administrators haven't been trained in the ASCA national model, part of school counselor advocacy is informing administrators about the role of a school counselor. The high-stakes testing position statement does the same thing. If you're assigned to an inappropriate role as a testing coordinator, ASCA says school counselors should use advocacy skills to help administrators understand why their time should be spent on appropriate school counseling activities instead. And I want you to notice the logic there. Your administrator doesn't understand the role, so you educate them. You're assigned to something inappropriate, so you help them understand. There's a barrier to your program implementation, so you advocate. And none of that is wrong. Sometimes people genuinely don't know. Sometimes showing your principal how you're spending your time really does make them stop and say, I had no idea. But here's where this gets interesting. Because ASCA has also studied what administrators actually understand about school counselors,

When Leaders Already Understand

and their own research complicates the whole thing. And their own conclusion was that administrators largely understand the role of school counselors. And in the 2025 state of the profession, 65% of school counselors said that their administrators understood the role at least adequately. Then in 2026, ask a survey district-level school counselor administrators. But this time they asked a different question. What actually gets in the way of supporting your school counselors? And listen to what they said. Competing responsibilities, limited time, budget constraints, insufficient staffing. They talked about workload, restrictive policies, additional responsibilities getting piled on school counselors from other departments, and structural problems in how school counseling is supervised. Now, with those problems, has misunderstanding completely disappeared? No. Those same leaders said that getting building level administrators to understand the counselor role is still a major challenge. But that's kind of the point. Because misunderstanding may be part of the problem, but it clearly is not the whole problem. And that's a really important distinction. Because we've spent years telling each other to educate administrators about what our role on campus should be. But what if your administrator already knows? What if your principal knows you shouldn't be coordinating testing? What if your superintendent knows your caseload is too high? What if they understand perfectly well that you need more time with students? Then showing them another responsibilities chart does not solve the problem. Giving them another position statement does not solve the problem. And explaining your role more clearly does not solve the problem. Because you can't solve a problem that isn't caused by lack of information with more information. And once I realize that, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Because if administrators already understand our jobs more than we've assumed they do, then maybe we've been asking the wrong question. Maybe the question isn't how do we make them understand? Maybe the question is, if they already understand, why isn't anything changing? And that is a completely different advocacy problem. Let's talk about testing. You know, ASCA identifies test coordination as an inappropriate

Testing And Caseloads Are Resource Fights

duty for school counselors. Your principal may already know that. They may completely agree with you that spending weeks organizing testing rooms and tracking accommodations and counting secure materials is not the best use of a school counselor. Maybe because somebody has to, and you're organized, you're dependable, you've done it before. And if your principal takes that off your plate, it's not going to just disappear. It's going to land on somebody else's. Somebody who's going to be pretty unhappy about inheriting that responsibility. Or maybe your principal doesn't even have the authority to make that decision. Maybe testing responsibilities were assigned at the district level. None of those problems get solved by showing your principal the appropriate and inappropriate duties list again. Your principal can agree with every word on that page and still say, I hear you, but I don't have anybody else to do it. That is not a misunderstanding. That's an operational problem. Same thing with your caseload. You can show your superintendent that AskA recommends a ratio of 250 students to one school counselor. They may already know. They may even agree that your caseload is ridiculous. But adding another school counselor means another salary and benefits and office space and money that now can't be spent on something else. So you're not really advocating against ignorance. You're competing against other priorities. And that's different. Or maybe you want protected counseling time. Your administrator may completely understand why you need it. But every time there is a crisis, a testing problem, an angry parent, a kid who won't leave a classroom or some other weird situation that nobody knows how to handle, everybody turns to you. That's not necessarily because they misunderstand your role. Sometimes it's because they trust you. Sometimes it's because you're good at figuring things out. And sometimes it's because, honestly, you've spent years being the person that says, sure, I'll handle it. And sometimes it's just because solving that immediate problem matters more

Influence Beats Information

to them in that moment than protecting your counseling time. And again, that is not an information problem. And I think this is where the school counselor advocacy machine gets stuck. Because if we assume that our biggest obstacle is misunderstanding, our response is almost always some version of explain it better, show better data, share the position statement, tell them what school counselors actually do, make the value of your program more visible. And sometimes that's exactly the right approach. But if the real problem is resources, more information isn't enough. If the real problem is competing priorities, more information isn't enough. If the real problem is district policy, more information isn't enough. If changing your set of responsibilities creates a new problem for your administrator, more information isn't enough. And underneath all of that, if the real problem is that you don't have enough influence with the people that can change things, more information is not going to manufacture that influence for you. That is the distinction that we've been missing. Knowing what should happen and having the ability to make it happen are two completely different things. And school counselors, you know this intuitively everywhere else. You can tell a student exactly what they should do, doesn't mean they're going to do it. You can explain something perfectly to a parent, but it doesn't mean they're going to agree with you. You can give a teacher the best behavior strategy in the world, but it doesn't mean that they're going to use it. Because people don't make decisions based just on whether somebody gave them the correct information. So why do we keep acting like the right information is all it takes to change an administrator's mind? And once you see that and you really take a minute and absorb the impact of that, a different question comes to light. If the obstacle isn't that they don't understand, then why have we been told over and over that the answer is to explain it better? Where did that come from? Who built that playbook? And does the evidence actually support it? That's where we're going to go in the next episode. But before you go, think about standing at that coffee machine.

The Teaser And The Real Question

Think about the last time you stood there printing something you'd already printed, highlighting something you'd already highlighted, preparing for a conversation you'd already had many times before. You were doing exactly what you were trained to do. The question is whether your training was helping you solve for the right problem. I'm Steph Johnson. I'll be back soon with the next episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. So keep listening. And in the meantime, take care.