The School Counselor Advocacy Trap

The MTSS Assignment Trap

You are back on campus, new school year. And in that first week back, your principal pulls you into a meeting and says, Hey, we need you to lead MTSS this year. You know that is not your role. You know it. So you advocate. You pull the responsibilities list. You explain what school counselors are trained to do. You show the data. You reference the standards. And your principal nods. They say, I totally understand. And then they ask you to do it anyway. That is a pattern. I have watched happen more times than I can count. And in fact, I have heard three different school counselors tell me about this starting up in just the past week. So what do you do? You try again in September. Better data this time, a different angle. You request a meeting, you make the case, nothing changes. In October, you mention it again, and you are told in no uncertain terms, there is no one else to do it. You get the message. If you want to keep your job, you'd better stop bringing it up. So by November, you do. December and January are a blur of more meetings, data entry, and intervention tracking that has nothing to do with what you were trained to do. And then it's February, National School Counseling Week. You upload the graphic, you tag AskA, you tag your state association, you add the hashtags, you share the ratio stat, your principal likes your posts, a couple of teachers share some of them, and your mom leaves a row of heart emojis. And you are supposed to feel celebrated, but you don't. You feel like a fraud. Because you've just spent five months trying to advocate for your own role at your school and nothing changed. And now you're posting a graphic about the importance of school counselors while spending your actual days doing something that isn't school counseling. So what is this? Is it advocacy or is it just awareness? Hey

Advocacy Or Just Awareness

school counselor, welcome back. Last week we talked about the frustrating moment when your administrator understands your school counseling job perfectly well, but still asks you to do the non-counseling things anyway. And that sent me looking at something bigger. What exactly have we been calling advocacy in this profession? Because the more I looked at the way we're taught to advocate, both individually and collectively, the more I started wondering whether we've confused getting the message out with actually changing anything. So, if you're ready for some straight talk, my friends, some clarity on your work, and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you are in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast.

Why This Conversation Feels Risky

You probably aren't supposed to do this in podcasting, but I want to be straight with you right from the start. This was a hard episode to write. And in fact, it's being released a day late because I wanted another 24 hours just to sit with it, to go back through what I've said, and to make sure that I was being fair. Fair to AskA, fair to you, fair to everyone doing this work of school counseling. And I want to be fair to the larger point that I'm trying to make, because this is a tough conversation for the school counseling field. Ask is going to be part of it, but this isn't an episode about tearing down Ask. It's about something that's way bigger. It's about whether we have spent years getting really good at informing people when what we actually needed was influence. So I wanted to get this right. And this started with noticing how often advocacy in our profession gets treated like a communication problem.

How Advocacy Became A Message

Explain your role, show the data, share your standards, make your work visible, tell the story, contact the decision maker, help people understand what school counselors actually do. You've heard some version of that in grad school and at conferences and from state organizations and in professional development sessions. And yes, you've heard it from ASCA. That's why I went to them first. If you want to see what our profession means when it talks about advocacy, their materials are a pretty good place to look. Take ASCA's advocacy toolkit. A lot of the resources in that are designed to help school counselors explain the profession. Role information, position statements, data, infographics, social media resources, and ways to contact legislators. But look at what those tools are designed to help us do. They're helping us communicate the role, explain why it matters, show the data, state the position, contact the decision maker. Basically, they're forgetting the message out. That's information, useful information, and it's important information, but it's information. And that's what made me start looking at advocacy differently. Because if this is the model we're being taught, what happens when our national organization uses that at scale? Before I go any further, I want to be clear. Ask a does advocate for the profession. They publish legislative priorities, they participate in coalition work, they endorse legislation, and they have staff whose responsibilities include government relations. They've brought school counselors into conversations with legislators and in congressional briefings. Those things matter. But the question I'm asking is broader. When a national organization has information, members, research, and a platform, how does all of that become influence? So I went through ASCA's public advocacy materials. I found coalition letters, endorsements, legislative priorities, ASCA joining other organizations around federal issues. And again, those are advocacy activities. But here's where this starts to matter more directly for you. When you're advocating for your role on campus, you don't get to be the 200th signature on somebody else's letter, right? You don't get to add your name to an existing national campaign and then go back to your office and go back to your day. You are often the person expected to initiate the case and continue carrying it forward. And when AskA does mobilize members, look at what that often asks of the individual counselor.

When Counselors Become The Campaign

Take National School Counseling Week. They ask you to post the message, use the hashtag, share the graphics, send something to your school board, tell people what school counselors do, and explain why it matters. ASCA creates the toolkit, but school counselors are still the distribution system. And the more I looked at that, the more it started bothering me. We're not just the subject of a public awareness campaign, we're the infrastructure that's running it. And think about who you're being asked to advocate to. It's the same people who control your job assignment, your schedule, and in a lot of cases, your evaluation. That is a hell of a lot to put on an individual counselor. Now, I want to be clear about something here. I am not knocking member mobilization. I have been part of really effective member-driven advocacy before in different organizations. And when there is a real strategy behind it, it can be powerful. So the problem is not that ASCA asks you to participate. Of course they should. The question is, what strategy is standing behind all those individual school counselors? Because getting more people to carry a message increases the reach of the information. But influence requires something more. And that's what I went looking for next.

The Data That Should Force Change

Ask has research, real national current research. Its 2025 State of the Profession report found that 59% of school counselors cite inappropriate duties as a significant challenge. More than half point to difficulties with high caseloads, and most are above ASCA's own recommended ratio. ASCA's current national data puts the average school counselor to student ratio at 1 to 372. Only four states nationwide meet or beat the 1 to 250 recommendation. That is not weak data. That is a big story. 59% of a profession says it's being misused. That is the kind of number you could build a tremendous national campaign around. So I looked for that campaign. I read Ask's monthly updates, including the sections where they summarized their media activity. And when I looked, what I found was mostly reactive. Ask a staff serving as expert sources for stories other people were already writing. Education Week, U.S. News, Bloomberg, legitimate visibility, but I couldn't find a sustained national public push built around the 59% or the 1 to 372. I couldn't find a campaign saying, here's what this is costing your district, here's what this means for kids, here's what needs to change. I checked the press release archive too. The state of the profession report is there, the ratio data is there, alongside ramp announcements, certifications, board elections, school counselor of the year recognition. All legitimate things, but the question I couldn't get past was, what did they make happen with what they learned? Because publishing the number is information. Putting it in an infographic is information. Handing it to school counselors so they can take it to their own principal's office is information. But what does it look like when a national organization takes responsibility for making that information hard for decision makers to ignore?

Show The Impact Not The Toolkit

And I think there are two things to consider here. The first is impact. We are a profession trained to demonstrate that our work is working. Pre- and post-measures, data-driven decision making, evidence-based practice. Don't just tell me you ran the group, show me what changed. That is the standard that is held up for the profession. So I think it's fair to ask how ASCA evaluates its own advocacy. I'm not asking them to prove that one coalition letter caused one particular policy outcome. Advocacy isn't quite that easy, and I know that. What I'm asking is, what are you trying to change? How do you know whether you're gaining ground? And what are you telling members about what happened? I couldn't find a public answer to those questions in what ASCA publishes about its advocacy. And if we're expected to show the impact of our work, I think it's fair to ask the organization representing us to show the impact of theirs. The second issue is what we do with the data. Ask a teaches school counselors that collecting data isn't enough. We have to communicate it, tell the story, take it to the people who can act on it, and make the case. That's the whole premise of advocacy. So what happens when the national organization has the data? Because they have it and they've had it for quite a while. But really, this isn't just about ASCA. It's about understanding how deeply this model runs through our entire profession. We inform, we explain, we raise awareness, we get the message out, and then we're surprised when understanding doesn't automatically turn into movement. Information is not influence. You can have impeccable information and almost no influence. You can be completely correct about your role and still have almost no influence. You can have the data, the standards, the physician, the research, the recommendation, and still walk out of the meeting with exactly the same testing coordinator assignment you walked in with. Being right is not the same thing as being heard. And being heard is not the same thing as being influential. We have made school counselor advocacy a professional responsibility. We've told school counselors that when people don't understand their role, they need to educate them. Use data, explain your program, make yourself visible. And when the system doesn't change after all that, it's really easy to jump to conclusions. I must not be advocating effectively enough. Maybe I need better data. Maybe I need to be more assertive. Maybe I need to show them that responsibilities list again. But what if the failure was never in what you presented? If your principal's problem is staffing, your ask a position statement doesn't solve that. If the superintendent's problem is money, your ratiographic doesn't solve that. If the district has already decided how testing is going to be coordinated, explaining your appropriate role to your principal doesn't give your principal authority that they don't have. That's an influence problem, not an information problem. And that's the exact same trap we've been looking at this whole episode, just at a different scale.

Three Questions To Build Influence

Okay, so before I leave you, there are three things I recommend you start doing on your campus this week. Before you send the next email, post the next graphic, or pull out the inappropriate duties list again, ask yourself one question. What will actually change if this lands? Not whether it's true or whether it's well written, what changes and for who? And if the answer is someone will understand something they didn't understand before, that's information. Useful, maybe, but it isn't influence. Secondly, look back at your last few attempts at advocacy, the meetings you attended, the data you shared, or the standards you cited. And for each one, ask yourself, after they understood, did anything actually change, or did they just get it and move on? Because understanding something and changing something are not the same thing. And third, this is a harder one, pick one thing on your campus that you've been trying to fix by explaining it better. And ask yourself, who actually has the authority to change this? And what would have to be true before they'd spend time or money on it? You don't have to figure out the answer today, but you need to start asking that question instead of automatically reaching for the list of appropriate and inappropriate responsibilities. And notice, these are the same questions I just asked our national organization. If you want to actually build influence around the thing you've been trying to change on your campus, instead of just getting better at explaining it, that's what we're doing this Sunday inside the School for School Counselors Mastermind. We are running a live project-based advocacy planning session. You're going to bring an important need for your campus, and we're going to show you how to turn that into an advocacy initiative that isn't just another way of explaining your job better, but a way of showing your impact when something actually needs to change. And if you're listening to this show the week that it became live, you can join us for it. Go check out the details in the show notes.

We Did Not Fail

Remember that counselor from the beginning of this podcast episode, the one posting the graphic in February after five months of advocating and nothing changing. I've been that counselor, and I'll bet you have too. And I need you to know before you go, we did not fail. We showed up, we made the case, we did what we were trained to do, and we used the tools this profession taught us to use. Communicating, educating, sharing information, making the case. And that's exactly why I think we need to take a harder look at our advocacy model as a whole. Because information can create understanding, it can clarify and educate, and it can absolutely support influence, but it cannot stand in for influence. And if we're going to keep asking individual school counselors to demonstrate the impact of their work, I think it's fair to ask the organization representing us to do the same. So if I could leave Ask with one question, I would borrow it directly from the standard we hold up to school counselors every day. And that would be this show us the impact. Not the toolkit or the letter or the data. The impact. And really, I think that's the question for all of us. Not just did I make the case, but what actually changed? And next week we're gonna go back inside your building. Because if information is an influence, what actually is? What does it look like to build real influence when you don't have the authority to make changes on your own? That question deserves its own answer in its own episode. Take care.