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Lessons In Leadership is an ongoing series in which K-12 Dive talks to principals and superintendents about their best practices as well as challenges they’ve overcome.
Krish Mohip says he had a faster-than-expected path into administration.
The superintendent of Illinois’ Proviso Township High Schools District 209 began his career as a teacher in nearby Chicago Public Schools in 2000, and had moved into administration as an assistant principal by the time he was 27.
“I remember telling my wife I wanted to be a principal by the age of 40, and I started exploring that pathway,” Mohip told K-12 Dive. “I figured I’d do some interviews and just see what the process is like.”
In fact, he became a principal by 30.
After interviewing for four schools, he received job offers to lead two of them. One was on the city’s North Side, near Wrigley Field. The other? John A. Walsh Elementary, then one of the lowest-performing schools on Chicago’s South Side, in the heavily Latino neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village.
“I chose that, because my passion’s always been around supporting low-income Black and brown students, especially,” Mohip said. “I’m a minority myself and grew up with some challenges, so I really wanted to serve in that type of population.”
Over seven years, Mohip’s leadership lifted Walsh’s performance to the point that he caught the attention of Chicago Public Schools’ then-CEO, Barbara Byrd-Bennett. He became deputy chief of schools and was placed in charge of improving dozens of other schools in the district.
Mohip was ultimately recruited by state leaders in Ohio to help lead its takeover of Youngstown City Schools, where he spent three years and contributed, he said, to a 15% graduation rate increase and substantial narrowing of achievement gaps.
Following multiple positions at the Illinois State Board of Education that included chief education officer, he became superintendent of Proviso Township High School District in 2024. The 4,200-student, grade 9-12 school system is headquartered in the Chicago suburb of Forest Park, Illinois.
Since taking the reins, he has overseen improvements in reading and math proficiency, reductions in chronic absenteeism, efforts to address leadership challenges in one high school, and the launch of a “CARE Center” that aims to avoid out-of-school suspensions by providing students access to educators and clinical social workers to address underlying issues and help the high schoolers remain connected to instruction.
K-12 Dive recently caught up with Mohip to learn more about his philosophy on school turnarounds, best practices for addressing chronic absenteeism, and his advice for other administrators.
Editor’s note: The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
K-12 DIVE: With the experience that you have overseeing school turnarounds in Chicago Public Schools and in Youngstown, what lessons did you learn that you’re now using in Proviso?
KRISH MOHIP: The No. 1 thing I’ve taken away from all these jobs is that you have to believe it’s possible, and your belief has to become infectious — not only within the school system, but within the community. Turnaround work, transformation work, is not for somebody who doesn’t believe deeply in the ability of students to learn.
My educational philosophy is three simple statements: “All kids can learn, all kids want to learn, and it’s up to the adults to make it happen.”
Those students who are high-achieving, we need to make sure we’re still getting them to meet their goals. And those students who are low-achieving or low-performing, we need to set stretch goals for them so that they can catch up in a certain amount of time.
It’s harder at the high school level, because now you only have four years to get them to catch up. But we’re committed to that.
The culture I’m trying to build here is around the belief that if you provide a high-quality experience for students, they will meet the challenge, and they will exceed it.
My second statement is that all kids want to learn. That’s clear to me, because when you just look at the internet or you look at Google or ChatGPT, students are constantly looking for information. They want to learn, but they may not always want to learn the way we’re teaching them.
Our kids are going to enter a workforce — a world — that’s difficult. And they have to be able to have that persistence. They have to be able to know they can endure hard things. They need to be able to know they can productively struggle.
We want to be able to build that into every class, every single day for them, so it just becomes part of who they are.
Yes, I want to teach standards. Yes, I want proficiency scores to increase. But I also want to prepare them for life. And I believe through our instructional framework, you’re able to do that, because we give kids multiple opportunities to work in groups and to struggle productively and learn to persevere through some difficult and uneasy times.
You mentioned that when you came into the district, there was a building that had some leadership challenges. When you’re coming into a school district that you’re working to turn around, how do you address that?
MOHIP: Entering into any position, the first thing I’m going to do is assess what is happening. Coming into Proviso, I realized that our biggest challenge was at Proviso West High School. The leadership team there needed more support, so I moved central office into the building, and we were there to support that administrative staff and the teachers in real time.
It wasn’t about sending leaders to a training. It was really about just being there to help support them, to help them build the systems, to help them strategize on how things were going to run, and then gradually release our support so they could do it without us.
From doing that, we were able to get students back into the classrooms. We had a big problem with students not going to class, even if they were in the building. We really built structure and systems into the school day.
This one really sticks out to me, because a girl came up to me as she was entering the building, and she just stopped me and said, “Thank you.” And I’m curious, like, “Why are you thanking me?”
And she’s like, “This place finally feels like a real high school.”
That really stopped me in my tracks, because at that point, I realized that the kids actually wanted this. They wanted more structure. They wanted to really feel like they were in high school. They wanted people who were going to place importance on them having a good academic day, and we were doing that.
We were holding them accountable, we were talking to families, I was doing home visits — everything that I could do to let people know that it’s important for kids to be in school, and it’s important for us to build that partnership.
When it comes to leadership, it’s really not about any one leader. What I have seen, time and time again, from being in Chicago to being in Ohio to being here, is that sometimes we entrust leadership solely on those who are in leadership positions, and we don’t build leadership teams that include some of the most important stakeholders, which would be our teachers and our students.
When you talk about the improvements you’ve had with absenteeism, what are some of the factors that you’ve found have high rates of success as far as encouraging kids to be in school?
MOHIP: It was two things: It was communication, and it was accountability.
The communication part was informing the students of the importance of being in school, and also informing parents when students were not in school.
There were no real consequences assigned to it, so we created a system where we did have consequences. We would provide detentions, lunch detentions — different strategies that principals would use, but we wanted to be consistent about that.
We also wanted to make sure parents knew, so we’ve moved to a system now where, anytime a student is late or misses a class, the parents will get a note. If students cut all their classes or if a parent doesn’t call the school to let us know they’re not going to be in school, parents are going to get a phone call or text message after every missed period.
That has really helped. We’ve gotten some complaints from parents about that, and this kind of leads to a conversation around the importance of their children going to school or them calling to let us know their child won’t be in school. If we don’t know, we’re going to treat them as truant and continue our outreach.
Something else we created around the communication piece is a BAG report. BAG stands for behavior, attendance and grades.
Every week, we send this BAG report home. One, we put in the hands of students an actual physical piece of paper, because I still strongly believe in putting paper in kids’ hands and letting them see their behavior, their attendance and grades for the week. We also email it to parents, because I’m also aware that many of our students will not show their parents their BAG reports — especially if it’s not the greatest news.
I think parents have really appreciated getting that information — not just waiting for progress reports or report cards, but really being proactive and communicating with parents around those three aspects of how well their students are performing
Then what we do with those BAG reports is we’ve built student support teams that meet weekly and review the data from the cohort of students they’re assigned to, so we could start building interventions for students based on how they’re doing in school, how they’re doing with coming to school, and how they’re behaving.
When it comes to other leaders who may be approaching school turnarounds, what would be your biggest piece of advice?
MOHIP: My biggest piece of advice is stay focused on the things that matter. Stay focused on the things that are going to drive student performance outcomes.
There are a lot of things that can pull your attention away, but you have to stay focused on teaching and learning, on your standards, and on ensuring that every single student has high-quality instruction aligned to state standards every single day in every single class.
That has been my mantra from day one: “Every kid, every class, every day.”
That’s the focus and that’s the intensity for any superintendent or any school leader who’s working in conditions like this.