For years, an unspoken tension has shaped financial decision-making across many schools: How to balance budgets while ensuring every student — especially students with disabilities or learners from other historically marginalized groups — has access to the support they need to succeed.
This tension shows up in real and measurable ways. While many students are making academic progress, gaps persist for those who need the most support. According to the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), between 2022 and 2024, Tennessee students experienced overall gains in reading and math — progress worth celebrating. But during that same period, outcomes for students with disabilities moved in the opposite direction, with fourth-grade reading scores declining roughly 5 points. These results reflect a broader reality: even as systems improve, not all students are experiencing that progress equally.
Tennessee has taken important steps to close this gap. In 2022, Tennessee made significant progress to ensuring all students have the support they need to succeed with the passage of the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement (TISA) Act, which allocates funding based on students’ unique learning needs. But even against that backdrop, the tension between budget constraints and equitable access remains a daily reality for schools and the finance leaders running them.
Too often, finance systems are treated as constraints rather than tools that help schools expand education for all students. At SCORE, we’ve seen what’s possible when finance leaders are empowered to lead with shared values, curiosity, and collaboration. Budgets become one of the most powerful tools a school has to serve all students, especially students with disabilities. That conviction was at the heart of the Finance Leaders Cohort, a 15‑month cohort experience led by SCORE and All Means All and designed to reimagine the role of finance leadership in public charter schools.
The Current Challenge
Across the field, finance teams are often expected to be technically excellent but are rarely positioned as partners in shaping school culture or academic decision-making. The result shows up in familiar ways: budgets rolled forward year after year without asking who they truly serve; special education funding absorbed into general line items with little visibility; academic and finance teams talking past each other instead of solving problems together.
The Finance Leaders Cohort started from a different premise: CFOs and finance leaders don’t just manage resources, they shape beliefs, behaviors, and priorities across a school ecosystem.
A Different Kind of Leadership Development
Launched in Nashville, this pilot cohort brought together eight finance and executive leaders from seven public charter school networks whose schools collectively serve approximately 5,000 students across Nashville and have a significant share of English learners and students with disabilities. Over 15 months, participants engaged in monthly one-on-one coaching and three in‑person convenings centered on a core question: What would it look like if finance truly operated in service of all students, including those with the greatest support needs?
Rather than focusing solely on processes or budgeting, the cohort emphasized adaptive leadership — helping finance leaders examine mindsets, build trust across teams, and practice collaborative problem‑solving with academic and student support partners. Technical skill mattered, but culture and deep collaboration were the key factors to unlock change.
By the end of the cohort, participants — and their colleagues — reported a significant shift. Academic leaders rated finance participants nearly twice as high as peers in comparable organizations across key indicators. These gains were most evident in how leaders understand and act on aligning resources to student needs and school mission, make equity-driven decisions, and collaborate across functions.
Participants themselves described the experience as a reset, an opportunity to move from scarcity-driven decision-making and toward a leadership approach rooted in possibility. Leaders also shared tangible changes, from redesigned budget processes to clearer goal-setting frameworks, showing how values-first finance can take shape in practice.
What This Means for the Field
The lessons from this pilot extended beyond a single cohort. They point to a broader opportunity for the sector: Finance leaders play a critical role in ensuring schools deliver on their mission and promise to serve all students.
The shifts we saw in the Finance Leaders Cohort didn’t require new funding streams or perfect conditions. They required leaders — especially finance leaders — to make intentional choices about how they show up as partners in advancing student outcomes. For schools and systems interested in making similar changes, a few lessons stand out:
Start by naming beliefs, not just line items.
Budgets reflect values, but they are also shaped by deeply held assumptions about what should be prioritized, what is “fair,” and where responsibility begins and ends. When finance and academic leaders create spaces to surface and examine these beliefs together, they often unlock the first real opening for change. And when those beliefs shift, so does what feels programmatically possible. Creating space for finance and academic leaders to surface and examine these beliefs is often the first step toward meaningful change.
Redefine the role of finance leadership.
When finance leaders see themselves as partners, not just stewards of compliance and cash flow, their work looks different. This means investing in adaptive leadership skills alongside technical expertise and expecting finance leaders to engage as thought partners in service of student outcomes.
Build shared ownership across teams.
The strongest shifts happened when finance, academics, and student support leaders worked together to solve problems, rather than handing decisions back and forth across silos. Schools can start small by redesigning budget conversations to focus on impact, trade-offs, and learning instead of simply approvals.
Make equity visible in financial systems.
Funding streams intended to support students with disabilities and other high-need students should not disappear into general budgets. Schools that want to serve all students well must build systems that make it easier to track, discuss, and learn from how resources are allocated and whether they are reaching the students they are meant to support.
Invest in community and learning.
Finally, this work is hard to do alone. Finance leaders in the pilot grew fastest when they were part of a community that normalized struggle, encouraged reflection, and modeled what values-aligned leadership can look like in practice.
None of this happens overnight. But as this pilot showed, when schools are willing to position finance leadership differently — and support leaders in meeting that expectation — budgets can become a powerful lever for expanding opportunity. At SCORE, this work reinforces a core belief: When we align systems, leadership, and values, the question shifts from “Can we afford to do this?” to “How do we make this possible?”
To learn more about All Means All, SCORE’s partner in the Finance Leaders Cohort, visit amaleaders.org.