Dr. Monique Lewis, Ed.D.

Dr. Monique Lewis is a Partner at BetterEd Solutions and a nationally experienced educational leader, turnaround principal, executive coach, and systems strategist with more than two decades of experience driving measurable improvement across schools, districts, and leadership teams. Her work is centered on school improvement, transformation and growth, executive and principal coaching, adult learning, organizational culture, instructional leadership, and the development of high-performing teams. Across her career, Dr. Lewis has built a reputation for entering complex environments, identifying the systems and leadership behaviors limiting performance, and helping organizations move from persistent challenge to measurable progress.

Dr. Lewis brings particularly deep expertise in school turnaround. She spent 11 years in principal leadership and was specifically recruited to lead schools facing significant academic, cultural, and organizational challenges. Her approach combines urgent action with systems thinking: strengthening leadership teams, clarifying expectations, rebuilding culture, improving instructional quality, engaging families and communities, using data to drive decisions, and developing the adults responsible for sustaining improvement. She does not approach transformation as a collection of disconnected initiatives; she works to create the leadership capacity, management systems, and organizational coherence necessary for improvement to endure.

One of the clearest examples of Dr. Lewis’s impact came at Central Middle School in Galveston Independent School District. She was recruited as the school’s turnaround principal after the campus had experienced a prolonged period of state accountability challenges. Texas Education Agency records had identified Central as a campus with five consecutive years of Improvement Required or Academically Unacceptable performance as of 2016. After Dr. Lewis assumed leadership, Central earned a B with an overall accountability score of 83 in 2018 and received five of seven available state distinction designations, including distinctions connected to English language arts and reading, mathematics, academic growth, closing achievement gaps, and postsecondary readiness.

The academic result was only one dimension of the turnaround. Dr. Lewis rebuilt the school’s leadership structure, brought a team of experienced leaders into the work, addressed campus violence and safety concerns, strengthened teacher recruitment and instructional capacity, improved student attendance and family partnership, and created a shared vision grounded in the school’s historic significance to the Galveston community. Her leadership demonstrated that sustainable turnaround requires simultaneous attention to academics, culture, people, systems, stakeholder confidence, and the daily conditions in which students and educators work.

Dr. Lewis previously served as Principal of Fondren IB/Magnet School in Houston Independent School District, where she led another significant transformation. She was recruited to guide the school through International Baccalaureate authorization and helped reposition a campus that had struggled with reputation, culture, and enrollment. Under her leadership, Fondren redesigned its master schedule, strengthened instructional expectations, implemented the Leader in Me model, expanded family and community engagement, and established a Newcomer Academy serving students representing 17 countries and 12 languages. The school earned International Baccalaureate status, and public reporting during her tenure documented enrollment growth of approximately 100 students in a single year as families responded to improvements in culture, curriculum, expectations, and safety.

These experiences shaped Dr. Lewis’s belief that school growth is inseparable from school quality. Enrollment, staff retention, family trust, leadership stability, academic performance, and organizational reputation are interconnected. A school cannot sustainably grow if the underlying student and adult experience remains weak. Dr. Lewis therefore helps leaders think beyond short-term performance fixes and build institutions that families want to choose, talented educators want to join, leaders can successfully manage, and communities can trust.

Dr. Lewis later expanded her impact from individual campuses to districtwide adult and leadership development. She currently serves as Executive Director of Professional Learning for Spring Independent School District, where she leads directors and professional learning facilitators in building high-quality development experiences for educators and leaders across the district. Her work includes coaching principals and district leaders, designing professional learning systems, strengthening leadership capacity, translating data and observational feedback into professional development, building university and external partnerships, and presenting strategic work to senior leadership, the superintendent, the school board, and community stakeholders.

Her district-level work reflects the scale at which Dr. Lewis is able to develop adults. Under the Professional Learning department, Spring ISD has expanded opportunities for leaders and teachers to learn collaboratively across campuses and roles. In 2024, the district’s Fall Learning Fair drew approximately 440 faculty and administrators, roughly double the prior year, with more than 60 workshops. In 2025, Dr. Lewis helped frame the district’s Summer Leadership Institute around leadership development, culture, accountability, instructional leadership, and the preparation of campus teams to enter the school year with shared priorities and stronger execution.

Executive coaching is another defining strength of Dr. Lewis’s work. She coaches principals, directors, executive directors, assistant superintendents, and other senior leaders through complex decisions involving performance, people, culture, change, and organizational strategy. Her coaching is grounded in the belief that strong leaders must be able to diagnose systems, manage adults, communicate clearly, use evidence, make difficult decisions, build trust, and create conditions in which other people can perform at increasingly high levels. Rather than treating coaching as advice-giving, she works to strengthen the leader’s own judgment, habits, confidence, and capacity to lead through ambiguity and change.

Dr. Lewis is especially effective in organizations navigating moments when the stakes are high and incremental improvement is insufficient. Her experience includes turnaround leadership, learning recovery, crisis management, data forecasting, instructional improvement, professional learning redesign, International Baccalaureate implementation, school culture transformation, leadership-team development, and organizational change. She has repeatedly worked in environments where leaders must simultaneously stabilize current performance while building a stronger future state, making her a particularly strong partner for schools undergoing transformation, expansion, leadership transition, accountability pressure, or significant organizational growth.

Her approach is deeply relational without sacrificing rigor. Dr. Lewis understands that transformation happens through people, and she invests deliberately in trust, clarity, feedback, and the development of strong teams. At the same time, she is uncompromising about the need for measurable results. She uses data, observation, clear performance expectations, leadership routines, and systems of accountability to ensure that strategic intentions translate into changed adult practice and better outcomes for students.

Dr. Lewis’s leadership has been recognized repeatedly throughout her career. She was named Galveston ISD Principal of the Year in 2022 and was recognized as Principal of the Year by Communities in Schools in 2018. Her work has also received recognition from the City of Galveston, the Texas Legislature and state leaders, Houston Independent School District, and community officials. These honors reflect a professional record defined not simply by longevity, but by her ability to improve organizations, develop people, and produce visible results in challenging educational environments.

Dr. Lewis holds a Bachelor of Arts from Texas State University, a master’s degree in Educational Administration from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a Doctorate in Executive Educational Leadership from Houston Christian University. Her professional development has continued through advanced leadership learning and executive coaching, reinforcing a career-long commitment to the same principle she asks of the leaders she supports: adults responsible for organizations must remain learners themselves.

At BetterEd Solutions, Dr. Lewis serves as a senior partner in the firm’s school improvement, transformation and growth work. She supports superintendents, charter executives, principals, leadership teams, and education organizations through executive coaching, turnaround strategy, organizational diagnosis, leadership development, professional learning, talent and culture strategy, change management, instructional improvement, and implementation support. Within complex engagements, she brings particular strength to talent and workplace diagnosis, leadership capacity, organizational culture, change management, and determining whether an organization has the people and systems necessary to execute its strategy successfully.

Dr. Lewis is a game-changing partner for leaders who know that their organization must become significantly stronger and are prepared to do the work required to make that happen. Her career demonstrates a consistent ability to move between vision and execution, between relationships and accountability, and between the needs of individual leaders and the systems that shape entire organizations. At BetterEd, she contributes to the firm’s vision of transforming schools in our nation’s most underserved communities into happier, healthier, higher-performing places where every child can thrive.