You know what advocacy can look like when you’re a school counselor? Printing the same appropriate and inappropriate duties list for the third time. Pulling your use-of-time data. Highlighting the ASCA standards. Preparing your talking points before you walk into your principal’s office. Explaining, once again, why coordinating testing isn’t school counseling.

Your administrator nods. They understand… and nothing changes. So you try again. You pull better data and a different argument. Another conversation is had and still nothing. By the time National School Counseling Week rolls around, you’re sharing graphics about the importance of school counselors while spending your actual workdays doing things that have very little to do with counseling.

That’s a pretty uncomfortable contradiction. It also raises a question I think our profession needs to ask: What if we’ve gotten really good at awareness, but not nearly as good at advocacy?

We’ve Confused Getting the Message Out With Creating Change

School counselors hear a lot about advocacy. We’re encouraged to explain our role, educate administrators, share data, communicate our value, tell our stories, contact legislators, participate in awareness campaigns, and make school counseling more visible.

None of those things are inherently bad. In fact, they’re important. The problem is that we’ve started treating the communication of a message as though it is the same thing as changing a system when it isn’t. A graphic about school counselor ratios is awareness. A post explaining appropriate and inappropriate duties is awareness. A position statement is information. A presentation about comprehensive school counseling is information. A letter to your principal can be advocacy, but it can also simply be communication.

The difference isn’t necessarily what you say. The difference is what you’re trying to change and whether your strategy has a realistic path to changing it. That’s where I think our profession needs to get much more honest.

The Question Isn’t Whether the Information Is Good

School counseling has plenty of information. We have standards, research, national data, and position statements. We have statistics about caseloads, inappropriate duties, student mental health needs, and the impact of school counseling services. We definitely aren’t lacking evidence.

ASCA’s 2025 State of the Profession data, for example, reported that 59% of school counselors identified inappropriate duties as a significant challenge. The national counselor-to-student ratio remains substantially above the recommended 250-to-1 ratio. Those are powerful numbers. The question isn’t whether the data matters. The question is: What are we doing with it?

If we know that a significant portion of school counselors are being pulled into inappropriate responsibilities, what changed because we know that? If we know national caseloads remain substantially above recommended levels, what changed because we know that? If we know school counselors are struggling with role confusion, workload, and systemic barriers, what changed because we know that? That’s a very different standard.

It’s also the standard we already expect school counselors to meet in our own work. We don’t say, “I ran a small group, so that’s good enough.” We ask what happened. What changed for students? What outcomes did we see? What evidence tells us the intervention worked? We should be willing to ask the same questions about advocacy.

Awareness Is Not the Finish Line

Think about National School Counseling Week. It can be wonderful to see school counselors celebrated. It’s encouraging to see teachers, administrators, parents, and communities recognize the work counselors do.

Visibility matters, but visibility isn’t the same thing as systemic change.

Your principal can post about how amazing school counselors are and still give you three additional non-counseling responsibilities. Your school board can celebrate counselors publicly while maintaining staffing ratios that make meaningful services nearly impossible. A legislator can like your post about school mental health and still vote against the funding that would actually increase access.

That’s the trap. We can feel like we’re doing something because we’re participating in the conversation. Meanwhile, the conditions we’re talking about remain exactly the same. A louder message isn’t necessarily a stronger strategy.

This Isn’t Just About ASCA

This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable. Professional organizations absolutely have a role in advocacy. ASCA does legislative work, coalition work, government relations, position statements, research, and member mobilization. Those efforts matter. This isn’t an argument that ASCA does nothing. It’s a bigger question about how our profession defines successful advocacy.

If we’re asking individual school counselors to demonstrate the impact of their work, shouldn’t professional advocacy be evaluated by impact too? Not just: Did we publish the report? Did we release the infographic? Did we send the letter? Did we participate in the coalition? Did school counselors share the campaign?

Those are activities.

The more important question is: What changed? That’s the piece I think we’ve been missing. If the profession is telling school counselors to collect data, communicate it effectively, take it to decision makers, and demonstrate outcomes, then shouldn’t the organizations representing school counselors be held to a similar standard? Show us the impact. Not just the toolkit. Not just the campaign. Not just the data. Show us what moved.

Your Administrator May Not Be the Problem You Think They Are

There’s another important piece here for individual school counselors. Sometimes we’re advocating against the wrong obstacle. You might believe your principal needs to understand that testing coordination isn’t an appropriate school counseling responsibility. Maybe they already understand. The problem may be that the district has assigned testing coordination to your building or your position and your principal doesn’t have the authority to change it.

Maybe your superintendent knows your caseload is too high but doesn’t have funding for another position. Maybe your administrator understands the importance of protected counseling time but has 14 other competing priorities and keeps choosing the immediate crisis.

Maybe everyone agrees with you, and still, nothing changes. That’s not necessarily a communication failure. It’s a strategy failure. You are trying to solve a problem by increasing understanding when the actual barrier might be money, authority, staffing, policy, competing priorities, politics, or organizational structure. No amount of highlighting the ASCA document changes that.

Start Measuring Your Advocacy Differently

Before your next advocacy effort, I want you to ask yourself three questions.

What will actually change if this works? Get specific. Don’t settle for “they’ll understand my role better.” What decision, behavior, resource, responsibility, policy, or condition will actually be different?

Who has the power to make that change? Not who supervises you. Not who is easiest to reach. Who actually has the authority to make the decision you’re trying to influence?

What would make that person willing or able to make the change? This is where advocacy gets much more strategic. Maybe they need different data. Maybe they need a solution to the problem your request creates. Maybe you need to build support from other stakeholders. Maybe you need to demonstrate an outcome they care about. Maybe the person you’re talking to isn’t the person who can solve the problem at all. Those are very different strategies than simply explaining your role again.

We Didn’t Fail. We Were Using the Tools We Were Given.

There’s something I really want school counselors to hear. If you’ve been advocating for your role for months or years and nothing has changed, that doesn’t automatically mean you’re bad at advocacy. You may have been doing exactly what you were taught. You’ve been communicating. Educating. Sharing information. Showing the data. Making the case.Those things have value, they just aren’t the whole picture.

Information can support influence but it cannot replace influence. That’s the distinction I want us to start making. If we keep telling school counselors that the answer is simply to explain themselves better, we’re going to keep putting the responsibility for systemic problems on individual counselors, and that’s not fair.

You don’t need another prettier infographic explaining why school counselors matter. You need to understand what actually moves decisions inside systems. You need to know where authority lives. You need to understand what your decision makers care about, what constraints they’re operating under, and what would make change possible.

You need to stop measuring success by whether someone nodded and said, “I understand.”

Start measuring it by what happened next. Did anything change? That’s the question, and maybe it’s time for school counseling advocacy to start asking it, too.

If you’re ready for more honest conversations about what school counseling actually looks like inside real schools, that’s what we’re building through the School for School Counselors Hub, Blog, and Mastermind. Not another place to collect information, but a space to think through what to actually do with it.

Because our profession doesn’t need more people who can explain the problem.

We need more people who know how to move it.