The words “strategic” and “academic” are not comfortable partners. Academics is, by definition, an operations responsibility and rightly the province of the School Head. Strategic implies the Board is involved and has a hand in direction and planning. Still, since 2014, schools have been thinking divergently about academics and asked ISM to assist with and partner in developing strategic academic plans, and the demand for this is growing. Placing the words “strategic” and “academic” in juxtaposition could suggest that ISM’s long-held position about separating strategic and operations is compromised. In the 20th century, that would indeed have been true. Then, academics was a fairly straightforward pursuit that required schools to choose between textbooks printed in Ontario, Texas, and California and ensure that teachers were competent to use them in the classroom. The word itself had a limited reach, being typically applied to the disciplines of math, English, social studies, and science, with foreign language included as a suspicious addition. The arts were clearly not academic, and athletics were not connected to academic pursuits although there was obeisance paid to the scholar-athlete (the two words appearing in opposition to each other). In this world, teachers were polite to one another, but rarely worked together outside their silos—whether by grade or discipline. Budgets were based on last year’s expenditures. Curriculum review was incremental. Students were usually the object, not the subject, of the sentence. Rocking the boat was considered both unnecessary and opposed to tradition.