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No matter if you’re a School Head, Admission Director, Development Director, Board member, or any other private school administrator—Ideas & Perspectives, ISM’s premier private school publication, has strategic solutions for the pervasive problems you face.
- Tuition not keeping pace with your expenses? In I&P, explore how to use strategic financial planning to create your budget and appropriately adjust your tuition.
- Enrollment dropping off? Discover how to implement the right admission and enrollment management strategies that engage your community—and fill your classrooms.
- Trouble retaining teachers? Learn how you can best support your teachers using ISM’s Comprehensive Faculty Development framework. Your faculty members will become more enthusiastic about their roles—which ultimately improves student outcomes.
- Fundraising campaigns not as successful as you’d hoped? Implement ISM’s practical advice and guidance to build a thriving annual fund, construct an effective capital campaign, and secure major donors—no matter your community size or location.
- Not sure how to provide professional development—for you and your staff? Learn ways to develop and fund a successful professional development strategy. You can improve teacher-centered satisfaction and growth, which in turn strengthens student-centered learning.
- Problematic schedule? You can master the challenges of scheduling with the help of ISM’s practical advice, based on our experience with hundreds of schools and our time-tested theories.
- And so much more.
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See the articles from our latest issue of Ideas & Perspectives.
The ISM Faculty and Management Compensation Survey, 2012-13: School Head Salaries
Volume 38 No. 15 // November 18, 2013
The School Head is the sole employee of the Board, and management of the Head’s compensation is a high priority. Numerous entities are now asking how much compensation is too much for nonprofit CEOs. Never has it been more important that the Board be fully conversant about Head compensation. Only then can the Board determine what adjustments are needed to ensure that the school compensates competitively to retain the Head or enhance its ability to be competitive in its next Head search. Trustees must educate themselves about the marketplace and understand the complexities of the School Head’s job. ISM surveyed a random sample of I&P subscriber schools concerning compensation for faculty and administrators. This article focuses on the survey results regarding the salaries of School Heads at our participating day schools.
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Erroneous Premises Employed in Tuition Setting
Volume 38 No. 14 // November 4, 2013
More than 30 years ago, ISM published a seminal article concerning the wrongful thinking often used when setting tuition. The article intended to help school leaders understand that pricing included a complex array of decision points, and that much of the “common wisdom” concerning tuition was incorrect. School leaders—notably the Board, School Head, and Management Team—must understand these variables to safeguard the school’s value proposition. Let’s re-examine four of the most prevalent erroneous premises.
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Faculty Ownership vs Buy-In
Volume 38 No. 14 // November 4, 2013
The private-independent school in 2013 is, in its context, radically different from the same school 20 years earlier in 1993. We note just some of those differences. Today, competition is fierce with public schools, magnet schools, charter schools, and other private-independent schools, with all touting their march to excellence. We have just gone through the second most severe recession in the last 100 years. Facebook and other social media networks exist. The smart phone exists. Free courses from Harvard, McGill, and Oxford are now available online. Private-independent school parents are of the Y Generation.
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The Benefits of Schedule Design Change
Volume 38 No. 14 // November 4, 2013
The schedule is important as a reflection and “interpreter” of your mission.1 It determines what is deemed important, decides who is important, reflects the power structures of the school, forces actions by students and adults whether desired or not, influences issues of discipline, can mitigate or exacerbate stress, and enhances or detracts from academic performance. Its importance has been underestimated, and thus its change power not clearly understood. That power relates to the school’s mission, to the school’s strategic direction, to the school’s 21st century character, and to its influence on student and faculty culture.
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Your School's Statement on Diversity
Volume 38 No. 13 // October 16, 2013
To establish institutional commitment to—and authenticity about—diversity, be sure to clarify and formalize the school's "case" by crafting a Statement on Diversity. This statement complements your school mission statement, especially by providing language to describe the kind of human community that distinguishes your school and supports its educational purposes.
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Teaching as Leadership: ISM Research
Volume 38 No. 13 // October 16, 2013
In a recent article on faculty as leaders, ISM identified four actions that faculty leaders take—they assume control of their own growth and renewal, take control of their own curricula and assessment, use time to define and improve their work, and strive to be paid according to the merit of the work they do. This article takes another step further by examining the qualities of leadership and the qualities of teaching to see how the former might be enhanced.
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Tuition Discounts and Your School's Sustainability
Volume 38 No. 13 // October 16, 2013
Schools use a variety of discount strategies, including tuition remission, sibling discounts, and full-pay discounts. ISM refers to these as category discounts, meaning that, because an enrolling student falls into a predetermined category, the discount is automatically awarded. This strategy can needlessly reduce net revenue per student and is a practice that should be reconsidered by most independent school leaders.
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ISM's Relational Coaching Model
Volume 38 No. 12 // September 18, 2013
Coaching is a career-long conversation between teachers and their individual coaches about the high-order professional/technical understandings and behaviors that collectively become difference-makers in the lives of students. In a previous article on distributed leadership, ISM identified coaching as a key skill for school leaders. Coaching is intrinsic to faculty evaluation as we have described it in ISM’s Comprehensive Faculty Development Model™. Coaching is also clearly implied for School Heads in the School Leadership Points of Emphasis. In this article, we outline the ISM Relational Coaching Model. While coaching is a form of communication, it is a specialized subset that requires training and practice.
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Defining Diversity in Your School’s Culture: Implications for Planning
Volume 38 No. 12 // September 18, 2013
We want more diversity. This phrase is often uttered during the brainstorming stages of a private-independent school’s strategic planning sessions, followed by nods of assent from other Trustees. Much informal agreement may be expressed on this general proposition; however, planning problems can ensue if key steps are not taken. Several years in the future, planners or constituents might say, “You know, we wanted more diversity but we haven’t done much about it.” A Board of Trustees or other group that wants to include “more diversity” as a planning item should consider the following three questions.
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Tuition Increases and Faculty Compensation
Volume 38 No. 12 // September 18, 2013
The seemingly dramatic increase in private school tuition between 1990 and 2010 is largely accounted for by the increase in faculty compensation over the same period. It seems that the competitive market for excellent faculty is dictated largely by public schools—not surprising, considering they employ the largest number of teachers.
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