Learn practical strategies to handle emerging trends and leadership challenges in private schools.
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.
I&P has shared targeted research, up-to-date insight, and sound theory with school leaders since 1975. More than 8,500 private school decision-makers find the answers to their schools’ administrative and governance matters in our advisory letter. We give you the strategic answers you need.
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See the articles from our latest issue of Ideas & Perspectives.
2012 Re-enrollment Survey Results—Full Steam Ahead
Volume 38 No. 3 // February 20, 2013
ISM constantly monitors enrollment trends in private-independent schools. Over the past four years, there has been significant angst that economic realities could cause enrollment declines. To monitor this, ISM, working with Hanover Research, conducted the largest parent survey in our history. That survey, and the follow-up surveys since 2009, have all indicated no change in parental intention to re-enroll their children due to economic constraints. To further understand tuition sensitivities, ISM worked with the consulting firm Measuring Success and learned that tuitions over the period of 2003 to 2009 had not reached the “tipping point,” and that perceived value—not price or the economy—was the key difference in determining whether parents would re-enroll.1
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Maintain Personnel Records Diligently to Protect Your School
Volume 38 No. 3 // February 20, 2013
While many schools expend significant effort to manage student records appropriately, they often pay less attention to handling employee records properly. In an increasingly litigious and regulated operating environment, schools must attend to employee records in a consistent and prudent fashion. This article provides record-keeping recommendations for each employee-related process, and describes how to maintain various files and records for the protection of the school and employees.
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Strategic Continuity: The Importance of Board Memory
Volume 38 No. 2 // February 4, 2013
Over the years, ISM’s on-site visits have uncovered a disconcertingly broad range of completeness in the organizational histories provided by school documents and by individuals’ memories. Your school’s “strategic history” provides both constraints and opportunities for its strategic future. As Board President, you should consider a formal review of the quality of your existing historical portrait, take steps to reorganize that portrait if needed, and elevate the quality of your school’s organizational “Board memory.”
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Performance Characteristics for Advancement Professionals
Volume 38 No. 2 // February 4, 2013
By ISM’s definition, advancement refers to the strategic process1 by which a school advances its mission through the integration of its admission, development, and marketing and communications programs. Each specialty area within advancement has particular “performance characteristics” commonly needed to carry out the function with great effectiveness. Identifying the characteristics most pertinent to each role in your advancement area will guide the school in hiring outstanding professionals as well as in coaching, mentoring, and supporting incumbents toward their greatest effectiveness and impact.
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Who Is Responsible for Enrollment Management?
Volume 38 No. 2 // February 4, 2013
In an earlier article, I&P described the activities associated with enrollment management and the seamless relationship between recruitment and re-recruitment. These two functions are responsible for attracting prospective families to the school, encouraging them to enroll, and then educating them about the value of the school’s programs to re-recruit them every year until graduation. An effective enrollment management program is critical to your school. The result of effective recruitment and re-recruitment strategies provides your school with a high percentage of its hard income.
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Antidotes to Board-Level Schizophrenia
Volume 38 No. 1 // January 11, 2013
The business of a school is in its classrooms. Many intelligent, well-intentioned Trustees infer that the Board’s business, too, should focus on day-to-day school operations. As Board President or member of the Committee on Trustees (COT), consider the consequences of this notion, whether you currently observe it on your Board or fear it may develop. Typical ramifications include the following.
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Assessing Your School’s Internal Marketing in Light of the Student Experience Study
Volume 38 No. 1 // January 11, 2013
In an earlier issue of Ideas & Perspectives, ISM provided a means to assess your school’s standing on the second-tier Stability Marker, “internal marketing.”1 Recent ISM research, the Student Experience Study (SES), reinforced the relationship between the predictability and support teachers provide for students and the students’ performance, enthusiasm, and satisfaction. From this research, ISM updated long-used instruments to measure your school’s faculty and student cultures—the Faculty Culture Profile II (FCP II) and the Student Culture Profile II (SCP II). These new instruments are now worded in parallel and develop impressionistic data about the level of the faculty’s predictability and supportiveness in the eyes of the teachers and students.
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21st Century Education and Your School’s Parents
Volume 38 No. 1 // January 11, 2013
ISM has written extensively about the characteristics of 21st century education. The educational landscape has the potential to be vastly different from what it was a few years ago—enhanced technology, pedagogy, facilities, calendar, schedule, etc. When adopting 21st century educational changes, recognize that your school will have a parent education “opportunity” of significant proportions. As School Head, take control of this effort.
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Research Report: Faculty Culture Profile II, Spring 2012 Data
Volume 37 No. 16 // December 11, 2012
ISM published its Student Experience Study 2010–11 outcomes in January 2012, and published related articles in Ideas & Perspectives throughout the spring. Among the features in the report was a revised Faculty Culture Profile—ISM’s longstanding measure of the quality of a school’s faculty culture—along with the study’s statistical findings and two other instruments, the Student Culture Profile II and the Characteristics of Professional Excellence II.
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Business Manager Compensation 2011–12: Salaries
Volume 37 No. 16 // December 11, 2012
School Heads should determine the compensation package that will recruit and retain the best Business Manager possible. Having the right person in this position, one who is capable of covering multifaceted tasks that call for a variety of skills (finance, human resources, facilities management), is crucial in providing the School Head with the support needed.
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