ISM has published before on athletics and character development, including an athletics checklist for schools to employ. However, there seems to be a changed environment for athletics, certainly in the United States. Some schools seem to be getting to the point in secondary athletics (with its trickle-down impact in middle school) where they must make a decision regarding this question: To what extent are we going to allow our school to be driven off course (off mission) to meet the perceived competitive needs of our own and the next (college) level? Just as some schools are (appropriately) moving away from a mass curriculum/testing version of education encapsulated in Advanced Placement,1 so ISM believes that schools need to think carefully about their obeisance to college athletic pressures and focus on their own school cultures.

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One of your most vital tasks as School Head is to supervise your school’s operations. All of your school’s constituencies expect a consistent level of excellence in all the programs and functions. However, while you are responsible for these operational tasks, you are not responsible for actually performing them. Joining you is your Management Team—the deputies to whom you have delegated supervision of various portions of the day-to-day programs and functions. However, always keep in mind that you must hold your deputies accountable for performing their tasks, and that ultimately it is your duty to evaluate them accordingly.

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Each fall, ISM publishes a set of conversion factors to facilitate the recasting of previous tuitions into current dollars. (See the table on the next page.) We continue to use the Urban Consumer Price Index (CPI-U).1 However, we also realize that the CPI-U does not completely reflect expenditures in private-independent schools; it can only serve as a base figure. There are compelling arguments for adjusting your tuition at a rate 2% above the overall inflation rate.

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The 20th Century School has as its educational center the autonomous teacher who exists in an egalitarian culture and is rarely, often never, effectively evaluated for impact on student performance, enthusiasm, and satisfaction. At all levels of the school, teachers are organized into silos of teaching (by grade or by content area) with little effective time within the silo to truly collaborate and professionally assess and grow, and equally little effective time to communicate outside the silo in any meaningful way. Teachers spend most of their time teaching on their own and preparing on their own to teach. Administrative meeting time, regularly scheduled, is universally disliked as irrelevant even though led by School Heads who themselves largely come from the teaching ranks.

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In its work with schools, ISM often hears Development Directors say that the annual fund goal is determined by the Board and School Head, based on the “gap” between expenses and expected revenues (often referred to as the “plug number”) with little consideration of data gathered by the Development Office. Further, the performance of Development Offices is frequently evaluated based on the school’s ability to meet these goals. In ISM’s experience, budgeting for gift income and evaluating the development program in this way provides an inaccurate picture of the school’s financial resources and the true fund-raising potential of the school’s constituents.

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As the Summer Program Director, you want to attract as many participants as you can. Because the program (with the exception of those that offer credit classes) does not have admission requirements, is oriented toward enrichment rather than academics, and is open to almost any student interested in a rewarding summer adventure, you can accommodate as many students as space allows.

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ISM has defined advancement as “the process by which a school supports admission, development, and marketing/communication programs.” To stress its direct relationship to faculty, we will now add another aspect to this definition—“to provide the resources for strong and sustained student performance, enthusiasm, and satisfaction.”

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Since some private-independent school Boards use, or are considering, the Carver Model of Governance, and since ISM is occasionally asked its view on that model’s efficacy in the private-independent school context, we offer the following opinions.

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As the de facto “risk manager” at most private-independent schools, the Business Manager is usually responsible for ensuring that the school maintains insurance coverage that is appropriate to its many legal, financial, and environmental risks. The legal vehicle through which we transfer risk (or fail to) is the insurance policy. It’s critical to know how to “read” and have a general understanding of your policy. This article offers several critical recommendations to help ensure that your insurance policies cover what you need covered—and that these items are spelled out appropriately in the written insurance contract(s).

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ISM last wrote about the motivations that parents and children have for entering and staying at a school in 1994. The original research was done over 30 years ago—it doesn’t seem to have changed in essence, although some nuances are becoming evident. Every year, we interview hundreds of parents and students face-to-face and almost always ask them questions about their motivation to attend a school, their motivation for staying, and what has the most impact on them. Our 2010 parent survey (with an n = 14,207) shows that 42.13% of our parents earn over $175,000 annually; 35.8% earn between $75,000 and $125,000; and 14.06% earn less than $75,000. Across all socio-economic bands, the answers to those questions are strikingly similar and can almost be scripted.

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