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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.
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.
Portrait of the Graduate—Moving from Division to Division
Volume 32 No. 15 // November 30, 2007
The Portrait of the Graduate is one of three definitive documents (including the school’s mission statement and the Characteristics of Professional Excellence) that capture a school’s core reason for existence. This portrait was defined as “a list of five or fewer items comprising short descriptors of your product—the student you expect to have developed over the years that she/he has spent under your faculty’s tutelage.”
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Continuous Planning: Its Relevance to Private-Independent Schools
Volume 32 No. 14 // November 8, 2007
“In my business, we do continuous planning. Planning never ends. We never stop examining our market, making adjustments, and, when appropriate, instituting major changes. Should private-independent schools really be any different?”
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Action Research: A Multi-Faceted Tool
Volume 32 No. 14 // November 8, 2007
Action research is a systematic process of inquiry undertaken by school practitioners in their own schools. It uses the techniques of research to help teachers examine their own educational practices, then takes steps to improve education in the very place where the research is carried out. Teachers become more effective when they are encouraged to examine and assess their own work, and then develop ways of improving their own teaching skills.
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IRS Code 409A and Faculty Compensation
Volume 32 No. 14 // November 8, 2007
Section 409A of the tax code (which generally deals with tax-deferred compensation issues) was enacted in October 2004.1 This did not directly impact schools until final regulations were issued in April 2007. The final regulations generally are applicable for taxable years beginning on or after January 1, 2008. However, for school years beginning in 2007 and ending in 2008, schools that offer elections to annualize compensation must have set forth in writing, by December 31, 2007, how employees are to be paid for the rest of the of the current school year. For 2008-09 and later school years, schools will need to meet the requirements explained below.
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The Deferred Maintenance Account
Volume 32 No. 13 // October 16, 2007
Your school may have limited or no cash reserves. The Board, Head, and Management Team understand that your buildings are depreciating, and a depreciation line in your school’s budget reflects this. A 1997 report, “A Foundation to Uphold,” identified $26 billion of deferred maintenance for institutions of higher education nationally. (This included $6 billion of urgent needs.) While ISM knows of no similar study for private-independent schools, ISM Consultants have visited many schools where a deferred maintenance backlog exists.
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The Management Team: Profiled for Success
Volume 32 No. 13 // October 16, 2007
As you, the School Head, think about the school five years from now, you must consider the Management Team (the Head's direct reports) and ask whether the team members can take the school where the Board, in its strategic plan, wants it to go. You can't do it alone; this group of administrators is critical to meeting (a) the strategic plan goals and (b) the school growth items as laid out in the annual administration agenda.
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Your Strategic Financial Policy Document: A Sample
Volume 32 No. 13 // October 16, 2007
ISM’s recommended 13-line strategic financial plan model has been in widespread use for some time. This short, six-year (i.e., displayed in six columns) expression of your strategic plan comprises a one-page attachment to the plan itself and represents the quantitative expression of that plan. The great virtue of the 13-line model is that it allows Board members who are not mathematically inclined or have little financial expertise—often either a majority or a substantial minority—to understand the financial ramifications of the positions they take on strategic issues. The 13-line document attends to the main strategic numbers and, by purposeful exclusion, leaves everything else alone. (And the “everything else,” of course, falls to the Finance Committee, thereby honoring a core ISM strategic-Board concept—a differentiation of function.)
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Helping Board Members Understand Your School's Educational Programs
Volume 32 No. 12 // September 30, 2007
The Board does not need to be involved in your school’s educational program, either as individuals or as a group. Discussions and decisions about the program are not appropriate topics for these volunteer leaders. The Board has hired you, as School Head, to determine programs and supervise their delivery.
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Scheduling and Faculty Culture
Volume 32 No. 12 // September 30, 2007
Faculty culture—the pattern of customs, ideas, and assumptions driving the faculty’s collective set of professional attitudes and behaviors—is profoundly impacted by conversations about schedule. The reasons for this are easy to understand. Schedule—a complex set of data around time, program, space, and people—cannot be changed without changing the parameters of each teacher’s professional life. Schedule can affect a teacher’s performance and job satisfaction in many ways.
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Money Follows Performance—When Validated
Volume 32 No. 12 // September 30, 2007
ISM has long maintained that money follows performance. When privateindependent schools provide the education promised by their mission statements and admission materials, parents are willing to enroll (and reenroll) their children, and donors are willing to contribute on a recurring basis. As accurate as this aphorism continues to be, given the current challenges schools face in attracting and retaining students and donations, it now needs to be modified with—“when validated.”
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