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.
How High-Achieving Students Search for a College
Volume 28 No. 11 // September 2, 2003
As Director of College Counseling, you are responsible for providing one of the most critical services your school can offer. While parents set academic excellence and next-level placement as high priorities when they select your school, the college-bound teenager ideally makes the primary decisions when it comes to selecting a college. It is your job to help students find the institutions of higher education that best match their interests, needs, and abilities. What are the key avenues students use today to find appropriate colleges—and what can you do to ensure your program steers them in the right direction?
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Mission-Centered Advisory Programs
Volume 28 No. 10 // August 11, 2003
As Head of School, you know that middle and upper school parents want—and students need—programs and services that extend beyond “pure” academics. Your school derives a competitive advantage from its ability to provide benefits such as caring teachers, safe environment, leadership and social opportunities, and character education.
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Your Strategic Financial Plan: Format and Reporting
Volume 28 No. 9 // July 17, 2003
ISM recommends that you, as Head of School, Business Manager, or Finance Committee Chair, adopt a particular 13-line format in your strategic financial reporting vehicle. Many schools have since done so.
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Technology and Your Faculty's Professional Development
Volume 28 No. 8 // June 30, 2003
As with most students, teachers tend to make good progress toward achieving their goals if they are provided with both system and reward. This can be especially true when the goals relate to technology—a professional development area that still lurks as ambiguous and uncertain in the minds of many faculty members and, as well, in curricular and instructional frameworks in otherwise taut academic administrations.
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Scheduling a Community Service Program
Volume 28 No. 7 // June 4, 2003
Many private-independent schools have not only included the completion of community service hours as a graduation requirement, but have also implemented year-long service learning programs. (Service learning includes those components of the school curriculum that support and complement your community service program.) Given the fact that students and their families tend to lead harried lives, it is your responsibility, as Head of School, to make certain that community service/service learning is not just one more burden added to an already hectic schedule, requiring excessive amounts of time on weekends and during the summer.
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Five Characteristics of Outstanding Managerial Foresight
Volume 28 No. 7 // June 4, 2003
Your success as Head of School depends in part upon your ability to respond to challenges successfully. That, in turn, is a function of your adeptness in recognizing potential hot spots—i.e., new problems and threats with capacity to reach real significance—before they rise to the level of “challenges.”
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Recognize the Marketing Opportunities of Parent Surveys
Volume 28 No. 7 // June 4, 2003
ISM recommends that schools survey their parent bodies on a regular basis (every two or three years). Do not overlook the marketing opportunities implicit in reporting the survey results.
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Governance and Fiscal Vigilance
Volume 28 No. 6 // May 4, 2003
The confusion and anger that surround recent corporate scandals in the public sector indicate that stock-holders and stakeholders (to use the term more appropriate for private-independent schools and the not-for-profit sector) are turning their attention to the question of Board “due diligence.” What is the Board’s role in overseeing the operation of an institution? How is “due diligence” defined? How can the Trustees maintain the necessary delicate balance between governance and management of school operations?
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Creating a Strategic Culture in Your School's Board of Trustees: Fostering Objectivity
Volume 28 No. 5 // April 11, 2003
“Emotional awareness starts with attunement to the stream of feeling that is a constant presence in all of us and with a recognition of how these emotions shape what we perceive, think, and do.” – Daniel Goleman, Working With Emotional Intelligence, p. 55 (New York: Bantam Books, 1998)
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Good to Great: Implications for Private-Independent School Management
Volume 28 No. 4 // March 30, 2003
From time to time, a book written for the corporate sector calls out for the consideration of private-independent school leaders. Such a book is Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … And Others Don’t, (HarperCollins: 2001), Jim Collins’ second book on strategic management thinking.1
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