Board-level strategic support of a healthy, growth-oriented faculty culture is critical for your school to sustain long-term programmatic excellence. The outcome of a healthy faculty culture is sustained/enhanced student performance, enthusiasm, and satisfaction.
The faculty is, however, an operational responsibility and you, as a Trustee, should not interfere in teachers’ daily work. So, what are the strategic ways in which you can aid the School Head and Management Team in ensuring a healthy culture? What resources can you, as a Trustee, provide? Here are four key variables for your consideration.
1. Require the School Head to develop (or sustain) a faculty evaluation system.
The system should be predicated on each teacher’s commitment to his/her own professional growth and career. This is ISM’s correlate to student performance, enthusiasm, and satisfaction. This commitment is the measurement point for predicting a school’s academic success and its ability to retain (and also recruit) its students. In this system, evaluation is synonymous with professional development that guides each teacher’s professional growth and, by implication, capacity building.
(For more on ISM’s faculty evaluation system, see the Comprehensive Faculty Development/Teaching Excellence II package.)
2. Support professional development.
How? By moving (or sustaining) the PD line of the budget toward/at 2% of operational expenses. This is the simplest investment that you as a Trustee can make, and it will provide the biggest return on that investment. This budget line should be defended in times of scarcity, and defended over cuts in either personnel or program. It’s that important.
(For more on strategic financial planning and budget issues, see The Strategic Planning Book.)
3. Ensure that you have and support competitive faculty salaries.
Have salaries that are within 95% of your target group, whether it is your group/association of private-independent schools, the local public school system, or a group of schools with the same philosophy as yours. Through your quadrennial strategic planning process, as well as in the annual budget setting that the strategic planning drives, demonstrate to your teachers that they are valued and will, from a Board/resource point of view, be well cared for.
(For more on faculty salaries, see the e-book Faculty Compensation.)
4. Ensure that your school has and supports extensive employee benefits.
Research on retention and recruitment shows that the compensation package a school offers has a significant impact on its ability to hire and keep excellent employees. Although the Board is not the “employer,” it holds the purse strings in the budget to make sure the benefits package is competitive.
Your actions in supporting these four faculty initiatives provide a resource framework for the School Head and Management Team, allowing the team to work successfully in developing and sustaining a superior faculty culture.
Additional ISM resources:
ISM Monthly Update for Trustees Vol. 10 No. 3 Beginning Teacher Attrition and Mobility
ISM Monthly Update for Trustees Vol. 10 No. 2 Solidify the Relationship Between Board and Faculty
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 39 No. 10 Faculty Compensation, 2013-14: Day School Salaries
I&P Vol. 38 No. 12 Tuition Increases and Faculty Compensation
I&P Vol. 37 No. 2 A 21st Century Teacher Evaluation Model
I&P Vol. 36 No. 10 Budgeting for Professional Development
