In our continuing research on the competition for talented, mission-appropriate teachers for private-independent schools, ISM annually surveys a random sample of I&P subscriber schools about teacher and administrator compensation.1 This year, 262 schools responded to the survey. The following article focuses on the survey results regarding the salaries of day school teachers. A competitive faculty salary structure is critical in a school’s ability to sustain programmatic excellence over time. Competitive salaries enable you to retain members of your faculty and hire new teachers. Consider the following results of our survey—and where your school falls in the scope of compensation variables.

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The expression “deliberate heterogeneity” reflects ISM’s commitment to private-independent schools truly delivering each school’s unique mission to its unique students (i.e., deliberately, and not being uniform). The term is defined as a school’s desire to articulate and exemplify its mission distinctives in the marketplace, and thus its confidence in being able to appeal to that marketplace through the power of its own voice. The expression reflects our concern that our schools are being unduly influenced by an educational movement toward homogeneity that strikes at the core of an independent school’s character and competitive position. We introduce the phrase “deliberate heterogeneity” to galvanize schools, one at a time, to take on their mission responsibility and deliver it in creative and innovative ways. Heterogeneity includes your school’s values, unique history, culture, and circumstances influencing your mission-in-action.

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If you, as Board President, are confident that your current strategic plan/strategic financial plan meets the criteria spelled out in the No. 2-ranking marker in the ISM Stability Markers®, revisit your Committee on Trustees’ structure and function to determine whether this crucial committee needs revitalization. If you seek to lead your Board forward as a truly strategic entity—one focused upon long-term financial and organizational stability—then the Committee on Trustees (COT), your Board’s “most strategic” committee, must be appropriately staffed and charged.

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A sequence of qualified, effective Heads who stay six years or more—with a series of orderly transitions—is the best-case scenario for any private-independent school. However, in given situations, a temporary replacement can be necessary, appropriate, and advantageous. In the most common circumstance, the school faces a vacancy relatively late in the school year, leaving insufficient time to conduct a careful search for a permanent Head. In other instances, the Board may have conducted a Head search without reaching a clear decision or identifying a need for a hiatus between permanent Heads. Perhaps the Board has decided to postpone an all-out search to test the qualities of an administrator already at the school.

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How much land is enough? ISM has long recommended that schools acquire a minimum of 40 acres (and ideally 100+ acres). This is particularly true where the school is (or includes) an upper school with its enormous athletic needs. In all our work with schools, ISM has not encountered one that complained of owning too much land, but has found many that regret not acquiring land when they had the opportunity. Today, of course, land is so much more than athletic fields. Schools see the importance of outdoor classrooms, adventure playgrounds, organic gardens, ecological preserves, wetland conservation, and so on.

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The third iteration of ISM Stability Markers® comprised 18 variables, each of which, according to ISM’s internal reviews, correlated strongly with a private-independent school’s ability to sustain excellence over time. In the fourth iteration, no additions or subtractions have been made to the 18 third-iteration Stability Markers themselves. The new scoring structure does, however, better align with ISM’s Success Predictors™. Benchmarks, weighting, points of reference, and/or methods of calculation have been updated to conform to ISM’s current perspectives on each. And one of these updates can be considered major: the movement of two first-tier markers (No. 5 and No. 6) to the second tier, replaced in the first tier by two previously second-tier items.

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School Heads usually find that their days are replete with meetings of varying length—some scheduled and some of the “have-you-got-a-minute?” variety. Depending on the Head’s personality, there could be additional self-assigned expectations. The upshot of attending to these expectations can fill (and, in ISM’s experience, over-dominate) a Head’s day, week, month, year—leaving precious little time available for reflection or opportunities to leave the office. The Head must occasionally get out on campus and gain a sense of the current rhythms of the school—those rhythms that are strumming across the campus while the students are present. Because the school day is the Head’s business day and corresponds with others’ business day, the Head’s time is often consumed conducting “official business,” meeting the needs of others as well as the needs of the school and its students, faculty, and staff.

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While schools continue to consider the year-round school in their academic programs, you, as Business Manager, know that schools are already operating 50+ weeks of the year. The resulting lack of down time makes it difficult to carry out ongoing maintenance, significant repair tasks, deep cleaning, adaptation, renovation, and construction (inside buildings, on building exteriors, and outside around the campus on athletic facilities). Yet, the fiscal and parental demands for ongoing use of the facility are not going away.

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The overriding responsibility of those who supervise faculty is to increase their capacity and hold them accountable—this is not negotiable. In ISM’s Comprehensive Faculty Development (CFD),1 it is clear the evaluation process and the growth and renewal process are the two key aspects of this singular task (i.e., the way in which to do it), with the Characteristics of Professional Excellence acting as the glue to tie it all together. As Division Heads (and other academic administrators) approach their task, it is important for them to have a stance or attitude with which they come to faculty evaluation/growth and renewal.

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Private-independent school Board Presidents often ask, “What is the right size Board for a school with our enrollment and grade configuration?” For those Board Presidents seeking to implement ISM’s “strategic Board” concepts and practices, our standard answers include the following. There is little relationship between school enrollment and school grade-configuration, on the one hand, and the number of Trustees needed to do the work of the Board, on the other. Board structure and function are factors almost entirely independent of school size and student age-range. That said, ISM’s second-level answer to the question is this: The work of the Board normally requires about 15 to 20 people annually immersed in “doing governance.”

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