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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.
Faculty Compensation, 2010–11: A Dangerous Gender Divide
Volume 36 No. 15 // November 23, 2011
In this article, part of our continuing series analyzing salaries and benefits in private-independent schools, we assess faculty salaries from a gender perspective. The results of the ISM Faculty and Management Compensation Survey raise a cautionary flag regarding potential gender-based pay discrimination that all schools need to consider carefully.
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The 21st Century Academic Administrator and Teaching
Volume 36 No. 14 // November 7, 2011
In previous I&P articles, ISM has noted that regular team “walkarounds” by the School Head and academic administrators are a prime administrative task for improving the capacity of adults in your school. This leadership style requires the School Head to be physically and visibly present to every student and employee, and to develop teacher leaders. The primary task of all academic administrators is facilitating the development of faculty who are the interface of the mission with the students. This has been one of ISM’s most consistent and insistent teachings for academic administrators—that they view their faculty as their own “works of art” and move persistently to improve both the individual faculty member as well as the faculty culture as a whole.
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Generational Differences: The New Management Paradigm
Volume 36 No. 14 // November 7, 2011
According to an article in the May 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review, “the makeup of the global workforce is undergoing a seismic shift: In four years Millennials—the people born between 1977 and 1997—will account for nearly half the employees in the world. In some companies, they already constitute a majority.”1 To better understand the shift, the Society for Human Resource Management recently conducted a survey of younger workers. The participants were asked to respond to the following: “I’m most concerned about my older managers’_____.” Their responses were:
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Alumni Relations and the Portrait of the Graduate
Volume 36 No. 14 // November 7, 2011
As School Head, you want to assure that there is solid alignment between the way you and your marketing team portray your school and the actual outcomes your graduates experience. For example, if you tell others that you offer one of the leading college preparatory programs in your area, you want to be able to back that up with data about your graduates’ college experiences that substantiate your claims. You also want to be able to celebrate the successes of your graduates in ways that reinforce your mission, help keep your alumni engaged, and align your alumni’s values with your mission and vision so as to enable more robust financial support of your school.
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ISM Loses One of Its Cofounders
Volume 36 No. 13 // October 12, 2011
Anne Louise Kurtz Snelling December 1, 1930–September 19, 2011 How do you encapsulate Anne Snelling’s 80 years of concern for others? How do you describe her love of nature, friends, and family? How do you relate the role she played in the betterment of private-independent education on multiple continents?
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The 21st Century School: 10 Myths
Volume 36 No. 13 // October 12, 2011
So much is being published on the 21st century in education that it is time to reflect on the many claims that are being made, and provide some direction as to what makes sense and what does not. As a School Head, you must be able to discriminate amid the blizzard of information being offered you. So, here is ISM’s list of what we believe to be the major myths around the education changes that are influencing our schools.
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Green Strategies for Pest Control
Volume 36 No. 13 // October 12, 2011
If not controlled, insect pests and rodents can pose serious health threats to students, teachers, and employees at your school, and may also be responsible for significant and costly damage to your facilities. However, toxic chemicals and pesticides traditionally used for pest control have been shown to be hazardous to humans, particularly to students susceptible to asthma and breathing difficulties or those who have issues with their immune, endocrine, or neurological systems.
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Ease the Transition for the Incoming Head
Volume 36 No. 13 // October 12, 2011
When a school experiences a change of leadership, the Board must ensure that the new Head’s transition into the school goes smoothly. Responsibility for directing the essential work of assimilating, assisting, and supporting the new Head usually falls to the Search Committee, the group of four or five Board members who guided the Head-search process.
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Estimated Family Expenditures on a Child
Volume 36 No. 12 // September 22, 2011
Since 1960, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has released its annual report, Expenditures on Children by Families,1 which estimates the costs of raising a child. The tables offer a general sense of what your school’s families may be spending on their children (see Table 1), and can be revealing if you also factor in your tuition over the years. The cost differs significantly depending upon the income level and the region in which a family lives (see Table 2). If your school has a high percentage of single-parent families, you may also be interested in the figures in Table 3. (We have used figures for upper-income families in the accompanying tables.)
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Strengthen the Ties Between the Development Director and the School
Volume 36 No. 12 // September 22, 2011
In a 2007 study, the Association of Fundraising Professionals found that Development Directors stayed at an organization an average of 3.6 years (3.5 for females and 4.17 for males). Given the time it takes for a Development Director to gain trust with a Board and develop relationships with school donors, it is important to develop strategies that would enable your school to keep its Development Director for a lengthy period of time.
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