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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.
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See the articles from our latest issue of Ideas & Perspectives.
Private-Independent School Navigational Forecast: Bumpy but Manageable
Volume 29 No. 5 // April 12, 2004
In October 2002, The National Center for Education Statistics released Projections of Education Statistics to 2012, Thirty-first Edition. Included in those projections were predictions regarding private school enrollment. (See the accompanying table, “Enrollment in Private Schools: 2000-2012.”) Consider the following points as you revisit your planning process this year.
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Auditing Your Business Office Operations
Volume 29 No. 5 // April 12, 2004
ISM endorses a strong working partnership between you, as the School Head, and the Business Manager. The “silent” partner in this relationship is the Board of Trustees. Your Business Manager works with Board members via the Finance Committee (and, depending upon how your Board organizes for its work, other committees as well). This exposure can confirm to your Board the quality of the Business Manager’s work. If the Board reports unsatisfactory performance, do not ignore opinions that differ from yours. Discounting the Board’s concerns may put you in peril as well.
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Common Restroom Problems and Student Health
Volume 29 No. 4 // March 31, 2004
According to a Kimberly-Clark Professional survey conducted by Opinion Research Corporation, 20% of middle and high school students admit to completely avoiding school restrooms because the facilities are dirty and unsanitary. A similar study concerning public restrooms, by Impulse Research for the Georgia-Pacific Corporation, determined that, of those surveyed:
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Keeping Your School 'Accessible'
Volume 29 No. 4 // March 31, 2004
Private-independent schools annually wrestle with complex financial issues that center on the question of tuition. Trustees, Heads, and Business Managers often find themselves asking, “How can we keep our school affordable?” ISM believes this is the wrong question to ask if one of your school’s strategic goals is to maintain long-term financial viability. The proper question is, “How can we keep our school accessible?”
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The Strategic Board: Guidelines for Board Meetings
Volume 29 No. 3 // March 7, 2004
ISM has long stressed the fundamental importance of Board-level strategic planning, coupled with annual Board (and administration) agenda-setting, as being critical for a school to sustain long-term programmatic excellence. This set of core ideas collectively forms ISM’s Stability Marker No. 2: “Stable schools will have ‘strategic’ Boards.” These tenets must be linked explicitly to such organizational practices as Board profiling (itself on the second-tier of the ISM Stability Markers®), new-Trustee orientation, bylaw revision, formation of a strong Committee on Trustees, and Board self-evaluation.
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Clarify the Role of Your School's Learning Specialist: A Checklist
Volume 29 No. 3 // March 7, 2004
“The core theme of K-12 education in this century should be straightforward: high standards with an unwavering commitment to individuality.” – Mel Levine, M.D., “Celebrating Diverse Minds” Educational Leadership, October 2003
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Facilities and Faculty Retention
Volume 29 No. 2 // February 12, 2004
When discussing ways to enhance faculty recruitment and retention, do you include the condition of your school facilities in your considerations? As Head, if you’ve noticed teachers complaining about their classroom space, noise levels, air quality, lighting, and other facility inadequacies, this may be a red flag indicating deeper problems.
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Reculturing For Change: A Head's Primer
Volume 29 No. 1 // January 17, 2004
“We demand that leaders solve, or at least manage, a multitude of interconnected problems that can develop into crises without warning; we require them to navigate an increasingly turbulent reality that is, in key aspects, literally incomprehensible to the human mind; we buffet them on every side with bolder, more powerful special interests that challenge every innovative policy idea; we submerge them in often unhelpful and distracting information; and we force them to decide and act at an ever faster pace.” – Thomas Homer-Dixon, "Leadership Captive"
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Hiring and Orienting Your New Advisors
Volume 28 No. 16 // December 21, 2003
In ISM’s experience, the most frequently expressed administrative concern about the advisory program is unevenness in the quality of adviser functioning. Teachers’ motivation, skill, “buy-in,” and overall professionalism in this role often vary considerably. Clarity about the role—its purposes, priorities, limits, and sources of assistance—provides focus. This clarity and focus, for those with less affinity for the role of adviser, instills a sense that the job is “do-able” (i.e., not an “all-things-to-all-people” set of responsibilities). These boundaries also “rein in” any faculty who tend to overdo (i.e., become over-involved in the lives of their advisees). On a broader level, this kind of clarity implicitly makes advising more professional and contributes to a culture that values professional development in this role on behalf of students.
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Board/Head Relationships: Brutal Facts and Eternal Faith
Volume 28 No. 16 // December 21, 2003
Jim Collins, in his book From Good to Great, quotes Winston Churchill: "There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away." The chapter this quotation prefaces is "Confront the Brutal Facts Yet Never Lose Faith." This is a great paradigm for your Board to consider when either hiring a new Head of School or evaluating the present Head.
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