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:

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.

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.

There is a management conundrum that is usually hidden in the area of faculty accountability. The vast majority of what ISM has written relates to the support and evaluation of faculty with regard to their academic function, overlain with their numerous other responsibilities for advisory, lunch duty, and so on. However, many teachers—stretching across all divisions—also act as coaches within the school and thus also report in that capacity to the Athletic Director. As coaches, they are responsible to the Athletic Director for student athletic accomplishments, students’ actions, successes and failures, parent relations, and volunteer coordination. It is a management tenet that an employee cannot effectively report to two people, and this dysfunction is a complication in many teachers’ lives.

In a previous article, we identified challenges to the school community in a 21st century learning architecture. The importance of the school community and its concomitant virtue of fairness is more important than ever. In addition, our increasingly competitive environment is causing students and parents to question the value they are getting from their school. In this article, we consider the issues of fairness, competitiveness, and high performance from the viewpoint of assessment. While this is a limited snapshot, we hope that it will encourage much deeper conversation about assessment practice among your school’s faculty.