In an earlier issue of Ideas & Perspectives, we offered ISM's 20 Success Predictors for the 21st Century. As that article explained, ISM expects successful 21st Century Schools to make radical changes in both structure and function to achieve and sustain stability and excellence. We emphasized that the 20 Success Predictors were designed as speculative forecasts of what ISM expects to be needed to achieve long-term stability and excellence in the coming years. Readers were reminded that the current (third) iteration of the ISM Stability Markers®--the primary lens through which ISM views private-independent schools--does not lose its general utility as an evidence-driven set of benchmarks for long-term stability and programmatic excellence. Thus, ISM maintains its focus on the Stability Markers, but offers a future-focused set of Success Predictors as accompanying guidelines. (Note: There is some overlap between the two lists. Several of the ISM Stability Markers are also Success Predictors for the 21st Century.) This article focuses on ISM Success Predictor No. 4: Teachers will be hired and rehired based upon highly specific course/professional development contracts.

As the competition between private and public schools intensifies each year, it is not always the luxuries or differentiators associated with attending a private school that become more critical. Rather, the basic but vital The ISM 37-School Parent Survey: Why Families Can Afford Your Schools Tuition is of immense concern to private school parents and students. While clearly one of the most difficult and unpleasant topics to attempt to get one's head around, there are no more important issues for you to address than potential misconduct and bullying toward your students. At issue here is not only concern for the student's physical and emotional safety, but the reality that students simply cannot learn effectively when they do not feel safe.

ISM has for 15 years published—at five-year intervals—its list of the prime correlates necessary to sustain mission-specific excellence. This periodically revised, evidence-based list, known as the ISM Stability Markers®, has been in widespread use as both a lens through which to self-evaluate and as a means by which to strengthen a school’s longest-term financial and organizational stability and excellence.

While ISM has long written about faculty culture, and there has been the sense of a monolithic culture, the reality is that each division in our schools seems to have a particular character. Of course, if your school only has one division, then unity is a much simpler concept to understand.

Harvard Education Press has brought out a new book, AP: A Critical Examination of the Advanced Placement Program,1 which is an interesting collection of essays from a variety of viewpoints, and the findings demonstrate the controversies in this area. Although it is not ISM’s primary interest, social equity is a prominent element of the book. While ISM is sensitive to social issues, we are more directly concerned with the appropriateness of Advanced Placement for private-independent schools. We have consistently opposed its use. How does this new book advance the conversation?

The extent and (perceived) urgency of the daily demands on you, the School Head, could easily render the job impossible without a reliable sense on your part of the validity of the priorities you hold. Institutional success, personal/professional success, and an actual sense of joy in the role can all be within plausible reach if your priorities are “right,” and provided:

The Board, faculty, and administration have worked diligently to develop the three Purpose and Outcome Statements that ISM recommends. The Characteristics of Professional Excellence and Portrait of the Graduate have been especially noteworthy in that they are documents probably created by the faculty (with the administration’s acceptance before implementation). Thus, the faculty “owns” these two statements and how they are fulfilled programmatically and pedagogically.