Private schools annually wrestle with complex financial issues that center on the question of tuition. Board members often find themselves asking, “How can we keep our school affordable?” ISM believes this is the wrong question to ask.

The National Center for Education Statistics publishes a biennial series of compendia describing key education outcomes and contexts of education in the Group of Eight (G-8) countries—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The 2011 report is organized into six topical areas: population and school enrollment, academic performance, contexts for learning, expenditures for education, and educational attainment and income.

The Board of Trustees is responsible for the management of a school’s financial resources. As schools continue to work though these difficult economic times, many are deciding that cutting costs is necessary.

In July 2011, we sent our e-Letter subscribers a short survey asking about their concerns regarding their position and what obstacles they felt their school faced. This was the third consecutive year ISM asked its e-Letter subscribers to participate, and we were impressed with the response.

The Committee on Trustees is always searching for “ideal” Board members—people whose skills and personal qualities help to keep your school moving forward. As time goes on, however, it is worth revisiting the essential responsibilities, behaviors, and priorities of Trustees. This training might be part of your annual Board retreat or new Trustee orientation. The goal is to ensure that Board members know that the ideal Trustee:

Although the School Head is responsible for hiring a strong, mission-based faculty, the Board must provide the needed funding, via strategic financial planning, so that the Head can recruit and retain a quality teaching staff for your school. Keeping new teachers is especially difficult in the current economy and market.

As the school year is now in full throttle, your Board can takes steps to foster a more productive relationship with your school’s faculty. Here are a few tips for bridging possible gaps between these two groups.

The relationship between education and earnings is a long-analyzed topic of study. Generally, there is a strong belief that achievement of higher levels of education is a well-established path to better jobs and better earnings. The “Education and Synthetic Work-Life Earning Estimates” report, published in September 2011 by the U.S. Census Bureau, provides one view of the economic value of educational attainment by producing an estimate of the amount of money a person might earn over the course of their working life, given their level of education. These estimates are “synthetic,” that is, they are not the actual dollars people earned over the complete working life of the person. But the data reported can spur some interesting discussions concerning how your school prepares its students for future success.