In our continuing research on the competition for talented, mission-appropriate teachers for private-independent schools, ISM annually surveys a random sample of I&P subscriber schools about teacher and administrator compensation.1 This year, 262 schools responded to the survey. The following article focuses on the survey results regarding the salaries of day school teachers. A competitive faculty salary structure is critical in a school’s ability to sustain programmatic excellence over time. Competitive salaries enable you to retain members of your faculty and hire new teachers. Consider the following results of our survey—and where your school falls in the scope of compensation variables.

A sequence of qualified, effective Heads who stay six years or more—with a series of orderly transitions—is the best-case scenario for any private-independent school. However, in given situations, a temporary replacement can be necessary, appropriate, and advantageous. In the most common circumstance, the school faces a vacancy relatively late in the school year, leaving insufficient time to conduct a careful search for a permanent Head. In other instances, the Board may have conducted a Head search without reaching a clear decision or identifying a need for a hiatus between permanent Heads. Perhaps the Board has decided to postpone an all-out search to test the qualities of an administrator already at the school.

School Heads usually find that their days are replete with meetings of varying length—some scheduled and some of the “have-you-got-a-minute?” variety. Depending on the Head’s personality, there could be additional self-assigned expectations. The upshot of attending to these expectations can fill (and, in ISM’s experience, over-dominate) a Head’s day, week, month, year—leaving precious little time available for reflection or opportunities to leave the office. The Head must occasionally get out on campus and gain a sense of the current rhythms of the school—those rhythms that are strumming across the campus while the students are present. Because the school day is the Head’s business day and corresponds with others’ business day, the Head’s time is often consumed conducting “official business,” meeting the needs of others as well as the needs of the school and its students, faculty, and staff.

The third iteration of ISM Stability Markers® comprised 18 variables, each of which, according to ISM’s internal reviews, correlated strongly with a private-independent school’s ability to sustain excellence over time. In the fourth iteration, no additions or subtractions have been made to the 18 third-iteration Stability Markers themselves. The new scoring structure does, however, better align with ISM’s Success Predictors™. Benchmarks, weighting, points of reference, and/or methods of calculation have been updated to conform to ISM’s current perspectives on each. And one of these updates can be considered major: the movement of two first-tier markers (No. 5 and No. 6) to the second tier, replaced in the first tier by two previously second-tier items.

The overriding responsibility of those who supervise faculty is to increase their capacity and hold them accountable—this is not negotiable. In ISM’s Comprehensive Faculty Development (CFD),1 it is clear the evaluation process and the growth and renewal process are the two key aspects of this singular task (i.e., the way in which to do it), with the Characteristics of Professional Excellence acting as the glue to tie it all together. As Division Heads (and other academic administrators) approach their task, it is important for them to have a stance or attitude with which they come to faculty evaluation/growth and renewal.

Outcomes of ISM’s School Head leadership research projects remain in routine use in the form of ISM surveys, usually in conjunction with the electronic scoring of the ISM Stability Markers®. The leadership projects’ outcomes comprise ISM Stability Marker No. 3. This article offers a brief review of the findings, all published previously in I&P. ISM’s leadership findings are divided almost evenly between “leadership points of emphasis” that high-rated School Heads routinely employ, and “leadership traits” characteristic of high-rated School Heads. Said differently, one group of findings summarized the sorts of things that Heads rated highly on leadership tended to do, while the other group of findings summarized the sorts of things that Heads high-rated on leadership appeared to be.