Many schools are exploring alternative revenue sources to mitigate ever-increasing tuitions; some strategic plans even call for an investigation into this concept as a means to maintain sustainability. Is this a wise course of action? On the surface, exploring alternative revenue sources is indeed logical. If a school could design a way to create, for example, $265,000 in profit, tuition increases could be curtailed. This thinking can, however, be misleading—and even detrimental, in some cases.

In the recent research ISM carried out relating to faculty compensation and benefits, a corollary to the findings was this one: Schools are still underfunding professional development. In the chart below, the percent of budget spent by schools on professional development is 1% or less in 82% of responding schools. ISM’s Success Predictor No. 17 suggests that the appropriate amount is “roughly 2% of the total budget of expenses to be devoted to faculty professional development, plus an additional allocation of 1% of the total budget for support of professional development for nonteaching personnel (including Trustees).”

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.

In our continuing research concerning the competition for quality teachers that private-independent schools are now experiencing, ISM recently surveyed a random sample of I&P subscriber schools. The 178 responding schools answered questions concerning the salaries, selected benefits, and hiring of faculty members. This article concerns the salaries of teachers at day schools only (164 schools).

While we believe that much is changing in educational architecture, we don’t believe that to be necessarily true of teaching practice. And the challenge will not be in how to teach—we actually know a lot about that already—but how to establish culture/community within the new 21st century architecture.

In a previous article, we noted particular characteristics of the lower, middle, and upper school divisions. Management/leadership would do well to understand these characteristics and take them into account in working with the faculty cultures there. However, there is a fourth "division" that rarely is given much attention. This one incorporates teachers who typically teach across two or even three divisions. Working with these faculty members, without recognizing that they face and respond to unique challenges, you run the risk of talking constantly past them and rarely to them. Note that ISM is opposed to cross-divisional teaching in theory and in practice. This article recognizes the reality in today's schools and tries to place these teachers in a useful administrative context. We need to be clear: ISM does not intend to suggest that there is a balance between positives and negatives. In addition to the challenges noted below, cross-divisional teachers are part-time in each division in which they teach and inevitably drive the schedule. This practice is generally considered the only fiscally prudent way to provide course needs; it is a pragmatic business decision, but rarely is it a satisfying solution to teaching excellence within a school. As such, it is often not in the best interest of students.