Schools constantly face pressure to increase program, diversify experiences, and meet parent demands. As a result, teachers have seen their time increasingly fragmented in all divisions. While schools in North America are routinely expected to have 180 teaching days, the reality is often far less. The number of teaching minutes raises interesting questions, but the counting of days is usually quite instructive. Both at workshops on scheduling and during on-site visits, ISM routinely looks at the number of actual teaching days. There is enormous variation among upper schools, with some achieving in the 170 range, and others struggling to reach 150. While we have no data to suggest that one number is better than any other number per se, it is clear that the frenzy to complete curricula and the pressure that students and faculty experience indicates that the school year needs more time. It also seems widespread that the speed at which courses need to advance mitigates against any but a percentage of the students taking the most difficult courses.

As School Head, you are unavoidably aware that this is an era in which year-to-year enrollment is especially difficult to predict. If your strategic financial plan is set up according to ISM’s 13-line, six-year format, and if you have followed ISM’s standard advice regarding holding your enrollment projection flat on Line 1, you will want to be prepared for quick action if your actual enrollment in the new school year is substantially over or under your Line 1 number. For your 13-line financial plan, you have surely chosen a conservative number for your enrollment projection. And you will also have, as ISM urges, included enrollment-building goals in your planning document, while, at the same time, not chosen to have those goals play themselves out in the strategic financial document. Thus, you will have built into your plan—if you do meet or even approach your enrollment-increase goals—surpluses well beyond those indicated on Line 9 of your document.

ISM is often asked whether or not the School Head should be held accountable for operations outcomes other than those specified in the Head Support and Evaluation Committee’s annual set of Head’s objectives. (ISM has written recently about the differences between the relatively short and more complex HSEC’s annual objectives, on the one hand, and the much longer and more task-specific list found in the Annual Administrative Agenda.) ISM’s standard answer to the question is, “Yes, the Head may be held accountable for outcomes outside the objectives list, provided there is reliable evidence pertaining to such outcomes, provided those outcomes are actually under the Head’s control, and provided those outcomes are periodically noted (by the HSEC) as being included in the Board’s ongoing list of expectations for the School Head.”

With the explosion of available communication instruments in the last few years, independent schools need to be more strategic about their communications. The longstanding vehicles of the paper/electronic newsletter and blast emails are being supplemented--and perhaps in some cases replaced--by social media as a preferred medium. Your school's resources will be taxed to maintain a "broad-brush" approach in the future. Communications with constituents need to be more purposeful and less reactive.

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.