ISM's recommended 13-line, six-year format for your strategic financial plan serves as a ready reminder to you, the School Head, that today’s expenditure excesses have long-term consequences. In the two tables shown below, only Line 5 (cash operating expenses) and Line 9 (the annual cash surplus/deficit or profit/loss) are shown, for ease of explanation.

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 upcoming years. Readers were also 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. 17: 3% of the overall budget allocated to professional development.

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.

ISM has long recommended six-year strategic plans that are enacted every four years. The financial expression of that plan, ISM has suggested, should be shown on a single sheet: 13 lines and six columns. ISM calls this single-sheet display the strategic financial plan (SFP).

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.

There is much concern, at the Board and management level, over the increasing cost of financial aid.* Yearly, it seems, this budget line item (whether you recognize it as contra revenue or an expense) increases. But an increase in that line item does not necessarily mean the financial aid is costing your school more. A better way to think about the true cost of financial aid is to understand the concept of net tuition revenue per student.