The 20th Century School has as its educational center the autonomous teacher who exists in an egalitarian culture and is rarely, often never, effectively evaluated for impact on student performance, enthusiasm, and satisfaction. At all levels of the school, teachers are organized into silos of teaching (by grade or by content area) with little effective time within the silo to truly collaborate and professionally assess and grow, and equally little effective time to communicate outside the silo in any meaningful way. Teachers spend most of their time teaching on their own and preparing on their own to teach. Administrative meeting time, regularly scheduled, is universally disliked as irrelevant even though led by School Heads who themselves largely come from the teaching ranks.

One of your most vital tasks as School Head is to supervise your school’s operations. All of your school’s constituencies expect a consistent level of excellence in all the programs and functions. However, while you are responsible for these operational tasks, you are not responsible for actually performing them. Joining you is your Management Team—the deputies to whom you have delegated supervision of various portions of the day-to-day programs and functions. However, always keep in mind that you must hold your deputies accountable for performing their tasks, and that ultimately it is your duty to evaluate them accordingly.

Each fall, ISM publishes a set of conversion factors to facilitate the recasting of previous tuitions into current dollars. (See the table on the next page.) We continue to use the Urban Consumer Price Index (CPI-U).1 However, we also realize that the CPI-U does not completely reflect expenditures in private-independent schools; it can only serve as a base figure. There are compelling arguments for adjusting your tuition at a rate 2% above the overall inflation rate.

Competitive salaries are an obvious component in attracting and retaining teachers. In addition, employees are increasingly looking for work environments that emphasize personal growth and professional development. Also, to keep your compensation package (salaries and benefits) comparable with other schools in your area, you need a strong faculty culture to make your school truly stand out. As you and your Board review your strategies for recruiting and retaining teachers, ask yourselves if you have both promoted your faculty culture and budgeted enough money to compete in a tough job market to attract and retain mission-appropriate teachers.

Private-independent schools have been on a tear of late, building grand buildings (to match the ostentation running amok in the housing sector) or remodeling old ones. All the while, they generally are growing their endowments through the use of tax-exempt bonds leveraged in a currently favorable investment climate. (Some schools do take the more conservative approach of raising money via capital campaigns before starting construction.)

Sponsorships and endorsements are not new in private-independent schools. Local merchants support your school by placing ads in the yearbook, the students’ newspaper, and the program book for your fund raiser. Each year, local businesses sponsor your golf tournament or charity auction. These are “innocent” endeavors with, usually, no strings attached. Funds are raised without tapping parent and alumni checkbooks.

The trend in the corporate sector is to offer executives and senior managers more options in their benefit plans. Heads, perceiving an inequity between their benefits and those of corporate managers, are asking for more choices as well. According to the results of ISM’s 1999 Head Compensation Survey, a higher salary is not necessarily the item the majority of Heads would change about their compensation. When asked what they felt was missing, if anything, most Heads named specific benefits: e.g., higher retirement contribution, dental insurance, severance pay, financial counseling.

ISM recently surveyed Heads about their compensation. We randomly selected 398 Heads from our I&P subscribers; 250 responded. (See the chart “About the Respondents” on page 4 for more information on the survey participants.) This article examines Heads’ salaries and implications for the Board; a subsequent article will analyze Heads’ benefits.

In its work with schools, ISM often hears Development Directors say that the annual fund goal is determined by the Board and School Head, based on the “gap” between expenses and expected revenues (often referred to as the “plug number”) with little consideration of data gathered by the Development Office. Further, the performance of Development Offices is frequently evaluated based on the school’s ability to meet these goals. In ISM’s experience, budgeting for gift income and evaluating the development program in this way provides an inaccurate picture of the school’s financial resources and the true fund-raising potential of the school’s constituents.