For several years, ISM has pushed academic administrators (typically Division Directors, Department Chairs, and School Heads) to recognize that faculty culture (defined as the pattern of customs, ideas, and assumptions driving the faculty’s collective set of professional attitudes and behaviors) is the critical determinant of a school’s “excellence.” The contention is that the top of a culture cannot escape the bottom.

In the 19th century, education in schools in the city was year-round (although it is unlikely that attendance was). At the beginning of the 20th century, the calendar moved to its present orientation—nine months on and three months off in the summer. For city dwellers, the change came about because summers were unbearably hot, disease was easily spread, wealthy people went on vacation, and too much education was considered bad for frail minds. The situation was different in rural areas where, in the 19th century, children went to school for only six months (summer and winter), leaving them free to help with the crops and animals in the spring and fall. For them, the schedule changed because the experts thought that children were not taught enough, and they wanted to come into line with changes happening in the city.

ISM has long held that the proper role of the Board is to attend to the strategic viability of a school for future generations of students, while the role of the School Head is to manage the day-to-day operational needs of the school. With that core principle in mind, the question arises as to who is properly responsible for ensuring that the school has an effective, up-to-date employee handbook.1 As employee handbooks are primarily comprised of day-to-day operating policies, we believe that the answer clearly is “the School Head.”2 At the same time, however, there is an important strategic oversight role that the Board can and should play in ensuring that organizational risk is limited—but always showing deference to the Head on the operating details.

ISM’s six-year International Model Schools Project found powerful relationships between a professional-growth-focused faculty culture, on the one hand, and student performance, satisfaction, and enthusiasm, on the other. In ISM’s review of literature accompanying one of the two books produced in concert with that project, ISM cited Stanford University’s Dr. Milbrey McLaughlin’s work. She had noted, during a 1983 presentation to the annual conference of the National Association of Independent Schools, “… [R]esearch studies on planned change and teacher evaluation give clear evidence that, when interaction of this sort (i.e., teacher-to-teacher interaction dealing with teaching-learning equations and with professional excellence) does occur, especially on a regular basis, it has a substantial, powerful, and positive effect on what and how well students learn.”