As a School Head, there is no more pivotal, important task than ensuring your school hires mission-appropriate faculty. Whether you interview all candidates, delegate initial interviews to someone else and then interview the finalists, or delegate full responsibility to a member of your Management Team, the quality of the faculty is inescapably your responsibility.

As School Head, you are aware that your success in developing a growth-focused faculty culture is the most critical ingredient in the long-term quality of the student experience—that is, the central determinant of your students’ performance, satisfaction, and enthusiasm. You are aware, as well, that the qualities of "predictability and supportiveness" in your students’ environment (the conditions most closely associated with high-level performance, satisfaction, and enthusiasm) are most reliably generated by establishing those same two qualities in your teachers’ environment.

The ISM Standards for Professional Growth and Renewal provide private-independent schools with a way to assess whether their investment in faculty professional development is focused clearly on students, clearly articulated as a systems activity, contextually meaningful in building professional relationships among faculty, and accountable for the results achieved. This article, the third in a series, recommends a set of metrics related to the Process Standards.

Over the past few years, ISM Consultants have worked with a number of private-independent schools that have faced conflict-of-interest issues. Such problems usually occur because a school has not (or not properly) written a conflict-of-interest policy.

Faculty evaluation is, by and large, an individualized exercise. Evaluation is rarely considered within the context of the faculty as a whole, i.e., what is this teacher’s impact compared with others in the school? In this context, "impact" means the level of effectiveness demonstrated by the teacher in delivering the mission of the school to the students.

The ISM Standards for Professional Growth and Renewal provide private-independent schools with a way to assess whether their investment in faculty professional development is focused on students, clearly articulated as a systems activity, contextually meaningful in building professional relationships among faculty, and accountable for the results achieved. This article, the second in a series, recommends a set of metrics related to the ISM Culture Standards.

ISM has previously suggested that you, as School Head, consider the advantages of positioning your school based on one of three marketing platforms: the price/value platform, the product platform, or the process platform. In view of a probable increase in the use of character education as a differentiator among schools, an examination of your approach to marketing your character education program(s) is in order at any time, but especially as you approach such significant opportunities as (a) your quadrennial strategic planning event, (b) creation or revision of your Purpose and Outcome Statements, or (c) major Board and/or administrative committee charges derived from your existing strategic plan (e.g., creation of a fresh strategic marketing plan or fundamental revisions in an existing strategic development plan).

In working with schools, ISM Consultants often are asked to provide recommendations that will help a school’s Board and Management Team "think outside the box." School administrators instinctively know that improvement and progress will result from modifications in how they function.

Endowment is an important element of the financial picture in private-independent schools. If your school has an endowment, the following six questions and answers are intended to help you clarify its focus and function. If not, the questions will help your school think about endowment in a meaningful way.

As the school year draws to a close and your new parents are in the process of transitioning into active members of your school community, review the effectiveness of your Parent Retention and Education Program (PREP) in the pre-enrollment period. An effective PREP moves your school beyond a conversation-by-conversation model to a strategic, systemic, and culturally savvy approach to parent relations that takes into account the psychology of "value reinforcement." A planned, structured education process strives to draw parents into a deeper and more meaningful relationship with the school.