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No matter if you’re a School Head, Admission Director, Development Director, Board member, or any other private school administrator—Ideas & Perspectives®, ISM’s premier private school publication, has strategic solutions for the pervasive problems you face.
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- Enrollment dropping off? Discover how to implement the right admission and enrollment management strategies that engage your community—and fill your classrooms.
- Trouble retaining teachers? Learn how you can best support your teachers using ISM’s Comprehensive Faculty Development framework. Your faculty members will become more enthusiastic about their roles—which ultimately improves student outcomes.
- Fundraising campaigns not as successful as you’d hoped? Implement ISM’s practical advice and guidance to build a thriving annual fund, construct an effective capital campaign, and secure major donors—no matter your community size or location.
- Not sure how to provide professional development—for you and your staff? Learn ways to develop and fund a successful professional development strategy. You can improve teacher-centered satisfaction and growth, which in turn strengthens student-centered learning.
- Problematic schedule? You can master the challenges of scheduling with the help of ISM’s practical advice, based on our experience with hundreds of schools and our time-tested theories.
- And so much more.
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See the articles from our latest issue of Ideas & Perspectives.
Professional Development During Hard Economic Times
Volume 34 No. 10 // August 6, 2009
Scheduled time for professional growth and renewal of a meaningful kind (collegial, site-based, and career-long) is not often offered in our schools. When professional growth and renewal is done in a way that inspires a healthy faculty culture, student performance and student connection to their school is enhanced and is made optimal. Having such a faculty culture should be a prime objective for school management.
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What The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act Means For Private Schools: Rectifying Past and Present Pay Discrimination
Volume 34 No. 10 // August 6, 2009
Of the numerous new laws passed during the first 100 days of the Obama administration, the COBRA subsidy provision of the economic stimulus bill—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA)—has had perhaps the most immediate impact on schools (e.g., with the federal government providing a subsidy of 65% of benefits costs for involuntarily terminated employees for up to nine months). However, a new law that has received far less attention from schools—the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (LLFPA)—may have much further-reaching and longer-lasting consequences for any schools that engaged in pay discrimination at any point in the past. All schools are urged to review their past and current pay practices and to address any potential liabilities that they may discover in light of this new law.
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Price, Product, Process: Competing Within Your Market Platform
Volume 34 No. 10 // August 6, 2009
ISM has written a number of times about its tripartite classification system for examining a private-independent school’s marketing platform. In simplest terms, the classification and its descriptors read as follows. Price/value: We offer a transformational (nearly always religious) experience for your child at a cost you can afford. Product: We offer the best academic “product” (graduate) in our market area. Process: We offer “more” for your child (more electives; more levels of electives; more teams; more levels of teams; more individual attention, and/or a unique pedagogy) than others in our market.
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A Sample Strategic Plan (Including a Capital Campaign)
Volume 35 No. 2 // July 28, 2009
Strategic plans focus on the viability-related issues implicit in school finance, governance, and management. To meet ISM’s criteria for strategic plans, the planning document items must (1) display cost estimates, (2) indicate projected revenue sources, (3) be sequenced by year of expected implementation, and (4) be charged to a responsible person or entity.
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Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)—How It Differs From Current Labor Law
Volume 34 No. 9 // July 2, 2009
During the Obama administration’s first 100 days in office, several initiatives became law that have had an impact on private-independent schools. One bill of interest to employers, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), appears likely to come before Congress this summer but has received little attention in the private school community. As EFCA may significantly impact the way school employees and administrators interact, this article highlights the main features of the bill, considers key ramifications, and recommends ways to positively reinforce elements of your school culture that could be affected by EFCA.
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Recognize Your Faculty’s Excellence and Boost Student Retention.
Volume 34 No. 8 // June 12, 2009
Among the unsettling findings in ISM’s recent 37-school survey was this one: Less than 61% of the parents surveyed agreed that “The school rewards and recognizes excellence in its faculty.” 1 Only 24.44% “strongly” agreed. As School Head, consider your own situation. How would your own parent body be likely to respond to that item?
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Moody’s Independent School Outlook: The Implications
Volume 34 No. 8 // June 12, 2009
Each year, Moody’s Investors Service rates private-independent schools and the outlook for their ability to sustain debt (and, therefore, the advisability of an investor to support that debt). In the most recent ratings of the 52 schools it currently tracks, the service assigned stable outlooks to 94% of the schools, a positive outlook to 2%, and to 4%, a negative outlook.
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The Student Culture Profile and Your Purpose and Outcome Statements
Volume 34 No. 8 // June 12, 2009
ISM's Student Culture Profile has been in use for four years. Designed for use with middle and upper school students, the instrument can serve a useful purpose in your efforts, as School Head, to monitor the extent to which your student culture conforms to your school's core purposes and outcomes.
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Managing Faculty Culture in Times of Turmoil
Volume 34 No. 7 // May 12, 2009
In extraordinary times, leaders need to employ extraordinary insight. There is no school that we know of that is not contemplating or undergoing considerable change, and some of the change is negative—letting faculty go, eliminating raises, reducing or cutting programs and support services, increasing work loads.
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Revenue-Performance Bonuses
Volume 34 No. 7 // May 12, 2009
For schools that have frozen salaries for the upcoming school year (i.e., have awarded increases of 0%–2%), a system of Revenue-Performance Bonuses (RPBs) may be worth consideration.
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