Change: Why Independent Schools Must Be FOR It!

The 1932 Marx Brothers farce Horse Feathers opens with a presidential installation involving the gown-clad faculty and the more casually attired student body of Huxley College (whose rival, incidentally, is Darwin). The new president is inexplicably Groucho, holding nothing back just because his character wears a doctoral gown. After a brief speech, Groucho breaks into song:

I don’t know what they have to say,

It makes no difference anyway --

Whatever it is, I’m against it!

No matter what it is or who commenced it,
I’m against it.

Your proposition may be good

But let’s have one thing understood --

Whatever it is, I’m against it!

It doesn't matter in the end, of course, as Huxley defeats Darwin and the brothers polyandrously win the hand of the “college widow.” It’s utterly nonsensical, chaotic—Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo at their best.

Independent schools open the 2011–12 school year on possibly a less stable note. The economy is wobbling, the political process is unraveling, and our national intellectual aspirations have sunk so low that the Miss USA contest had no qualms about asking contestants whether evolution should be taught in schools; a bunch of contestants thought not. At the same time, the wealth and parental ambitions of households at the tip-top of the economy—the couple of undertaxed percent of the U.S. population who control most of its wealth—have grown apace, and I suppose the independent school world can hardly be faulted for wanting to provide good service such families.

At the risk of repeating myself, I remind readers of the power of brand. “Brand” tends to be used as a good reason for institutional consistency, which makes superficially good sense. But if a school’s brand is truly “educational excellence,” that’s not necessarily the same thing as “educational stasis at a high-but-traditional-and-familiar level.” One’s brand should not prohibit change, at least change made thoughtfully and for reasons that are supported by experiential reality.

Because the approaches and practices that make an education excellent are changing, in ways that have been so belabored and oft-repeated that the term “21st-century skills” has become kind of annoying. But it’s true, and it’s real. Ask any college admission officer or professor if students who have significant experiences doing high-level collaborative project-based work or who have had intensive experiences with design thinking don’t have a leg up when it comes to admissibility and academic promise. Sure, they must also know how to write and to have mastered the second derivative, and test scores and GPA are still the coin of the realm in most admission offices. But, to be blunt, colleges are looking for students whose experiences and skill sets are differentiated from those of the generality of applicants—and in 2011 a kid whose résumé is packed with “21st-century skills” still stands out as different.

In other words, schools actively engaged in developing their academic programs along lines that are now pretty well established as very effective are giving their students the kind of instrumental boost—along with actually useful cognitive skills and mindsets—that anxious parents (and wealthy ones—in other words, our traditional clientele) expect independent schools to provide.

Several generations of serious thinkers, from Jerome Bruner to Howard Gardner to Sir Ken Robinson, and a host of gurus heralding the promise of technology and new ways to think about curriculum and assessment have shown us the way to better world, and faculties and leaders who shudder at this world—educators like Groucho and the Huxley professoriate, reflexively “against it”—risk, well, everything. Soon enough there may be very little place for teachers who are afraid to advance their methods and curricula, administrators who are unwilling to push the issue, and boards who are trapped in the idea that tradition somehow froze solid—or should have—in 1965. Those anxious and ambitious families will be looking to take their kids, and their wealth, elsewhere, to schools that can serve their students and that will provide the kind of differentiating program that will make their children stand out in the beauty pageant that is selective college admissions these days.

I’m always shocked when I hear of great, “legacy” schools, rolling in endowment and applicants, that are paralyzed—teachers or leaders or governors or all three—by the idea that comprehensive curricular change could do them harm. Good grief! Who among us have stronger, more secure brands—more rock-solid credentials of “excellence”—to leverage in the direction of something new and substantially better? If St. Grottlesex were to change its methods—even if it meant following the lead of less prestigious but prospering schools who have been moving 21st-centuryward for a decade or more—those methods would soon become, like Harkness Tables—industry standards for this new century.

Of course, were this to happen the schools that have already embraced 21st-century methods might risk losing their competitive advantage and their students risk losing their differentiating characteristics. But I’m quite certain that such schools do not see themselves atop a plateau of practice but rather as engaged on a continuing journey toward new ways and new ideas.

But schools that aren’t wholeheartedly undertaking this journey, schools that permit themselves the false luxury of being fastidiously “against it,” may soon find themselves going nowhere, fast. To bring some of the more far-flung elements of this essay together in one stroke, it’s about evolution—it’s Darwinian. Adapt, or face the dead end.

I am aware that this "argument to the market" is materialistic almost to the point of cynicism. But what is it going to take to get more of our schools and their faculties off the dime? If survival, or at least a raise, is at stake, will more independent school educators open their minds and embrace real change?

When Are We?

For some of us it’s an itch, for others a royal pain, and for others a non-issue: Should we be talking about “21st-century skills” when we’re already a tenth of the way into the century? As we talk about the future of education, doesn’t using the term “21st-century” really mean we’re talking about the present, or even the recent past?

The other day I discovered that 20th Century Pictures, a precursor to 20th Century Fox, was founded in 1933. The New York Central ran its 20th Century Limited between New York and Chicago from 1902 (already into the century, we note) until 1967. Walter Cronkite’s Sunday-evening history show on television was called The Twentieth Century, and it ran from 1957 until 1966 and covered the whole thing, from grainy, herky-jerky newsreels of Teddy Roosevelt right up to more or less contemporary events.

It seems that new centuries seem new for a very long time, and they do tend to last their full hundred years. Since most of us only get to experience one new century in a lifetime, I guess this is a lesson we all have to learn anew and together, difficult as it is for generations bred to a 24-hour-or-less news cycle.

We are in the 21st century, as hard as it is to believe. And so asking kids (and teachers and schools) to learn 21st-century skills for a 21st-century workplace (Why do we talk so much about school being to prepare workers these days? Why?) is pretty much what we’re doing; if any of today’s students make it into the 22nd century, I bet they’ll need some retraining, anyhow.

So I’m okay with 21st-century skills, because that’s when we are and what we have to think about; if we’re all a little tired of urgent and rather hackneyed lists of what 21st-century students need and what 21st-century schools need to be doing (and I confess that I am), then that’s a different issue.

This whole conversation raises the question of what we are supposed to call “now.” “Contemporary” works, but it’s kind of blah. “Modern” may yet be quite useful, if we oldsters can shake images of Bauhaus architecture, Danish Modern furniture, Thoroughly Modern Millie (set in 1922), or A Modern Instance, an 1882 novel by William Dean Howells. (My school has been working with this, and it’s growing on me, I confess—maybe new centuries each deserve a shot at “modern” for themselves.) The “, c. 2011,” appositive seems silly, and awfully limiting.

So I think it’s “21st-century.” The trick, of course, is to actually be doing our work as it if really is the 21st century, and not as if we’re desperately marking time until things fall back into place they way they were when Cronkite was the Most Trusted Man in America and DeSotos, Ramblers, and Edsels roamed the earth.

Independent School Value: A 50-Year Perspective

Opening day chapel, and the distinguished-looking man at the pulpit wasn’t the Headmaster, and he wasn’t anyone else known to ninth-grade me. Tanned, with silver hair and a dark suit, he had to be important.

“Your parents are spending nine dollars a day on your education here. Be sure that every day, you put in your nine dollars' worth of effort!”

Whatever else he said, the man (who turned out to be the chairman of the school board of trustees), made an impression with this little factoid—at least on the Headmaster, who made it the mantra of that year and possibly several years to follow. We were to finish our homework every night, pay attention and speak up in class, and practice and play hard at sports. We must justify our parents’ investment in us.

Nine dollars a day—an amount arrived at by simply dividing the number of our day school days into the tuition and other required fees. This was during Lyndon Johnson’s inherited term, what we then thought were tumultuous times. I remember the number seeming important, but not unreasonable.

Nearly fifty years later, who among us would have the nerve to exhort students to do the same—to put in their one hundred dollars, even two hundred dollars (and more) a day worth of effort? While the logic hasn’t changed, the numbers have, and while nine bucks was a lot in those days, it just didn’t have the same stratospheric feel that a hundred or two have today. (Using the federal minimum wage, in 1964 those nine dollars represented 7.2 hours of work—almost a full day. A hundred dollars now is equivalent to 13.8 hours of minimum-wage work—nearly two days; for students at the $40K day schools in New York City, the 2011 cost of even a single day of a generously calculated 180-day school year works out to something close to 31 hours—nearly four full days—of minimum-wage work.)

There are some much larger and extremely urgent and important questions embedded here about school costs, socioeconomic diversity, and equity. We are not even talking about either the proliferation of administrative roles and services that have propelled tuition rises or the nature of teacher and administrative salary change. Perhaps another time, although the math I’ve already done points in some kind of disheartening directions.

But back to my question, Who would ask this explicitly of their students today: to put in their proportionate value of effort each school day based on tuition?

In 1964 it was plausible to envision the calculus of the school–student–parent “contract” in terms of students beavering away at their school obligations—the school providing an academic and moral framework—toward the fulfillment of some fairly clear-cut expectations: good grades, successful teams, pleasant vacations, and college. One could still have a couple of C-range grades on one’s transcript and hope for the Ivy League (with “decent” College Board scores and another compensating factor or two), and socioeconomic diversity wasn’t even much of a topic of conversation. The student was at the center; success or failure, that nine dollars’ worth of effort, was up to him (or her, although not yet at my school).

Today it seems so much more complicated, perhaps because on some level we’re embarrassed enough by our tuition rates not to want to resort to such simple math. Instead of “masters” teaching a limited continuum of courses, we have curricula carefully organized and vetted and presented by teachers whose professionalism and skills require continual monitoring and updating. We offer a range of social and support services aimed at assuring student success, and we make loud noises about holding ourselves as institutions even more accountable than we do our students. We turn ourselves inside-out to make sure that our message and reputation in the marketplace speak not only to students’ learning but to their comfort and efficacy in “the school community” and, by strong implication, to the ways in which their assured successes will give them a leg up as they approach the next level.

In 1964 my school offered me an opportunity: for a price, if I worked to be worthy of that price, I could learn some things and prepare myself for a college whose demands would be commensurate with my abilities. In 2011 the essential exchange may be the same, but there is a far greater sense that the school must now warrant and even guarantee a kind of experience that will be both rich in its daily elements and also valuable as the backdrop of a student’s c.v.—a résumé that will make the student stand out in a college (and next-school) admissions climate that is unimaginably more competitive than it was in the LBJ era.

Things are different, and that is why the numbers are different. For better or for worse, the Age of Accountability and 8% Ivy League admission rates mean that simply placing responsibility for success on the back of each student is no longer quite enough; independent schools know we must work our own tails off to provide support and services that really will help each student succeed, and our customers—the families who are paying more than ever proportionately (based on that minimum wage comparison and plenty of other measures) as well as our students—have a right to expect our very, very best efforts.

In 1964 my school didn’t need to be a think tank, and perhaps it didn’t even need teachers whose capacities needed to grow each year in response to new ideas and new ways (although many did, on their own). It seemed reasonable that the board chair could put it to students that we needed to live up to the price our families were paying so that we could sit in those pews and those classrooms and wear the school uniform on the field.

In 2011 we can still ask much of our students—at least a full working day’s worth of effort, just as it was in my student days—but we must also ask much, much more of ourselves. Are we providing an education that is fully worth one or two hundred dollars, each day to each student?

A board chair might well ask this question, but I think not just to students. I think it is also a question we must all continually ask ourselves.

The Year of the School As Think Tank?

Educators are feeling about like everyone else after the economic paroxysms of the past week. Five weeks after the annual fund has been put to bed (and the ones I know about seem to have come through okay) and just a couple of weeks before the curtain goes up on the new school year, it feels like 2008 all over again, with the politics meaner and the future more occluded.

But the show must go on. With all of the reasons we can conjure up to lie awake at night, we’ve got kids to educate.

The stakes are high, and we must be at our best: to both inspire and ease the minds of the children in our charge (and their parents), to lead faculties with clarity and confidence (and humility), and to manage our institutions with wisdom and creativity. There are going to be some tough decisions to be made, and one suspects that there could be a great deal more weirdness between now and June. The last few years have been tough, but now it’s time to start digging even deeper.

What a friend calls “summer conference season” has just come to an end, and the people in your schools whom you sent off to be personally and professionally developed can fill you in on the details of the case for change as they heard it from workshop presenters and gurus—what to do and how and why to do it. I hope like heck that their summer days and hours spent listening to very smart people will pay off in the substance of some brilliant initiatives at your school—and not just as little e-news blurbs to show your constituents how busy some of your teachers are over the summer.

It’s unclear precisely what the nuances of strategic management are going to be in 2011–2012 remains to be seen, but they are certainly going to involve branding, admissions, and development as much as academic program. The good news is that we’ve learned a few things since the 2008 Crash, and there’s quite a bit of wisdom to tap. The National Association of Independent Schools is on your side, and they’ve got a mass of shared wisdom in their Sustainable Schools materials.

What I can recommend, having been (I will happily avow) a part of gathering some of those materials, is to focus strategies during the second dip of this recession on doing more thinking, more listening, and more sharing. Independent school folks have not always been the best role models for the kind of open collaboration that we demand of our kids in sports and the arts and increasingly in the classroom; for some reason our schools and their leaders don’t always find it that easy to talk and listen to each other. We need to be better.

Sometimes our brothers and sisters in other school have excellent ideas to offer; sometimes what we can learn from the example of others is how to be on the lookout for new approaches to our work—new partnerships, new ways of teaching, new approaches to doing business, new sources of revenue, new markets, even new sorts of people whose different experiences, skills, and ideas can take our schools—and our students—to new and unexpected places.

Quite a few leaders in our industry have been talking about entrepreneurship lately. It’s a cool subject, and certainly our most successfully entrepreneurial graduates and parents are becoming some of our most important supporters; they often have a certain admirable fearlessness about them, and we more timid folk running nonprofit schools or even (even? Ahem!) classrooms are excited by their boldness, energy, creativity—and success.

Well, there never was a better time to try to imitate this boldness and creativity, and there has never been a better time to start fostering the entrepreneurial spirit in teachers, and even in our boards and parent and alumnae/i bodies.

A few posts and many months ago I described schools as being like think tanks. The question is, how can school leaders model and encourage think-tank-like, entrepreneurial behavior? Maybe it’s “venture capital:” seed money to support promising ideas or even reward innovative strategies (I’ve seen this concept embedded in a school’s strategic goals, so it’s not totally outlandish). Maybe it’s ramping up the professional development program to encourage and reward not just passive participation but active leadership, the kind that strengthens a school’s academic culture and encourages growth in everyone. Maybe it’s admitting that we might not have all the answers, right now—but that we believe those answers exist. And maybe it’s just listening to new ideas and then celebrating those who make them work on behalf of our students and our schools.

Can we start the year declaring not that we’re worried about the economy—of course we are; you’d have to be an idiot not to be—but rather by declaring 2011–2012 The Year of the School As Think Tank? Boldly invite faculty to begin imagining the school as it really could be if all of its best impulses, aims, ideals, and ideas were put into play; let the voices of students be heard, too. Why, we could even listen to other schools, and share what’s happening at ours.

It’s going to be tempting in some quarters to hold fast to the status quo, but it’s time we really start drawing on the intellectual, creative, social, and emotional resources in which our schools abound. Furthermore, we need to share what we discover, what works and what doesn’t. It’s the best way, really the only way, that I can see for independent schools to move ahead.