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Pat Bassett's "Independent Perspective" Columns
"Independent Perspective" columns written by NAIS President Patrick F. Bassett for Independent School magazine. Summer 2010
Assuring Healthy Schools
 Articulated in one form or another, the mission of all independent schools is to contribute to the healthy growth of kids in mind, body, and spirit. That happens most felicitously in healthy schools, schools where trustees, administrators, and school faculty and staff have created the conditions of fertile soil for student growth to occur. While parents and teachers/advisors are in charge of monitoring the well-being of individual students, it is the job of trustees and school heads to monitor the overall health and well-being of the school. Spring 2010
A Game-Changing Model for Financially Sustainable Schools
 It’s heartening to know that most of our constituents determined that paying the tuition was not a luxury but a necessity: in many cases, everything else on the family budget was on the block, except the schooling, where the needs of their children were being well-met. Another “best of times” piece of good news is that independent school leaders and boards found ways to economize and increase efficiencies by following their own instincts and by taking NAIS’s challenge to “sail directly into the storm” — using the crisis to make the hard decisions that are ordinarily difficult to implement in the family-like and consensus-rooted cultures of independent schools. Nonetheless, some schools may still face “the worst of times” because of two unprecedented factors. Winter 2010
An Explication of "Fisherman's Wife"
 Every so often, a piece of literature (Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, or A Separate Peace) or a film (Dead Poets Society, Scent of a Woman, or The Emperor’s Club) speaks powerfully about the world of adolescence within the context of a private school. These works resonate not so much because they terrify us on multiple levels, but because we identify with the protagonists so deeply and fear that the flaws within them are reflections of our own naiveté and imperfection. Fall 2009
Demonstrations of Learning for 21st-Century Schools
 One year ago, I wrote a piece entitled “An Education President for the 21st Century,” in which I cited current scholarship on the skills and values that will be necessary for students to succeed and prosper in these turbulent and ever-changing times. All five of the sources cited were in extraordinary agreement about the six basic skills and values that will be expected and rewarded in this century. Since the publication of that article, a sixth influential work has been released — The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need — And What We Can Do About It, by Tony Wagner, co-director of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard University — with virtually the same list of skills and values. Summer 2009
High Anxiety, the Sequel
 In my mind’s eye, I can imagine the opening of a school management team meeting held in an independent school head’s office. A grim-faced head begins the meeting by noting that he has called on each member of the team for a “condition of the school” report, an “update” that spares no “brutal facts.” What ensues is the catalog of mutually reinforcing factors that are “depressing.” Spring 2009
Change Leadership: Rethinking Pay for Performance
 At the NAIS Institute for New Heads each year, I give school leaders a wry piece of advice: “If something goes terribly askew at school, and you need to buy time to rectify it before your parent body finds out, suggest a change to the dress code. This tactic will keep parents distracted for at least 18 months in dress-code debates, giving you plenty of time to quietly fix the problem.” Next July, for the new group of school heads, I’m going to add a similar strategy for keeping the faculty preoccupied: “If you need to implement a change that would normally cause gnashing of teeth and drawing of battle lines among your teachers, do it after you form a task force to study changing the compensation system to a merit-pay model. The faculty will be so annoyed and preoccupied by the merit-pay proposal that the other change will seem minor by comparison.” Winter 2009
When Parents and Schools Align
 To educate children and adolescents, good schools know that they must also spend time educating parents. When parents are not on the same page with educators, kids move through the chiaroscuro of misaligned home and school life, receiving conflicting messages rather than similarly focused ones from both sides. Accordingly, I'd like to share some observations that parents and educators can contemplate together. Fall 2008
The Finnish Model
 In Finland, there are virtually no private schools. Why not? Because the public schools in Finland function like independent schools in the U.S., and the results are very good.
Finland has been in the news of late, especially since the publication of the most recent PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) testing results revealed that students in Finland outperformed those of all other OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development) countries. How did they do it? Summer 2008
Change Is Good
 The question before all educators is how and how quickly we change, not whether we'll change. On this topic, I am reminded of The New Yorker cartoon of the business traveler in his pajamas and slippers, seated on the side of his bed, answering a telephone call, and hearing, "This is your wake-up call: Change or die." Spring 2008
On Difficult Conversations
 In the contexts of the presidential primaries, yet another peace initiative for the Middle East, and this issue of Independent School on the intersection of education and democracy, I've been thinking about difficult conversations, their relation to leadership, and how badly they so often go. Winter 2008
The Genius of James Madison
 Annually, members of the NAIS leadership team go on a spring retreat to assess progress on our goals for the current year, to frame preliminary goals for the coming year, and to examine leadership issues for ourselves and, by extension, NAIS-member schools. Typically, we choose an experiential format. One year, for instance, we went to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for a program entitled, "Lessons in Leadership from the Battlefields of Gettysburg." Last spring, we held our retreat at Montpelier, the historic home of James Madison, located in central Virginia. Fall 2007
Making Strategy
 Without ongoing strategic processes, any organization can quickly find itself in jeopardy in today's world. As the National War College notes in its training of senior officers, the strategic process today is confounded by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. So more organizations like NAIS are adopting what amounts to an "existential" approach to planning. Unlike the "essentialist" model we've been using, where one starts with mission as a fixed point in the heavens and derives direction from there, the new approach requires us to start with data, then develop vision, and end with mission — often adjusting the last to accommodate new circumstances and challenges. Summer 2007
Sports at the Academy
 Beyond the experience of teaming and the healthful impact of lots of extracurricular activities on setting a standard of involvement and developing the skill of managing a packed schedule, what other valuable factors are at play in sports? How about the cultivation and nurturing of the competitive spirit? Or ambition? Or a single-minded (and sometimes obsessive) self-discipline to excel? Peak performers in all arenas (sports, arts, business, the military, medicine, law, finance, etc.) exhibit these characteristics. Spring 2007
Professionalizing the Profession
 The new expectations for 21st-century teachers should include many roles: teacher as professional; teacher as learner; teacher as innovator; teacher as team player. All four of these roles are manifest in schools that are committing to transform teaching from a trade to a profession. Winter 2007
The "School of the Future"
 When I imagine the school of the future, I try to remember what it means to be a kid. I remember what my granddaughter Avery told me about her first day in kindergarten: "I love school, but it's an awfully long time to keep my shoes on." I remember her saying at the beginning of third grade that "When I grow up, I'm going to be an inventor" and her telling me that she already had a notebook filled with invention ideas (many of them tools to make her younger brother vanish). And I dread her getting to the fourth grade, where — with all the testing, competition for grades, and redirection of learning away from what interests kids and towards what's mandated by adults — young students often lose their enthusiasm for school. Fall 2006
The NAIS Governance Survey, 2006
 Questions and Answers
Every five or so years, the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) conducts a governance survey to determine benchmarks for independent school board composition, structures, alignment between board chairs and heads, and priorities. While occasionally we at NAIS receive notes from heads about how annoying it is to receive so many surveys from us on so many topics, we are thankful for the large number who do respond (over 500 in this case), since the results are so critical in helping us provide the information from which all heads, boards, and schools will benefit. Elsewhere in this issue of Independent School, Donna Orem writes on some key results of the survey (see her article in this issue). In this column, I note how the new data relates to the key FAQs we receive on governance. Summer 2006
Professional Development for the 21st-Century School
 Most schools have long accepted the assumption that any enrichment or training activity has some value, even when that value has been hard to measure. But we've also always known that experiences disconnected from the broader mission of the institution may enrich individuals but seldom contribute to the overall growth of an institution's program or its success. On the contrary, it seems that professional development only "sticks" and "works" for schools as a whole when groups of faculty engage in highly targeted research-and-design work whose intent is to transform teaching and learning within the school. Spring 2006
Independence Under Fire
 Independent schools educate only a tiny fraction of the school-age population (slightly over 1 percent of the entire school-age population, 10 percent of the 10 percent of kids who go to private schools). The essential distinction between independent schools and other private schools is independence itself, essentially independence in governance and in finance: i.e., independent schools own, govern, and finance themselves, as opposed to government (public) and other private schools (parochial/diocesan) where the state or the church owns, governs, and finances the school. The National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) believes that the very success of its member schools and their unique contributions to the mix of American precollegiate education are related to the freedoms that derive from independence. Winter 2006
Class, Popular Media, and Independent Schools
 Independent schools are more often than not parodied in film as unapproachable schools for the rich (Dead Poet’s Society, Scent of a Woman, The Emperor’s Club) and portrayed in mainstream news as inaccessible institutions (“the tony and elite school on the hill”). Yet, while independent schools are enthusiastically painted with that brush, the elite, private colleges are not. Why is this? The answer, I think, is simple: The public knows that smart, middle-class kids get subsidized to go to college (80 percent of students receive financial aid at the most selective colleges), but about 80 percent of kids at independent schools pay full tuition. So while both independent schools and selective colleges are academically elite, only independent schools (with a few exceptions) are socioeconomically elite. Fall 2005
The Better Angels Within
Shaping Healthy Schools Today
When speaking to groups of parents and prospective parents about independent schools, I often cite the analogy of the greenhouse. Schools are, like greenhouses, controlled environments that protect the life within them from noxious elements that could harm or dwarf growth. Schools are also highly nourishing environments that enable the young to grow deep and strong roots and healthy leaves. At the same time, students are pushed and challenged and offered controlled exposure to the outside world so that, as with greenhouse plants, once transplanted in the outside world, they will not only survive but flourish. This analogy sounds right to folks, confirming their intuitive belief about independent schools and reminding them of one of the main reasons why they choose independent schools — which, according to an NAIS survey, is because schools provide “a safe environment.”
But we also need to acknowledge that noxious elements can breach the greenhouse door. Summer 2005
Utopian Schools
 Part of the tension between the disparate projections of our individual and collective fates is rooted in religion, of course: Will we ultimately return to paradise or perish in Hades? But it is also rooted in philosophy: Do we, like Rousseau, believe in the fundamental virtue of our species, or, like Hobbes, in its elemental vices? Spring 2005
Developing Sustainable Schools
 At NAIS, we believe it is essential to push for a multi-dimensional definition of school sustainability, to expand the term’s meaning in several directions, in a conscious move to make independent schools stronger and more publicly accountable institutions. While it may seem to some to be an idealistic goal, we believe that it is, in fact, a survival imperative. Winter 2005
Teaming for Sustainable Leadership
 While school leaders understandably are preoccupied with sustaining their own tenure, the primary leadership concern of schools is leadership that sustains a school over time. And for successful long-term leadership, the leadership team is the critical element. In fact, as Jim Collins points out in his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don't, the most valuable quality in any organizational leader is the ability to create a successful leadership team. Charismatic, commanding figures might be able to transform organizations in the short term, but that success is often so closely tied to the leader that the organization sputters once he or she leaves. Great organizations, Collins says, need what he calls "Level 5 Leadership": self-effacing leaders inclined to share power and decision-making — people driven by organizational rather than personal success. Fall 2004
Accountability and Independence for Schools
Towards a Higher Standard
For a long time, independent schools have relied primarily upon peer-review accreditation for the purpose of accountability. Akin to the process used by colleges and universities, libraries, and hospitals, school accreditation via a reputable accrediting organization is thorough, rigorous, and professional. It is rooted in two underlying principles: (1) offering full disclosure (what a school believes — its mission — and how it operates in congruence with those beliefs), and (2) meeting high standards (how schools should function and what students should learn). Schools that belong to the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), for example, undertake a periodic accreditation review that involves a year-long self-study and a several-day school visit by a team of professionals. The process is overseen by accrediting bodies in the various states and regions, all of which belong to the NAIS Commission on Accreditation, a national organization that sets universal criteria, models core standards, and periodically reviews the process of each of the accrediting bodies, in effect accrediting the accreditors....
But as my wife is fond of saying, "That was then; this is now." Summer 2004
When Technology Works for Schools
 When I talk with school heads about challenges for the school community, "managing technology" comes close to the top of everyone's list. After a decade of investment and considerable expansion into domains (literally) not even conceived of a generation ago, school leaders wonder how to make good decisions regarding technology, decisions that will have a "return on investment." Of course, just about everyone is clamoring for more hardware, a larger tech staff, faster and wireless Internet access, better interactive websites, and more mobile hardware. The demand is outpacing the ability of most schools to respond, considering that independent schools like to make careful, deliberate decisions: seeing what results they get from previous investments before making major new ones. Given this, how do we even begin to design an "outcomes" metric for investment in technology? Spring 2004
A Passage to India?
 Imagine that you're an exchange student parachuted into rural India for a year. In order to communicate your most basic needs, you'd have to learn Hindi. In order to forge friendships and avoid a cultural faux pas, you'd have to respect local customs and religious practices. After a year, the richness of your experience would be in direct correlation to how well you adapted to your "foreign" environment. Winter 2004
Creativity in Schools
 Creativity and its manifestation in art are central to life and to the spirit. Art dignifies existence, enriching the creator and the beholder. We know this in independent schools, as many public schools sadly cut back on the arts in some misguided attempt to "economize," independent schools remain committed to the arts, much to their credit and to the life-long benefit of their students. Indeed, an aesthetic sensibility and appreciation of the arts clearly contribute to the meaning we seek and make of our lives. Fall 2003
Financing Independent Schools for the 21st Century
Surveys by the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) last year indicated that financing schools was among the most pressing issues and challenges facing school leadership. How do we re-think financing, school leaders wanted to know, so that we can remain solvent and accessible for years to come? Last fall, NAIS and the National Business Officers Association collaborated to convoke a brain trust of school heads, trustees, business managers, and advancement professionals to begin to explore the possibilities of re-engineering the ways schools approach financing. Preliminary thinking from that symposium led to the offering this past summer of NAIS's first Financing Schools Institute, led by Harvard University's Jim Honan. The goal of all this formal focus on financing schools is to help schools learn how better to analyze data on which financial decisions are based, to develop new financing models that fit with the realities of the 21st Century, and to determine what truly works for schools so that this information can be shared widely. Summer 2003
Listening to Students of Color
But, as we look to improve the experiences of students of color in schools, it's not a bad idea to start by letting current students of color speak for themselves — and for adults to listen and carefully evaluate their school's role in shaping these students' experiences. As that happens, we'll know what is working, and learn how to build upon that success for a better future, not only for students of color, but for all students.
In this spirit, I put out a call to schools for students of color to share their experiences. What follows are excerpts from the many powerful and moving responses I received. Spring 2003
Are Robin Williams and Kevin Kline "High-Quality Teachers"
The debate about good teaching tends to break down into two views. On the one hand, state education departments and teacher unions and many of the schools of education define good teachers as those who are certified (i.e., those who presumably know something about pedagogy because they have studied methodology courses). A "highly qualified teacher in every classroom" is their mantra.
On the other hand, advocates of liberalizing entry into teaching (such as independent schools, many other types of private schools, and their proponents) argue that great teaching has very little, if anything, to do with certification and methodology courses. Rather, it requires knowledge in one or more content areas, passion about one's subject, and a love of kids. "High quality" (vs. "highly qualified") teachers is the mantra of this school of thought — and each of these teachers (at least in middle and secondary schools) has a degree in a discipline he or she teaches and/or life experiences that enrich the teaching itself. The idea here is that one needs to know something deeply to teach it well, and to care about it to teach it passionately. What light can Dead Poets Society and The Emperor's Club shed on this debate? Winter 2003
Myths and Realities in College Admissions
Back in December of 1988, as head of Stuart Hall School (Virginia), I sent a tongue-in-cheek letter to Jack Blackburn, dean of admissions at the University of Virginia. In it, I not only encouraged him to accept my daughter into his fine university, but I also pointed out what would happen to me, personally, if he turned her down. The letter paid scant attention to my daughter's interests or achievements. Instead, I focused on my health and happiness -- the desire to see that all my bragging to friends and reassurances to my spouse came to fruition. Fall 2002
An Alignment of the Stars
One might speculate that schools and associations could be more conscious of the confluence of factors that will help them align their stars. Here at the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) we've been trying to do just that. We continuously ask ourselves, "How do we serve our members better?" We remain open to change — both in how we operate and in what services we offer. Perhaps what is most interesting about the process is that it has helped us to become highly task- and goal-oriented, seeing that orientation as the best means to meet our mission in serving member schools and associations Summer 2002
Rethinking Independent School Governance
 What is strategic for school leadership? In the last three issues of Independent School, the president of NAIS indicated that creating more diverse and inclusive schools was one element of "staying strategic," developing a vision for a 21st Century school program was a second element, and creating an industry-wide "advocacy initiative" to disseminate key messages and themes about independent schools was a third. In this column, he argues that rethinking governance may be another possible strategic direction for independent schools. Spring 2002
Advocating Independent Schools
 What is strategic for school leadership?
In the last two issues of Independent School, the president of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) indicated that creating more diverse and inclusive schools was one element of "staying strategic" and that developing a vision for a 21st-Century school program was a second element. Here, he argues that creating an industry-wide image and message about independent schools, and then undertaking an advocacy campaign at all levels, should be equally compelling imperatives for school leaders. Winter 2002
Creating a Vision for 21st Century Schools
 What is strategic for school leadership?
In the last issue of Independent School, the president of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) indicated that creating more diverse and inclusive schools was one element of "staying strategic." In this column, he argues that creating a vision regarding educational programs for 21st century schools should be an equally compelling focus for school leaders. Fall 2001
Taking Action on Diversity
 I have two grandchildren — four-year-old Avery and two-year-old Carter — both of whom are filled with boundless imagination, energy, and openness to learn. I know, because demography is destiny, that they will grow up in a much more diverse world than the one I grew up in, and I am thrilled that they will be enriched by that diversity. That they will embrace, rather than resist, that diversity will in part be determined by the cultural cues that they pick up from their parents (and grandparents), from the other kids in the neighborhood, and most especially from their school. My dream is that they will attend an independent school that is far along the road to equity and justice, one that creates a welcoming and inclusive environment for all kinds of differences — where diversity is strength, and everyone knows it. To help my grandchildren — and all children in independent schools — fulfill this dream, we are obligated to explore school leadership and culture and symbolism and priorities. |
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