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.

In the school setting, we know healthy kids when we see them. We notice their engagement in their studies and activities, their enthusiasm for school, their physical and emotional affect — evident in patterns of attendance, student surveys (such as the High School Study of Student Engagement), grades, discipline, etc. The self-confidence with which students interact with others is another barometer, like the seven-year-old Carter who confronts the schoolyard bully (“You know, everyone is afraid of you, so that makes you the neighborhood bully, and it’s not nice and has to stop.”), or the five-year-old Helen, playing by herself on the playground, shoveling sand into her pail, responding to a teacher’s query, “Helen, how many shovels full of sand do you think it will take to fill the pail?” with “I don’t need any help right now, but those two children over there look as if they could use some.”¹

But how do we know if the school itself is healthy?

The Board’s Role in a Healthy School

NAIS-member schools can assess board health quantitatively and qualitatively by the results and comments from the NAIS Online Board Assessment² — and prudent boards do this annually. The NAIS board also evaluates its three annual meetings at the end of each of its two-day or three-day sessions with a “quick and dirty” written assessment: “What went well? What do we need to do better next time? What topics should be on the next meeting’s agenda?” The brief, open-ended, and timely nature of these queries produces ample insight into “the mood of the board” and, thus, one element of its health. With frequent comments and accolades like “The best board I serve on” and “Where I get my professional development,” we know the board sentiment is positive; with the occasional “Can’t let one or two board members monopolize the time and tone of the meeting,” the board chair knows when an “off-line” conversation is needed with individual board members. Over the years, I’ve had many conversations with various schools’ board chairs or committee on trustees chairs about a toxic trustee who tries to develop his or her own following, or who is persistently disrespectful of the board’s or school’s leadership, or who promotes a self-serving agenda or otherwise obstructs the workings of the school. In those cases, a healthy board does not renew the term of the trustee, or, in the worst cases, asks the trustee to resign or removes the trustee. The healthiest boards mostly avoid toxic trustees in the first place through a vetting process that includes service on a board or school task force or committee before election to the board, where one’s true colors are often first revealed.

The Parents’ Role

With the exception of the obsessive 5 percent who occupy a great deal of administrative time and psychic energy, most parents in healthy schools are genuinely supportive of their schools. We know from NAIS StatsOnline data that, on average, two-thirds of parents contribute to annual giving every year. At some schools in some years, quite amazingly, 100 percent of parents donate to annual giving. These remarkable levels of annual giving are dollar equivalencies of appreciation for what the school does for the parents’ children, and represent one indicator of a school’s healthy parental support. Other indicators of parent body health are the level of family volunteerism, attendance at parents’ association events, parents’ presence at school athletic and artistic events, and the like. Creating the conditions for salutary parental involvement is work, requiring setting expectations from the beginning and finding parent leaders whose own “tipping point” of enthusiasm creates a climate of parental participation and support. An annual parent satisfaction survey³ should reveal not only what parents are happy about and unhappy about, but also what’s really important to fix and what’s not so important to worry about in order to maintain a healthy parent body.

Operational Health

How do we gauge the operational health of an independent school? For boards looking for “dashboard indicators,” NAIS, through its annual data collection (StatsOnline), provides 10 markers of success that function as “data proxies” for institutional health.⁴ As the chart (on page 10) illustrates for one of the “markers,” one can easily place a school’s data next to the industry’s range by percentile to see where the school stands comparatively. (In the planning stages is a customizable version of the “markers of success” that will give each school its own data juxtaposed against a self-selected benchmark group of schools.)

Beyond the “brand strength” of this first example, the “markers of success” also include data proxies for customer satisfaction (attrition rates); constituent appreciation and loyalty (giving rates by alumni, parents, grandparents, and trustees); operational efficiency (ratios of students to staff); cost/value (tuition rates); and the like. These “data proxies” allow schools to determine where they have healthy indicators to leverage, and where they might want to focus resources to improve. In this way, the markers function as an institutional “check-up,” a kind of annual physical that can be assessed, compared, and used to sustain or improve the health of the school.

Faculty Health

What does one observe about the faculty culture that indicates its health? Surveying the faculty is always tricky given the intense, personal, emotion-laden nature of the work. (Never, under any circumstances, administer a faculty climate and morale survey in February.) On any given day, results would vary widely, just as they would if one administered a personal climate and morale survey to one’s own family, depending on what affront or affirmation happened that particular day. Better to gauge the health of the faculty by the teachers’ observable behaviors. Is there obvious collegiality at the school, with teachers supporting one another’s work and initiatives? Is this a culture of professionalism, with faculty genuinely interested in understanding and implementing new approaches to teaching based on research on how children learn? Do faculty members support the kids at athletic and artistic events? Do they support the leadership and act as advocates for the school with current and prospective parents? Do they receive substantial indications of support from school leadership, via recognition and rewards, for the stellar work they do?

School Leadership

All of the factors above are critical ingredients to school health, as is, of course, school leadership. What every school needs and deserves is stable, secure, thoughtful, nimble, and visionary leadership from its head of school and his or her administrative team. While the early 1990s were a time of relatively high turnover for school heads (often related to a lack of alignment between heads and boards about what the job entailed), since the mid-1990s we’ve seen remarkable stability in leadership. In a recent NAIS study of school heads⁵, we found that the average tenure of an NAIS-member school head in his or her current school was 13 years (with over 20 years’ total of school headship experience): This is far better than the conventional claims in the field of average turnover of three to five years. Thus, one indicator of school health is stability of leadership as manifested in the long tenure of one’s school head.

For the NAIS Annual Report to the membership two years ago, I presented a “brutal facts” overview of some of the conditions of the industry that appeared foreboding — analogizing the landscape as “good, bad, and ugly.” I also referenced the “VUCA” acronym coined by the country’s top military and security service brass trained at the National War College. The military leaders had dubbed the college VUCA U. — with “VUCA” standing for “volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.” In our Annual Report, I had written about preparing school leaders for what would clearly be a “VUCA” world of “volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.”

For the Annual Report to the membership in February of this year, I returned (with more compelling “great recession” data) to the VUCA theme, but this time celebrating the surprising resilience of independent schools, given the horrible economy they all faced and addressed with wise and decisive leadership. For a VUCA landscape of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, schools needed — and were well-served by — a new VUCA leadership of “vision, understanding, courage, and agility.”⁶

Whatever we can do to support and sustain VUCA leadership in our schools will increasingly be required for healthy schools in the future.

Notes