End of Days for Some Private Schools: A Head of School’s Checklist for Insignificance

These are interesting times in independent school education. Some of our schools may not be around in twenty or thirty years for a variety of reasons, most of them financial and technological. As our tuition and operating costs continue to rise, pick-up circle conversations are now, more than ever, drifting towards the ultimate questions: Is it worth it? What unique skills, behaviors, and knowledge will my child get at a private academy that they cannot gain anywhere else?

So, if you want your school to go the way of the VHS tape, here is a dry-witted, wink-wink checklist for you. Enjoy!

✔Support Staffing: Do not over-invest in student support staff, on-site psychologists, or learning specialists. You are an elite academic powerhouse, so those kids who cannot handle the rigor should probably go elsewhere. Remember: your school caters to the best and the brightest, and standards need to be maintained.

✔New Tech: Avoid experimenting with “trendy” technology such as social media tech, blended learning, or online educational support models. Only use technology for researching, emails, and the paper writing process. Also, pretend not to notice the handful of “old guard” teachers who refuse to use email or Smartboards.

✔Curriculum: Keep the CPR going on the “old dead white guys” curriculum in the high school and make sure the primary and middle schools keep spiraling native America, Greeks, Eurocentric immigration, medieval/renaissance Europe, Romans, and colonial America. Avoid any trends about global curriculum, diversity, or including voices that have been left out of the western canon except as senior electives or during nationally designated months.

✔Teacher Work Load: Crank up demands on teachers. Keeping piling more responsibilities (additional classes, interscholastic coaching, committee work) on your teachers, while still paying them a lot less than their public school counterparts. And, continue the slow whittling away of their benefits to cut costs.

✔Athletics: Recommit to football as a major focus of your athletic program. Even though the public schools you compete against thump you year after year with their three-bus army, football is a tradition at your school, and it always will be (despite flagging interest and the collapse of your middle school programs.) This concussion obsession will ease up soon, one hopes.

✔Diversity: Solidify diversity as a key component of the school’s mission statement, but really only maintain its “pet project” status that begins and ends in the admissions office. It is sink or swim at your school, as it always has been. You have done wonders over the years in providing opportunities to the underserved by letting them attend your academy for free. What else could be done anyway?

✔Bricks: Keep fundraising and campus expansion at the top of the priority list. Internal programs and innovative curricular changes come and go, but bricks and endowments last forever.

✔ New Teaching: Tinker at the margins with project-based learning and other innovative and collaborative educational models, but do not ever sacrifice what has worked for your academy for decades. Also, keep your modes of instruction rooted in traditional practices that are tried and true. All that collaborative mumbo jumbo and wishy-washy pod learning never worked in the 70s, nor will it now. How do you grade that stuff anyway?

✔College Entrance: Remain obsessed with college entrance statistics, APs, National Honors Society, and the list of impressive colleges to which your students gain entrance. Don’t worry about optimizing the student experience for everyone; remain focused on the top 30% of high performing students, as every one else will get pulled along by them. A tide of rigor floats all boats. Also, students should avoid academic reaching and risking-taking so not to tarnish their permanent records or affect their futures.

✔Standards: Avoid any professional development initiatives that broadly address the use of standards or research-based instructional strategies. Teachers need to remain autonomous and should not feel threatened by any top down Big Brother stuff. Your teachers are the best and do not need further development beyond what they identify for themselves as valuable.

✔The Arts: Keep the arts departments and their offerings interesting, but not too much so. Athletic centers and turf is what really invigorates the alums and looks cool. Be sure to mention the arts in a lot in speeches, but unless someone wants to donate to build a new arts wing, keep it hobby-like. Instead, embrace anything that involves the term “entrepreneurship,” no matter how mundane (re: selling lemonade.)

✔Demands on Students: Keep turning up the speed and incline on the student treadmill. Steer clear of fringe extra curricular drift that distracts from the meritocratic march to greatness. Be sure to help students build stronger resumes and avoid needless meanderings or searches for meaning. Community service should only really be a “done in a day” box to be checked, as are internships, senior projects, health class, and senior speeches.

✔Current Research: Ignore the National Association of Independent School’s 2010 report entitled “A Guide to Becoming a School of the Future.” Be able to drop terms like “21st century skills” and “disruptive technology” at the new parent gatherings, but do not whole-heartedly embrace any of the bold suggestions in the report. Stay the course.

It’s that simple. Best of luck.

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