Ken’s college continued to enthrall him, years after his graduation. The place had a magic to it when Ken attended, and that magic persisted long after his graduation. Ken even wondered whether its charm would ever wear off. The campus, grounds, and buildings had a quiet majesty to them. The professors seemed like genteel sorcerers revealing the earth’s spells, while the administrators seemed like royal princes and princesses ruling a fantasy kingdom. Even the students fell under the college’s charm, taking on their own quiet grandeur as they mulled higher vision and thoughts. Ken couldn’t put his finger on it, which might have been the point. His college had an uplifting spirit to it that no one could control.
Community
How you conceive of your school goes a long way toward making it what it is. A school can be a lot of things to different people, as the following paragraphs suggest. And that variety is one significant attribute of a school, that it can all at once serve several missions, populations, and purposes. Indeed, a school must do so. Most schools must have relatively wider margins and softer boundaries, if they are to serve their social, economic, political, philosophical, historical, and other functions. A school isn’t any one thing but instead several things, each function informing and shaping another. The one thing that a school may be is a community. Communities imply both multiplicity and unity. Schools have students with different experiences, capabilities, and commitments, and teachers with different talents and gifts. But schools gather that multiplicity around a fellowship committed to student growth in social and civic character. Schools are communities, in their better iterations like extended families.
Constituencies
A school, though, is a special kind of community that brings together different constituencies. A strong, stable, vital, and effective school recognizes, involves, and supports not just one or two but instead all of its significant constituencies. Current students are the prime constituency, including directly or indirectly their parents who invest in and support the school. A school that doesn’t serve its current students and their parents well will soon perish. Former students, also calling them graduates and alumni, are another important constituency. A school has a real problem if its graduates are not knowledgeable, skilled, ethical, reputable, employed, and otherwise prospering. Employers are another school constituency, especially for colleges, universities, graduate schools, and professional schools but also for vocational schools and high schools. If a school is not graduating credentialed, licensed, skilled, and knowledgeable students of good character, then employers won’t be hiring them. Government regulators and agency accreditors are other profoundly important constituents, with their powers to effectively shutter a school. Donors and endowment boards make other important constituents. The school’s board and administrators must also treat the school’s teachers and staff members as other critical constituencies whose needs the school must meet in their own way. Anytime one weighs the needs of one school constituent, one must consider how responding to those needs will affect other constituencies.
Interests
A school is thus a set of constituencies, each with different interests. To employers and economists, schools might be assembly lines churning out laborers in large enough numbers to keep productivity up and wages down, and with just the right attributes to make the laborers fungible and compliant. To families, neighborhoods, and communities, schools might be training grounds for the moral character and social skills that sustain a peaceful and orderly society. To teachers and administrators, schools are workplaces, each with greater or lesser demands, responsibilities, wages, and benefits, and each with either uplifting or degrading workplace culture and spirit, and stronger or weaker collegial relationships. To students, school may be an inevitable annoyance, depressing and better avoided, or conversely exciting, inviting, and inspiring, equipping the mind and body for adventure and to engage the world. For students, school may also be a way to escape from a difficult home, a place to make friends and meet mentors, and a way to learn about the world while preparing for adulthood, families of their own, and jobs and careers. The school that recognizes and serves all significant constituent interests does well.
Mission
To unify those efforts in a coherent community, though, schools must generally discern and articulate a higher mission. A mission unifies, drawing engagement of constituents around the mission. A mission also guides, giving a school a sense of direction. A mission also becomes an accountability measure, if the school clearly heads in another direction. To effectively serve those critical roles, a mission statement should articulate the school’s purpose, the values from which the purpose arises, the primary constituency whom the purpose serves, and the aspiration the school has for that constituency. Take, for example, the constituency or audience factor. A school can make itself its mission constituency, for example, to preserve and enrich the school’s legacy for generations to come. Or a school can make its local community its mission constituency, for example, to provide access to affordable higher education for all local residents. Or a school can make its alumni its mission constituency, to uphold for all graduates the school’s reputation of educating the leaders of tomorrow. The mission’s purpose is generally a verb, an action that the school seeks to cause or take, such as to uphold, uplift, preserve, enrich, and educate, and not just generally but around values such as traditional, affordable, classic, bold, creative, Christ-centered, or well-rounded. A well-chosen and clearly articulated mission names its constituency, action, and standard or value unifying the school. Know your school’s mission.
Accountable
That a school’s mission keeps the school accountable is hugely important. Schools occupy a peculiarly critical role in society. The failure of a school means so much more than the failure of other public and private institutions. A school means more to a community’s future than a road, park, or venue, or another store, repair shop, or restaurant. A school’s program means more than the programs of a charity, agency, or community center. Schools develop a community’s younger generation, transmitting society’s values, hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Schools help students acquire the knowledge and develop the skills and character to live out society’s values while pursuing those hopes, dreams, and aspirations. When schools fail, communities fail, and societies, nations, cultures, and ways of life fail with them. We tend to see the ebbs and flows of peoples and their cultures in terms of leaders and conquests. But the future of a people generally depends instead on the consistent transmission of the people’s higher vitalizing values. Societies need no conquerors to fail. They instead rot from within when their schools fail them. Hold your school accountable to its mission.
Planning
To ensure the vitality of their programs consistent with their mission, schools generally make strategic plans to carry out their mission. Strategic planning typically involves all significant constituencies of the school. Schools may survey constituents for input and appoint constituency representatives to the strategic-planning team. Strategic planning can follow different processes. An inward-looking SWOT analysis examines the school’s mission against the school’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. An outward-looking PEST analysis examines political, economic, social, and technological factors affecting the school’s mission. An objectives-and-key-results framework sets ambitious objectives, designs measures for those objectives, and plots progress results. Whatever strategic approach the school’s planning team takes, it should produce sufficiently clear plans around which school leaders can shape annual themes, two-year campaigns, and other initiatives toward accomplishing the five-year strategic plan, all to advance the school’s mission. A good plan is active, informative, and consequential. A poor plan stays in the file drawer or hidden deep on the school’s website. See that your school follows a sound strategic planning process producing a useful plan.
Family
Schools have another characteristic that can be more important and pronounced at lower levels but can also carry over right through high school, college, and graduate school years. Courts sometimes hold, around questions of student supervision, that school officials stand in loco parentis toward students. In loco parentis is a Latin phrase meaning in place of the parent. That authority grants school officials greater rights to monitor student behavior but also greater obligation to intervene to guide and protect students. School teachers and administrators are not parents. But at lower levels, students may well look to school teachers and administrators for the emotional support, concern, care, and protection that a parent would naturally provide. And at all levels, including higher education, students may expect instructors and administrators to supervise, reward, discipline, coach, and mentor students for their best development, as an invested parent might. Schools officials construe their in loco parentis obligations differently, some as close and compassionate parents while others as strict and distant parents. Yet don’t miss that a school is in some broader sense also a family, not just an instructional institution.
Home
It should be no surprise, then, that schools at all levels make substantial efforts to have the qualities of a family home. At the college and graduate school level, schools can be literal homes, with dormitories or other institutional housing, dining rooms or cafeterias, and all the other comforts and accoutrements of a home. At lower levels, students may likewise attend a residential prep school very like a home. Yet even traditional public and private grade schools without student living quarters may have dining areas, social areas, recreational rooms, playgrounds, and even showers and locker rooms. As much as education is their mission, schools can appoint and even staff and enculturate their campuses like homes. They even give students homerooms to check in with their closest classmates and a teacher charged with caring for their composure and preparedness for school. Homeschooling can have great benefits for the nurture it provides. Bringing the home to school can have its own benefits, too.
Reflection
Does your school feel more like a correctional facility, psychiatric hospital, residence hall, playground, assembly line, theater production, or just a school? Which constituency do you feel your school is most committed to serving among current students, former students, teachers, administrators, staff members, donors, board members, employers, accreditors, or the community? Can you articulate your school’s mission? Does your school have a strategic plan? If so, do you know what year of the plan your school is in and what are any of its main features? Could you find your school’s strategic plan? Does your school give you a sense of family or of being a home? If so, what makes it feel that way?
Key Points
A school is above all a community of constituencies united to educate.
School constituents include students, teachers, alumni, and employers.
School constituencies can each have their own interests to serve.
A school’s mission unites interests around a purpose and values.
Schools should conduct strategic planning to pursue their mission.
Strategic plans should be vital, measurable, achievable, and active.
Schools can appropriately have family characteristics.
A vital school can take on the character of a welcoming home.