1 Why Trust This Guide?

Angela took at least a year on her school board to feel like she knew what was going on. She’d taken a school board seat because she wanted to see the school do better, not that it was doing poorly or doing anything wrong. Angela just wanted to make it the best school she possibly could, knowing how critical schools were to develop healthy, balanced, responsible, and wise students. That was her only agenda, just to improve the school wherever and however she could. Yet as soon as she got on the board, she realized she hardly knew how a school operated. That all the school’s functions and activities came together at all seemed like a miracle.

Development

Student development is indeed a miracle. Instructing, inspiring, coaxing, coaching, pushing, and at times even disciplining students toward their better development can be a richly complex endeavor. What works for one student doesn’t work for another. What one student needs, other students have already acquired. If students were blocks of wood, schools could just chisel and hammer at them until they took proper shape. But students are instead divine living beings who respond each in their own way to the demands, requests, and invitations of instruction. And what, even, is a proper shape, when each student has unique character and personality, and unique capacity and destiny? The teachers, administrators, staff members, board members, parents, donors, suppliers, contractors, and volunteers who make a school function do well to keep the miracle of student development in mind. Students, too, should deeply appreciate how sensitive, subtle, varied, and precious their own development is. A good school isn’t an assembly line. It’s a miracle.

Complexity

One attribute that makes schools so challenging and wondrous to lead, administer, manage, reform, and improve is that they are so complex. Some organizations and endeavors can be laser focused on a particular outcome. Mining operations can be that way: get as much as you can out of the ground as quickly as you can at the lowest cost. Manufacturing operations can be similar: produce as many widgets of the highest quality at the greatest speed for the lowest cost. Their operations are still complex, but the focus is generally crystal clear, and the means and measures are equally so. Schools? Not so much. Students are not widgets. Schools don’t produce students because students are not products. A school that sees students as products is an industrial complex, not a school. Schools instead nurture students, like a gardener gently watering, fertilizing, pruning, and shining a light on a plant, hoping it grows into the strange but beautiful flower somewhere inside it. The knowledge, skills, and ethics schools should help students acquire may be relatively standardized. But how to influence students to acquire those attributes, for what purposes, in what form, and for use in what culture and context are all wide variables. Schools are complex. Don’t think that your school is an assembly line.

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2 What Is a School?

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. 

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3 How Do Schools Organize?

Wendy just wanted an answer. At this point, she didn’t care who gave her the answer, as long as she could rely on it. She had assumed that her professor could tell her. Unfortunately, he could not. He sent her instead to an advisor. Yet the advisor couldn’t give her an answer either. The advisor sent Wendy to the campus associate dean. But he couldn’t give her an answer either. The campus associate dean sent her to a central dean who, unfortunately, couldn’t answer either but agreed to convene a faculty committee that made those decisions. Yet when the committee ruled, the central dean said that the president had to approve the committee’s recommendation. The matter then had to go operations for evaluation before implementation. The central dean also said she might hold off on implementation until the school’s board and faculty senate had approved a policy. Just what, Wendy wondered, was she supposed to do in the meantime?!

Distributive

Anyone coming to the academy from business, industry, government, or the professions has an adjustment to make. Schools have their own organization and management culture, distinct from the organization and management culture you see elsewhere. As the illustration suggests, the organization of a school distributes decision-making authority more broadly than elsewhere, to reflect the deliberative, collegial, collaborative, and communal nature of a school, and a school’s respect for expertise. Distributed decision making is not the norm in every school. Online for-profit schools, for instance, would operate more like businesses with centralized and autocratic decision making. And a headmaster at a prep academy might have a lot of say over what goes on. But anyone wishing to effectively lead, manage, reform, or navigate a school needs to keep in mind not so much who’s in charge but instead that everyone has a say. 

Boards

Schools, both public and private and at all levels, have governance and leadership. School governance typically lies with a board. Public elementary and secondary schools generally fall under the governance of a district school board that may oversee anywhere from one to five or more high schools, several middle schools, and more elementary schools. District residents typically elect those boards. The governor, state legislature, or statewide electorate may determine the membership of boards governing public colleges and universities, while private school boards at all levels may elect their own members or have alumni do so. Boards do not run the school. They instead govern the school through board policies and by appointing and supervising a school president, principal, or other executive leader. Boards are generally uncompensated and composed of school alumni or, in the case of private elementary and secondary schools, parents of current students. Know and respect your school’s board. When schools face crises, boards carry a heavy leadership mantle.

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4 How Are Schools Financed?

Marianne felt prepared to take administrative leadership of her remote campus, in every area but one. She had come up through the teaching ranks and so was perfectly comfortable with issues around student support, services, and discipline, the curriculum, courses, and instruction, and faculty supervision, evaluation, and support. Marianne also knew that her remote campus had a skilled facility and custodial staff, with central university support. The one area where Marianne had little idea what she was doing was in the campus budget and finances. Fortunately, she had no real budget input and only a little budget responsibility, for which she relied heavily on central university support.

Budgets

Schools, both public and private, operate on annual budgets. To some members of the school community, it may seem like money is neither an object nor a constraint in the operation of a school. Think again. Schools, both public and private, have limited budgets. Spending more on one program can mean spending less on another program. Indeed, school finances can affect everything from a school’s ability to attract and retain skilled instructors, administrators, and staff members, construct new facilities or improve old ones, hire adequate student services and support staff, upgrade or maintain library resources, and improve technology services. If you see cracks in your school’s facade such as programs short-staffed, equipment not repaired, and furnishings deteriorating, the problem may not be simple neglect. It may instead be a budgetary constraint. Schools need sound financial management and skilled financial administrators to maintain their programs. Watch the money. It matters.

Profit

In theory, profit is not an object in American schools at all levels attended by the vast majority of students. About ninety percent of elementary and secondary school students attend public schools. And about ninety percent of private elementary and secondary schools attend non-profit schools. For-profit elementary and secondary schools make up only a tiny fraction of schools at that level. Likewise, about ninety percent of students in higher education attend either a public college or university or one organized as a private non-profit school. Only about ten percent of students in higher education attend a for-profit school. Private non-profit schools generally qualify as tax exempt, giving them the same financial advantage as public schools. Public and private tax-exempt non-profit schools do not pay federal or state income tax on net revenue over expenses. Private tax-exempt non-profit schools have no shareholders and instead operate for charitable and educational purposes. Only private for-profit schools, representing a small fraction of schools, have shareholders with ownership interests and an incentive to operate schools to provide a financial return on investment.

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5 What Is Accreditation?

Barbara had never seen the school in such a blizzard of activity. Who were these accreditors who were about to visit the school? Why all the fuss preparing for them? And what was their business? Barbara had papers to grade, lessons to prepare, and classes to teach. How was she supposed to do all the extra things administrators were asking of her to get ready for the accreditors’ visit? To Barbara, it all seemed like a big waste of time and a bigger distraction. She just wanted to teach. Why couldn’t they just leave her alone?

Credentialing

Accreditation is a big deal in education. Accreditation serves several purposes. In higher education, federal, state, and private loan and grant programs may only fund student education in accredited schools. A college or university that loses its accreditation may lose most of its student body and funding. Closure is then in the offing. A new school that is unable to gain accreditation may never open. Professional licensing bodies and employers also use school accreditation to qualify graduates. Graduates of an unaccredited program or program that loses its accreditation may be unable to sit for licensing exams or gain employment. Graduate and professional schools also use undergraduate program accreditation to qualify applicants. Students must therefore think twice before enrolling in an unaccredited school or a school on probation or other thin ice with accreditors. Your school’s accreditation is likely critical for these several interests dependent on credentialing.

Improvement

Accreditation, though, is also in theory for school improvement. While accreditors go about their business rigorously examining a school’s programs and performance, the school’s faculty members and administrators necessarily do likewise. Like students, school personnel depend on the school’s accreditation. The loss of accreditation would trigger the loss of school employment. In theory and to some degree in practice, faculty members and administrators thus constantly have accreditation standards in mind when going about their daily work. Accreditation holds school personnel accountable to broad educational standards. Annual reporting to accreditors, and sabbatical or other periodic site reviews by accreditors, spur school personnel to quickly address lagging areas of performance around critical measures like retention, graduation rates, graduate performance on licensing exams, and graduate placement rates. Your school is, in theory, better off in all areas because of accreditation. Help your school see accreditation in that program-improvement view rather than as a necessary annoyance or evil.

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6 What Is Assessment?

Donald at first didn’t understand or appreciate all the fuss about what his colleagues called assessment. He just figured they were talking about tests, you know, quizzes and examinations. Donald just thought they were trying to use fancy language for an old-fashioned concept. But gradually, Donald realized that his colleagues had a different way of looking at tests–or assessments as they called them. Indeed, his colleagues were constantly helping students deploy different kinds of assessment to gauge and speed their learning while also constantly assessing their own instructional practices and program success. Donald finally decided to join the assessment bandwagon. He could tell that if he didn’t, he’d be left way behind.

Definition

Assessment is an academic process of gathering, analyzing, and sharing evidence to measure and improve student learning and the effect of instruction. Schools may just do what schools always do. But some methods that some instructors at some schools have traditionally employed have not been the best methods. Dry, hours-long lectures to a theater-style classroom filled with hundreds of students day after day, followed by a single end-of-term exam, is incredibly efficient and inexpensive for the school. It is also a disaster for many struggling and failing students who could otherwise have met rigorous academic standards with better-designed instruction. A school committed to assessment won’t allow ineffective instructional methods to persist. Nor will it allow students to progress when they are not in fact learning enough to meet academic standards. Assessment is a commitment to shared accountability between instructor and student. 

Compulsion

Assessment isn’t just an academic fad adopted by elite schools. Accreditors instead mandate that schools conduct rigorous student and program assessment. The school that does not make assessment a core commitment of its instructional program may soon run afoul of accreditors and could lose its accreditation. The school that does not assess in the way that accreditors, lenders, employers, rating services, students, their parents, and other constituents require, to show evidence of the effectiveness of the school’s instructional program, won’t have the data to back up its claims of a quality or at least a competent program. Schools must generally do at least minimal assessment to meet standards and report the data that constituents demand.

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7 How Should Students Behave?

Derek often marveled that his school did as well as it did with student behavior. Oh, they had their problems and issues. But every time an issue arose, the school seemed to handle it well enough that the issue passed, without disrupting school operations or changing the school’s tone or culture. Derek certainly didn’t see the widespread disruption and enormous challenges about which he heard at other schools, not the drugs, gangs, sexual assaults, and harassment, nor even the dropouts, truancy, and failures to advance. Every day, Derek counted his blessings that his school didn’t have the widespread behavioral issues of other schools.

Concerns

Schools focus closely on student behavior. After all, shaping student behavior is one way of construing a school’s mission. Behavioral psychologists define learning as a persistent change in behavior resulting from experience. Schools supply the experience with the goal of refining student behavior around instructional goals and objectives. Schools instruct to influence three kinds of behavior. The first area of concern involves academic progression, advancing students through program levels within a structured curriculum. The second area of concern involves academic conduct, shaping student study practices to consistently meet academic norms while avoiding cheating, dishonesty, and other forms of academic misconduct. The third area of concern involves behavioral conduct, shaping student non-academic behaviors to respect the rights and interests of others while avoiding harm, injury, or offense to others that the school must discipline for safe, secure, and orderly operations. Sound schools closely monitor all three aspects of student conduct.

Progression

Academic progression is a school’s core student concern. Schools aren’t human warehouses. Schools instead expect to positively influence students in their academic development, at a consistent pace through program levels. To meet state benchmarks and federal satisfactory academic progress (SAP) standards, schools must ensure that students progress at the assigned pace or hold students accountable through a system of controls and sanctions. At the higher education level, SAP policies provide for probation. Failure to bring performance back above SAP standards may then lead to the student’s program dismissal or suspension of loan and grant rights, for not meeting minimum grade-point average, percentage of credits attempted, and program duration standards. Federal loan regulations require rigorous SAP policy enforcement. At the elementary and secondary school level, schools hold students back from advancing through grade levels and may deny graduation to students failing to meet benchmarks. They also use truancy laws and absenteeism, tardiness, insubordination, disobedience, and other behavioral policies and related forms of discipline to influence student effort toward academic progression.

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8 How Do Students Learn?

At the start of every school year, Beverly could hardly believe how little her new students knew and how little they could do. But at the end of every school year, Beverly could hardly believe how much her students had learned and how much they could do. Learning fascinated and enthralled Beverly. But as much as she studied learning, learning remained a mystery to Beverly. Yet the mystery of learning was also largely why Beverly found learning so fascinating and enthralling. If stimulating her students to learn was easy rather than mystifyingly hard, Beverly probably wouldn’t have found teaching and learning so gripping. Beverly marveled at these thoughts as she started yet another school year.

Goal

Learning, or stimulating a persistent change in student behavior toward the instructional goal, is a school’s core function. If a school’s instructors don’t know how to help students learn, then the school will underperform in its critical educational role. Obviously, teachers need to know how students learn and whether they are learning. But schools benefit when other members of the school community also know how students learn and whether they are learning. Administrators, for one, need to know how students learn, in order to recruit, orient, guide, evaluate, and support instructors. School support staff members also need to know how students learn, in order to monitor, guide, advise, and support students. Board members benefit by knowing how students learn, so that they can determine appropriate policies and evaluate and guide the school leader. And the students themselves, and their parents if the students are at the elementary or secondary school level, also need to know how learning occurs and whether they are learning. Knowing a thing or two about learning can help you participate effectively in your school community.

Approaches

Approaches to learning can vary. Instructors have more than one way to conceive of learning and its methods. A prior chapter already mentioned cognitive psychology, behavioral psychology, experiential learning, social learning, constructivism, connectivism, humanism, self-directed learning, and neuroscience approaches. The challenge with understanding learning is that it goes on in the brain and body in largely unobservable ways. We can only surmise the mechanism of learning from outward behaviors because learning isn’t mechanistic. Learning is instead physiological, neurological, chemical, or something else hidden from view. Instructors and other school personnel must thus use models for learning, where those models seem most useful to describe what the instructors are observing as to whether and how students are learning. Don’t assume one model or instructional approach is right and others are wrong. We understand learning largely by models drawn from behaviors. Use the models only to the extent that they aid instructional enhancement and reform.

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9 What Is a Curriculum?

William didn’t understand what the big deal was. He just needed to take the advanced course without first completing the introductory course, which he didn’t need anyway. William’s advanced high school education had already covered the subject’s introductory material. Having already reviewed the advanced course’s syllabus and book, William had no doubt that he could handle the advanced course without first completing the introductory course. And the advanced course fit his schedule perfectly, whereas he’d have to stay in town and on campus an extra day every week if he took the introductory course. William didn’t understand why the registrar insisted that the college’s curriculum committee would first have to approve.

Definition

Schools must organize their instructional programs. They do so through a curriculum, which simply means the prescribed course of study to accomplish the instructional objectives. A school curriculum is itself a wonderfully rich and complex entity. A curriculum attempts to chart across the school’s program the progression of subjects that students must study and skills they must acquire, including options they may choose, to earn the culminating diploma or degree they seek. While the quality of instruction is key to school outcomes, a school’s curriculum is also an important tool for accomplishing the school’s mission. A poorly designed or implemented curriculum can leave significant gaps in an education and waste substantial time and resources on duplicative or irrelevant instruction. Schools need wise curriculum directors and can put substantial time into curriculum mapping, study, and reform, to ensure the integrity of the instructional program.

Courses

Students know that they must complete a bunch of courses to advance through their instructional programs. A curriculum places those courses in a sensible sequence to enable students to build a knowledge and skill base. Schools implement their curriculum through courses. The course is the basic unit of instruction, stretching across a term and measured in credits based on the hours spent in the course. Courses generally relate either to a subject such as social studies, art, geology, or literature, or to a skill such as writing, counseling, debate, surgery, or other forms of practice. The curriculum maps those subjects and skills across all courses, to ensure that students earning a diploma or degree have all the subject-area knowledge and relevant skills that the diploma or degree represent. What one course omits, another course must cover. Courses should also reinforce rather than duplicate instruction. A well-designed course catalog around a sound curriculum is a beautiful thing. 

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10 What Is a School Board’s Role?

James was a veteran school board member, so veteran that he thought he’d seen it all. But apparently, not quite. This latest issue to come before the board took him and, it appeared, the other board members entirely by surprise. Indeed, the issue was so unprecedented that the board members weren’t even sure that the issue was for the board to address and decide. And so, they did what they usually did with new board issues. They first turned to the organization’s governing documents to ensure their responsibility and authority. They then turned to the school leader for any wisdom or experience the leader could share on whether the issue was indeed a board issue, as the governing documents made it appear. Once assured of their responsibility and authority, they began their deliberations, as usual with respect for one another’s views and a clear eye to the school’s mission and the potential long-term impact of their decision.

Authority

School boards have the authority and responsibility to govern their institutions. They draw that authority from different sources depending on the public or private nature of the school and the school’s level. Public elementary and secondary schools are generally creations of state statutes or constitutions. Legislative schemes create districts under boards, with the authority and responsibility to establish elementary and secondary schools to serve the district’s residents. Public colleges and universities may likewise be the creations of state statutes or constitutions under boards, with the authority and responsibility to govern the public higher-education institution. Private schools at all levels are generally non-profit corporations formed under state law, likewise governed by a corporate board. The relatively fewer for-profit private schools are generally private for-profit corporations with shareholders and corporate boards. Thus, schools of all kinds at all levels generally have boards with the state authority and responsibility to govern.

Perspective

The governance responsibility of a board generally requires a broader and longer view than the day-to-day operation of the school. Governance involves establishing the policies and patterns that will carry out the school’s corporate mission. A board generally doesn’t govern for the moment but instead for many future moments. A responsible board should consider the impact of each decision not only on the matter at hand but also on the school’s future. Boards should generally not make short-term decisions that sacrifice the long term. Boards should, for instance, generally avoid setting precedents that in the long run may undermine commitments of the school. Thus, boards should generally make fewer decisions on individual matters and more decisions on policies that will guide the school’s leadership and management in making their own decisions on individual matters. When necessarily deciding matters, boards do well to consider the policy and precedent that those decisions establish for the school’s leaders and management. 

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11 What Role Does Leadership Play?

Darnell had taught at several schools under different school leaders. He had also taught long enough at various schools to see school leaders come and go. Darnell, like other teachers and school staff, knew the difference that an effective school leader makes. Unfortunately, he’d also seen the adverse impact that an ineffective school leader leaves. Just about every school leader under which he’d worked was well meaning. But they each had their own experience, insight, personality, and skill. And some had different levels of commitment. Darnell was just glad that the school at which he currently taught had a good school leader. And he hoped, as a consequence, that both he and the school leader would stick around.

Embodiment

School leadership is critical to effective school operations. Distinguish school leadership, though, from school governance. A school board governs, while the district superintendent, school principal, school leader, or academy headmaster (by whatever title the school designates the leader) leads. The school board may meet and work in relative obscurity. Students and parents may not even know who the school board members are. But everyone knows the school leader because the school leader, not the board, leads. The board governs, and the school leader leads. The school leader is the school’s public face, the personality who projects and the figure who embodies the school’s mission, vision, and operations. A school leader makes so many judgments and decisions in a school day that those individual decisions define the school leader and school less than the leader’s consistent stance, attitude, and professional character. The school leader’s judgment and skill are important. The leader’s embodiment of school values, culture, and commitment may be more influential over the school’s outcomes than the leader’s judgment and skill.

Characteristics

School leaders can differ in personalities, character, and leadership styles. More than one mold exists for an effective school leader. Yet effective school leaders generally have professional character, meaning that they exhibit the expertise peculiar to school leadership and administration. The educational mission of a school to influence student learning requires a remarkable degree of attention to program and system design, efficiency, accuracy, and outcomes. A school leader must thus generally care a great deal about program design and outcomes, with great consistency and energy. The educational mission of a school to overall positively shape student character requires positive, supportive, collegial, and moral leadership. A school leader must thus generally be not only of sound character but also strongly positive personality. Schools do well to recruit, respect, retain, and reward effective school leaders.

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12 How Do Faculty Work?

One thing Danielle had discovered in all the recruiting, interviewing, and hiring she’d done for faculty positions: you never really knew how the candidate, once hired, would perform. You could do all the vetting you wanted. You could have the strongest conviction that the candidate you’d just hired was the perfect one to fill the role. And you could assign the new hire the best faculty mentor. Yet as the school year wore on, you’d soon discover that the candidate didn’t know how to help students learn or the other essentials a faculty role entailed. Danielle finally decided that the teaching role is simply too specialized on the one hand and requires such disparate skills on the other hand that the teaching gift was always in the demonstration, never really in the qualifications or resume.

Role

The role of a school’s faculty is to deliver instruction. Yet given the mysterious nature of learning, instruction isn’t exactly a deliverable. It is not as if an instructor can show up, measure out the magic water, and ensure that students imbibe. Individual students, groups of students, subjects, classrooms, and other conditions present so many variables that sound instruction has more to do with constantly adjusting resources, methods, and approaches to trigger the desired results. Instruction is not engineering the magic ride, administering the magic pill, or firing the magic bullet. The role of a school’s faculty is thus more to stay constantly abreast of student needs, interests, and challenges, and instructional resources, options, and designs, to coax out of the greatest number of students the best possible performance. A school’s faculty members must try in the most collegial and collaborative fashion to produce a symphony every term and every year, when the score is constantly changing. Appreciate the challenge that your school’s faculty members face and the constant creativity and commitment that effective instruction takes.

Types

Schools may employ several types of instructors. At the higher-education level, colleges and universities tend to employ both full-time faculty members teaching core required courses and part-time adjunct faculty members teaching elective courses. Full-time instructors may be either tenured or on a track toward tenure, where they have security from job termination, or non-tenure track, where they are generally employed at the school’s will with no job security but with employment benefits. Schools employ adjunct faculty at will without benefits. At the elementary and secondary school level, schools employ both full-time teachers and part-time substitute teachers. They also employ teaching staff members who divide their duties between classroom and specialized instruction, student support, and other administrative services. Full-time public school teachers tend to work under negotiated labor agreements with job security and benefits. Part-timers are generally at will with no benefits. Private school teachers may work on annual contracts with the expectation, but no promise, of renewal.

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13 How Do Administrators Work?

Lila loved working in the shadows. She watched with humor as the teachers walked around the school like kings and queens with their court of students following in their wakes. And Lila watched with even greater humor as droves of parents, students, and teachers swarmed the school leader, all seeking the leader’s favor. Little did they know that Lila was the one who held the keys to so many of their interests, concerns, and problems. Oh, but then again, they knew. All of them knew that when they really needed to get something done, they could rely on Lila who needed no court, no droves, no swarm, and no fanfare. 

Essential

Schools place teachers as stars on stage. And schools elevate school leaders above teachers as their dramatic symphony director. But schools operate on the quiet gifts and talents, exquisite insights, and committed labors of their administrators. School administrators are the glue that brings and binds it all together. You know how your whole elementary school revolved around the front-desk receptionist, who was so quick with a bandaid for a student’s bruise, shoulder for a student’s tears, hug for a teacher mourning a departed pet, phone number for the school plumber, and call for a substitute teacher? Those are the unsung but essential roles that school administrators play to keep a school running. That technology director teachers call when the classroom computer freezes, maintenance director the principal calls when the boiler quits, finance director the receptionist calls when a contractor needs a check, and department director battling colleagues call when both need the same classroom? Those administrators make schools work.

Academics

School administrators ensure the continuous and efficient operation of several essential functions. Those functions begin with the academic program. Academic administrators need to create course schedules every term that allow for faculty coverage and classroom or lab availability, while fulfilling curriculum requirements. Administrators need to communicate faculty assignments and deal with instructor illnesses and leaves, and alternative assignments or substitutes. Administrators may also need to schedule exams and proctors, review and approve faculty grades, and support student grade appeals. Administrators may also need to review and approve requests for disability accommodations and services, and arrange for those services. Administrators may also need to ensure student satisfactory academic progress, warn students of failure to progress, and implement probation and remedial measures. To accomplish these and other academic functions, schools employ administrators with titles like dean, provost, registrar, associate dean, assistant dean, department chair, and student services director. 

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14 What Role Do Alumni Play?

Richie was proud of his school. His school years had been formative beyond his imagination. Indeed, Richie credited his schooling for about ninety percent of his substantial career success. He often felt that he’d have been nothing but for his school. And so he had tried to stay in touch not only with his school friends but also his school mentors and advisors. Sometimes, Richie would have a question for a mentor or advisor, while other times he’d just send a birthday or holiday greeting, or congratulate them on something big that had happened for the school. His close relationship with his school became much closer, though, when they invited him to serve on the alumni board, where he learned how much his school had meant to so many others. For all his school had done for him and others, Richie was more than glad to give a little back.

Graduates

Graduates of a school usually have their hands full. The transition from one school to the next can be intimidating, absorbing one’s full attention and energy, and leaving little time to think about the school one just left. The transition from school into the workplace can be even more intimidating, again requiring full attention and leaving little for the school from which one just graduated. Those first mailings from the alumni relations office? Straight into the trash, when one just graduated. The path is forward, not back. Indeed, the graduate still draws services from the school. The graduate may need school transcripts for licensing boards, job applications, and other opportunities and credentialing. The graduate may also need recommendation letters and references from professors and deans. And the graduate may need resume reviews, job postings, and practice interviews from the placement office, all for moving ahead.

Alumni

In time, though, the graduate begins to think less of having just graduated and more of being among the school’s alumni, a proud member of a senior and distinguished, even if very large, group. With that passage from graduate to alumni, the role and relationship of these important members of the school community change. Students and graduates are necessarily takers, drawing everything from the school community, although often also giving much service back. Schools pour their resources into serving students and supporting graduates. Alumni, though, are givers, sharing much with the school community, while asking little or nothing back. Schools maintain alumni offices and offer alumni services, but the school relationship of alumni is generally to give rather than to receive, for all that the school has already provided.

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15 What Role Does Technology Play?

Martin just wanted to teach, not to mess around with technology. He missed the days when he could just show up to class and talk, assign and collect a couple of papers during the term, and whisk out an arduous final exam at term’s end. Now, though, the school wanted Martin to use its online learning management system. He had to upload syllabi, assignments, models, and rubrics. The school’s curriculum committee wanted him to create online practice tests with automatic scoring, answers, and explanations. And his department chair wanted Martin to record and edit video lectures to post online so that he could use class time for paired and group exercises. What did the school think he was, a tech wizard and coder?!

Change

Schools are definitely different today than they were decades ago. And technology has been the primary driver of school change. Yes, instructional methods have changed due to education research and rigorous assessment standards. Those changes are significant. But technology has both supported and spurred changes in instructional methods. Technology has also facilitated changes in instructional delivery. Schools are still wrestling with those changes, when the pace of technological change doesn’t appear to be slowing but instead to be increasing. Technologies with applications in education are growing exponentially more powerful, swift, sure, and effective. They are also growing less expensive in some areas and for some applications. Accreditation standards are requiring schools to address technology use, just as competitive pressures are requiring schools to incorporate technology or fall behind. Technology is a huge issue in education.

Response

How your school responds to the availability and widespread use of new technologies may have a great deal to do with whether your school remains effective, relevant, and successful, indeed even whether it survives. Schools can respond to technology advances along a spectrum. Some schools actively resist it, banishing computers from the classroom, while allowing or even encouraging instructors to stick to the old paper-and-ink, blackboard or whiteboard ways. Other schools accommodate new technologies only as instructors, students, and accreditors demand, neither actively resisting nor promoting its use, and instead just riding the wave. Other schools see technology as a potential boon to instruction and other school operations, and so look for ways to incorporate it to supplement the old ways. A few schools, though, see technology as transforming education in its every aspect, indeed in its very object. To those schools, their mission is no longer to inform and shape graduates of sound knowledge, strong skills, and good character but instead to help graduates survive and thrive in a new technological age. Examine carefully how your school perceives technology. Its future may depend on a sound view.

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16 What Does a Co-Curriculum Do?

The constant flurry of school activities frankly distracted and exhausted Regina, who preferred to stick to her classroom instruction. Yet Regina knew the huge value that students drew from their co-curricular programs. Students left her study hall for band, choir, dance, and drama practice, theater set design and art class, academic clubs, and student council. Students stayed after school for the same activities and for athletics practice and competitions, community service, science competition practices, and debate clubs. Regina did her part, leading a group of girls in an after-school home-economics club where they learned budgeting, interior design, nutrition, and health practices. But the students’ energy and appetite for co-curricular programs sometimes overwhelmed her.

Value

Students at all levels thrive on school co-curricular programs. For a student, the life of a school isn’t so much in its classrooms but instead in its hallways, cafeterias, and common areas, on its breaks, and before and after school, when students interact freely with students. Educators know the value of student engagement and peer interaction. Schools design and maintain co-curricular programs to engage the whole student, body, mind, and spirit, in supervised and healthy activities of interest, alongside the core academic program. School cannot be all about academics, without missing important co-curricular opportunities for social, emotional, vocational, and recreational development. Some students study only because they’ll lose the opportunity to participate in their favorite co-curricular program. Don’t underestimate the value of your school’s co-curricular programs.

Administration

Schools must give some attention to administering co-curricular programs. Student interests can be so diverse and numerous as to make co-curricular programs sprout up, wither, die, and sprout again like weeds. Co-curricular activities generally require school classrooms, gymnasiums, fields, playgrounds, or other facilities and amenities, which may be in short supply. Co-curricular activities also require faculty, staff, administrator, or volunteer supervision, which can likewise be in short supply. Co-curricular activities may also require equipment and supplies, further taxing school resources. Some co-curricular proposals can also be controversial or frankly inappropriate, especially around health, welfare, and moral issues. A marijuana, vaping, or gambling club might be an example. Schools thus tend to have a system for evaluating and approving student and sponsor requests for co-curricular clubs, events, and activities, led by the school’s chief student-services administrator.

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17 What Is Instruction’s Direction?

Douglas felt like he’d seen it all. But apparently, not quite. Douglas had been in education his whole adult life. He’d gone straight into teaching out of graduate school when he was still a kid in his mid-twenties. That seemed like a lifetime ago. Indeed, forty years later, it now was a lifetime ago. In those forty years in education, Douglas had seen teaching fads and fashions come and go, so much so that he thought nothing was any longer new under the sun. Yet with his retirement right around the corner, it looked to Douglas as if the whole world of education had flipped upside down with the latest reforms. Douglas felt that maybe, just maybe, he needed to retire sooner rather than later.

Trends

Instruction always has trends. And trends in instruction can have big impacts on accreditation standards and the profile and performance of a school. School administrators and faculty members do well to be aware of trends in instruction. Schools and their faculty members don’t always have to adopt the latest and greatest fashion in instructional designs, theories, and methods. But the school that ignores trends, and the faculty that continues to practice forms of instruction that the field of education has long since passed, can do students serious disfavors, impacting school outcomes so severely as to threaten reputation, enrollment, and accreditation. No matter how fabulous a school’s facilities, famous its faculty, and brilliant its students, the instructional program of a school is still a school’s beating heart. And when that heartbeat slows and stutters, students suffer. Ensure that your school remains abreast of instructional trends. Doing so could make all the difference for your school.

Experiential

Experiential learning has been a significant trend in instructional methods and designs. Experiential learning exposes students to life-like instructional settings inside and outside the classroom, designed to stimulate student interest, effort, and engagement around instructional designs. Simulations, labs, role plays, and case studies are examples of in-classroom experiential learning designs. Internships, service learning, on-site and field studies, and studies abroad are experiential learning designs outside the classroom. Experiential learning shows students how practitioners use the subject’s knowledge and skills for productive work, making the studies instantly relevant and practical, and increasing student concentration and effort. Instructors can incorporate experiential learning units within a traditional classroom lecture instructional format. Schools can also offer experiential learning courses within the required or elective curriculum. Experiential learning offers powerful instructional design options.

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18 What Challenges Do Schools Face?

The one thing that surprised Louise about entering the teaching profession was how unstable schools were. As a student, Louise had always seen school as her rock. It never changed. And it would always be there. As an adult, her schooling in education had shown her that schools faced challenges and trends. But the challenges and trends just interested Louise, without unsettling her. It was only when she started to teach that Louise saw just how dynamic a school had to be to respond to the constant challenges. For a while, she just focused on the students, trying to ignore the pressures of change. Yet then she realized that the students were changing, too, rapidly responding and in some cases succumbing to their own challenges.

Challenges

Every industry, profession, and field has its own challenges. Nothing really stays the same. Every entrant in every field must respond to the challenges or find itself shunted aside, left behind, and headed for the scrap heap. Indeed, change is so dynamic that whole fields go extinct, either consumed by a better iteration or left entirely unnecessary by changes in consumer needs and tastes. Schools of some sort still look like they’ll always be here. But they’re already looking quite different, and the pace of change accelerates rather than slows. The advent of distance education, remote learning, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and, for the adult consumer, instantly available online videos to instruct in everything, highlight our ready ability to capture, enhance, promote, and deliver online instruction. Everyone in education, from teachers to principals, directors, administrators, aides, and operations personnel, can rightly wonder whether education will soon be so online and distributed that we won’t even need physical schools anymore.

Responses

Educators don’t have the luxury of looking the other way, ignoring the challenges, and just going about their jobs. The jobs of teachers, administrators, and other school staff, and the roles, nature, and methods of schools, are changing or must change to meet the challenges facing education. Thousands of schools nationwide have already closed over the past decade, including dozens of colleges and universities. The reasons include mergers and acquisitions, enrollment declines, high costs, financial instability, regulator action, legal changes, and poor academic performance. In the big picture, the closing schools did not or could not respond adequately to the changing landscape of education. Struggling schools that manage to keep the doors open still face painful layoffs and restructuring. Far better to look out and look ahead to manage the challenges as best one can than to let change crush a school. The following paragraphs list some of the bigger challenges schools currently face, with brief suggestions as to how schools may respond.

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19 What Opportunities Exist?

Sure, the school had faced many challenges, and Brianna knew that the school would face many more challenges. But she’d never been more excited for the school’s opportunities. Indeed, Brianna sensed that the challenges were themselves evidence of the opportunities. Brianna could see that in a staid and settled time, schools simply harrow on, without leaving the furrowed line. But in times of challenge, Brianna knew that schools must break new ground. And Brianna was excited to survey and plow the new ground. Finally, she might see the school incorporate some of the latest instructional methods and new facility designs, and refocus its programs. Both the board and school leader seemed poised to do so, and Brianna was ready to help, all in.

Opportunities

Some of the same challenges that schools face are also their greatest opportunities for enrollment growth, instructional reform, and program enhancement. Consider every challenge your school faces, except recasting it as an opportunity, and you’ll begin to see the possibilities. Responding to challenges is naturally reactive. And reacting can have the feel of compulsion and desperation to it, highlighting that one wouldn’t have changed if not forced by circumstances to do so. But recharacterizing those same challenges as opportunities gives one the opposite sense of hope and initiative, drawing on creative energies and productive forces. And sometimes, the opportunities have nothing in particular to do with challenges. Some opportunities just present themselves in the course of the steady administration of a stable program. In that case, the opportunities are for the bold and enlightened to pursue, as beacons on the horizon rather than islands in the storm. This chapter outlines a few of each form of opportunity, some arising out of challenges, and others just waiting for the bold.

Culling

Culling your school’s programs is a first opportunity arising out of the challenge of enrollment stagnation or decline, due to a dwindling and aging population, and decreased demand for education. In times of enrollment growth, schools continually add on, with little or no culling. Why rigorously evaluate any program, when the school is growing and needs more programming? Why rigorously evaluate and steadfastly train and equip school personnel, when the school is growing and needs all hands on deck? In times of plenty, schools can bloat in their programs and personnel, and in doing so lose rigor, effectiveness, and focus. A period of declining enrollment is the opportunity to cull ineffective, out-of-date, costly, and distracting programs. Declining enrollment is the time to close antiquated facilities and consolidate programs in the newer facilities. A time of economic reductions in force is a time to retain the better-equipped, qualified, and devoted personnel. Use your school’s seeming period of stagnation to revitalize the school and revivify programs and staff with sensitive and strategic culling.

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20 What Is School Success?

Before Jason first began working at the school, he had regarded it as a struggling school without clear success. But Jason’s interview had surprised him. The school officials and personnel whom he met didn’t seem at all challenged or discouraged by the school’s lower public profile. Indeed, just the opposite: everyone inside the school seemed largely to regard the school as highly successful. And it didn’t take Jason long to see the same thing. Jason had been judging the school through an elitist lens, as worldly people generally judge things. But through a proper lens of student development, Jason could see how his new school was indeed a spectacular success, likely more so than the most elite of institutions.

Measures

School success can take several forms. Schools have different missions serving different student populations having different educational goals. Schools can prosper by properly defining success, aiming for the proper success measure, and then celebrating success when they achieve it. Get the wrong picture of your school’s success in your head, and your school will not succeed, or if it succeeds by your improper measure, it will have failed in its proper mission. On the other hand, schools don’t have to measure success in only one way. Schools can define, pursue, and celebrate several forms of success. Indeed, one form of success can spur and support another form of success within and across school programs. Schools do well to build success upon success. Sometimes, a school just needs a small victory in one area to gain the momentum, confidence, commitment, insight, and resources for other successes. Focusing on wins can be a good strategy. Pursuing wins can be even better. Consider some of the following success measures when evaluating your own school’s goals, measures, and wins.

Numbers

Numbers are, well, easy to count. And things that you can count make ready measures for success. Schools have lots of things that they can count. Indeed, schools do lots of counting. Applications, admissions, admissions as a percentage of applications, enrollment, attrition, retention, graduates, and graduation rate are all common school measures. Indeed, schools measure their applicants by standardized test score averages and medians, and their prior-school grade-point averages. Schools also measure their admittees by the same measures. Schools measure their current students on cumulative grade-point averages, grade-point averages in the current term, credits attempted versus credits completed, and other measures. These and other measures contribute to school rankings, for which schools plan and compete, and successes they advertise and celebrate. Countable things make convenient success measures. Counting academic success makes good school sense. Celebrate your school’s academic numbers and ranking, if numbers are your school’s strength.

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