The third and final day of the NAIS conference kept up the same breakneck pace of workshops, general sessions, and conversations with new and old acquaintences the first two days. I began with a session on building endowments led by Kevin Ruth of Tower Hill School (DE) and Timothy McIntire of Carney, Sandoe & Associates that provided a soup-to-nuts approach to building an endowment that has intergenerational equity (preserving the purchasing power of the endowment so that future generations can have at least the same level as the current generation). The strategy has several layers, including having a spending plan that accounts for inflation and adjusts the draw from the endowment, allocating a percentage of the Annual Fund to the endowment, creating a tradition of Class Funds, and doing special fundraising such as an Endowment Campaign or pursuing planned giving. Also key are four dimensions of community preparedness: the school must be in a financial position to delay gratification, leadership at all levels must be committed to endowment growth, there should be full alignment within the school community about the philosophical reasons for having an endowment, and the school should be able to withstand the low time preference in which endowment building operates. The TBS Board has discussed the idea of launching an endowment in the past two years, and though I have supported the idea, I left with a much better understanding of how an endowment would help us work now for the benefit of future generations of students.
The morning’s general session was a series of three twenty minute talks, modeled on the TED format. The first talk, by Elizabeth Coleman (President of Bennington College), focused on the ways in which democracy is being eroded, and the importance of a liberal arts education in preparing students to become active and informed citizens in a well-functioning democratic society. Although the litany of social ills she named was depressing, her conviction and vision for the power of education to meet this challenge was deeply inspiring, In the second, “futurist” journalist Anya Kamenetz discussed her beliefs about the future of education in the context of “open source” technology, including OpenContent (what we learn), OpenSocialization (how we learn), and OpenAssessment (why we learn). In discussing the third idea, she mentioned the idea of assessment by network, and how some schools are having students put their work online for other people to comment upon; later in the day I was having a conversation with Andrew Davis, Head of Middle School at Crystal Springs Upland School, who said that the Stanford School of Business uses this model for student evaluations of teachers, which then gets used both by students in selecting classes, and even by the school in determining which faculty get placed on a tenure track! In the final segment, Salman Kahn of Kahn Academy narrated how and why he launched the site, and demonstrated the ways in which this disruptive technology can humanize the classroom. The data-analysis portion of the site can track how long a student spends on each problem in a set and the level of mastery that a student has reached in each unit, and provides an alternative to the use of snapshot assessments that biased towards moments in time rather than tools to help students achieve mastery. The analogy he used showcased the humor and wit of his presentation; if a child is learning to ride a bike, a parent doesn’t check back in two weeks to see how well he can do, and then move on to a unicylce regardless of the results of that moment’s assessment! I immediately emailed Mitch about this website – which is free – because I believe our pedagogy and approach can allow us to immediately begin incorporating the site into our classroom program at the 3rd-8th level. I encourage you to watch these videos of Elizabeth Coleman, Anya Kamenetz, and Salman Kahn!
For my last two workshops of the day, I selected ones that I thought would inform my own path towards aspiring Headship. Terrance Briggs of Bowditch and Dewey LLP spoke about negotiating Head’s contracts from the standpoint of both the school and the Head; key takeaways for me were the importance of seeing contract negotiations within the context of the developing relationship of trust between an incoming Head and a Board, and the need for a Head to speak up early about the critical issues in each compensation negotiation. Finally, Donald Grace of Touchstone Community School (MA), Matt Glendinning of Moses Brown School (RI), and Catherine Karrels of Stone Ridge of the Sacred Heart (MD) presented their unique and variable stories about how to balance the tension between a push towards action and a pull towards further study in a Head’s first year, and when and how to determine the right approach to a scenario. I (and many others) took some comfort from Don, who said “I’ve been a Head at six different schools over the course of the last 18 years, and I have yet to get the first year right.”
The closing general session of the conference featured Geoffrey Canada, creator of the Harlem Children’s Zone, an innovative “cradle to college” approach to providing services well beyond the usual role of schools to 10,000 underserved children who live in a 100-block section of central Harlem. This concept has gotten a ton of press recently; he has been interviewed on Sixty Minutes not once but twice, and he is also featured in the recent movie Waiting for Superman, and President Obama has allocated $150 million to create “presidential zones” in over a dozen other major cities using the same model. While his wit and humor made him a wonderful speaker, I was not engaged by the content of his talk, which was mostly a litany of the deeply troubling but well known issues surrounding the impact of race of educational opportunities (70% of African American males without high school diplomas are unemployed; more African Americans have died of gun violence in the last 30 years than in all of the lynchings in the history of the country; incarceration rates of African Americans outpace college graduation rates; etc). To be fair, we had to leave before the end of his talk, to get to the airport, so he may have been building up to something important or interesting. Fortunately, the ride to the airport did not disappoint; Mike Reira (Head of our Oakland neighbor Redwood Day School), Mohammad Kazerouni (TBS Business Manager) and I shared a cab to the airport, with a lively conversation covering many topics.
This is the third year I have been lucky enough to attend this conference, and I can't wait for 2012 in Seattle!
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