Now Is Not Then: Thoughts For Private School Leaders (Part Three)

How will my school survive?  

A strong community is most important right now, but how can I foster that?

How do I think about the future when it is so uncertain?

Above are the three primary questions I have been working through with the school leaders I help as a thought partner.

While the names and settings have been changed or represent composites, I hope you will recognize some aspects of your situation in what follows and find a thought or two of value. 

(Part one is here. Part two here.)

Part Three: How do I think about the future when it is so uncertain?

A few months ago any elite school teaching students to sew masks rather than how to code, to cook in isolation rather than to focus on STEM, or to write letters to pen pals rather than a five-paragraph essay would have been seen as loopy. Yet had you begun just that curriculum in December, your board and parents would now think you a prophet. Such is the measure of how unknowable tomorrow is.

Before getting to next year you first have to see if you can get through tomorrow. Can you, for instance, set the right tone and sense of ceremony for your upcoming virtual graduation? Your seniors deserve more than simply holding the event on Zoom.

This sort of challenge, though, may be a good testing ground for the new ways of working this crisis requires.

Because, as mentioned in parts one and two of this article, the current situation offers no precedent and your chief tasks is to tap those who can take on roles and meet challenges no one ever considered before.

With graduation, hospitality, hearth, and a sense of closing were always conveyed through cap and gown, because of that procession across the quadrangle. But now? You don’t have to come up with the answers, just find the people who might. 

Simone, a school head, knows her own assistant is a de facto mom to all on campus. She and a few other glue figures were added to the graduation committee, their first suggestion that each faculty member compose a handwritten note to two or three seniors already taking shape. This new committee is also considering a twenty-four-hour long Zoom-cast to showcase student work, serve alumni scattered around the globe, and take advantage of what the screen can do that real space cannot. (Previous classes may sponsor an hour of this community-wide celebration, etc.) While Simone will rubber-stamp what her assistant’s team comes up with, and speak at the virtual ceremony any day-long celebration leads up to, she has turned the heavy lifting over to others exactly because no one before has ever tried to heave this stone into place. It will be great, it will be mediocre, or it will be disappointing. Whatever the result, something will be learned. Nor does the committee need Simone, they need her trust and confidence. This she gives by letting them work and reminding the entire school community that, "we are all in new waters, all working together." And Simone does have time for this work, not if she is going to steal some time to think about the long term future of her school.

A private school leader now must focus on staying afloat by communicating with as many people as possible, fostering the community which can survive difficult waters. But they also must walk the deck, smell the air, and imagine the ship repurposed, built as if from scratch.   

In the first place, logistically, when students do return, it is difficult to know what the demands on campus will be. Will physical distancing mean classrooms need to be larger? Lunchtimes lengthened to accommodate more people? Dorms rearranged? Or will you need to close off some spaces to save money with fewer people around? Every chair, all the doors, and each light bulb will sit in, open unto, and illuminate some new reality. All of this, as suggested previously, demands a kind of war room thinking to take on and work through.

Yet far more challenging will be to imagine the currents and winds that might drive elite education in the future. For approximately fifty years private schools have maintained--to overstate it only slightly--a protected model: Get kids into the Ivy league, be (or be like) an Ivy League college. Will that model hold a year from now? Sure, money and status as drivers of admissions to top schools are not going anywhere and Harvard and Choate may, in this sense, have more hardtack stowed away than you do. Then again, if classes become a mix of virtual and on-campus (as seems assured in the near term) they have more real-estate to account for as well. Everyone, in other words, has their own challenges and no one owns a magic telescope for seeing beyond the horizon. The U.S. News & World Report rankings from yesterday mean little when everyone is adrift in the same fog. Your chance to prophesy what comes next is now the same as anyone else's.

For you to think (or to ask a team to think with you) about how you might rebuild your whole school based on guesses about the future is frightening for sure. A hard turn of the wheel will be felt by all aboard. Yet to plan for no course shift at all, no repurposing of your vessel, could be your most perilous strategy.  (Here Simon Sinek offers a few anecdotes about how companies over-protect their model with fatal results. And here is Rafe Steinhauer's excellent article for beginning to think about how we might redesign higher education.)

Will work at Google or on Wall Street still be primary drivers for ambitious kids who seek top schools? Will the system look (even more) suspect to them after such a global failure? Will new emphasis on healthcare mean pre-med, not tech, becomes the hallmark of future schooling? Will faculty who hold their students engaged on-screen wonder why they need your imprimatur? Will now be when more folks claim (as many have) that elite education is built too much on grading and compliance? The answers to such giant questions end up getting expressed in how you carry out your mission, in the details of your pedagogy. A debate over grades might have been a tiresome routine in faculty meetings of the past. Now it may contain some clue of what you bring to the board as your best guess of how you survive as an institution. If you have been pursuing the excellent sheep model because it paid the bills, can you still sell that in the future? Must you double down on that strategy? Shift from it more radically then you have? What will donors want? Families need? The future demand?

This is the time to look at schools you’ve secretly envied (or perhaps pitied) and consider how some part of their model might serve your new reality. The funky school down the street which made the most of a gardening program? Will such quasi-survivalist skills be obligatory now? The makers-space a board member gifted you? Should that be the hub of all you do rather than an outpost? The Director of Diversity and Inclusion or the faculty member in charge of civic engagement? Is now the time to listen even more deeply to their view of whom your school might serve, and how?

To pick a crucial specific: what about your schedule? Time is the essential currency in the life of a school. By definition, yours was built to sail through waters you may never see again. Do semesters still make sense? Would it be more practical to run school around month-long courses (as a few schools do) because that serves space allocation and keeping everyone healthy or, conversely, does it make sense to think of school running with no long vacations? Continuing through the summer? Your community and mission are the first variables, ones only you can know. What you see happening in the future for us all is that variable you must consider and respond to. To think these variables somehow not determining, to imagine that a new coat of paint on your ship will get you through when a whole new construction is required is to be looking through the lens of the past. And that, as I have been arguing here, is a mistake.

An understandable mistake. “We could never change our schedule” is to get caught up in the deep and beautiful life you once lived., to presume cars loaded up with families and duffle bags will drive your way this September just as they always have. For many of us, scenes of mom and dad moving boxes into dorm rooms mark time just as much as might the first fall of snow, spring flowers coming into bloom. But erveything we know about school and education we learned in the era before COVID-19. And now is not then.  

Indeed, whatever school looks like in the future, it will include ghosts, will feel haunted. There is where the basketball team used to play, there the cafeteria that once burst with life, there the courtyard where students gathered to throw rhetorical rocks at me because of some decision I made. Even the worst days of the past will be recalled with sentiment and managing those emotions for yourself and others will be, a few months from now, yet another unprecedented challenge you will need to take on.

To repurpose your ship and to catch the wind of the future you must ask the right questions, listen to others, and determine a course of action. But even if you could somehow get everyone in your community--students, faculty, administrators, parents, staff, board members and alums--to buy into your plan, to stand up and shout that your strategy makes sense, you will still be steering as if by a guess. Like great leaders before you, you will need to stick your finger in the air, feel the salt in the air, and say, “that way.”

Thus, remember too to take care of yourself. Minister to your own days, your own heart, your true spirit. Rest when you can. Give yourself a few hours away from the job on weekends. Laugh with others, laugh with them even and especially when the sound you think you hear is the glug-glug of your ship going down. 

You signed up to steer a sturdy ship through known waters and predictable adventures. Now, instead, you hear the creak of going nowhere, all the charm of leadership you once sought replaced with the heavy rope of crises. The spiffier campus you were going to build, those alumni who would credit you with their success, the endowment you were sure you could enlarge . . . all the ‘academic’ achievements you dreamt of now slip below the waterline and your life and career take on an entirely new focus. There is much to grieve. 

Yet it may be too that you are now an educator for the first time, teaching what you need to learn. Now, as never before, your school must do more than pick up on trends or market itself successfully. Perhaps for the first time since its founding, your institution will be forced to choose the stars by which it charts its course. Terrifying as that is, it is an opportunity. And while few in history have chosen to sail blindly forth, the adventure of it is not to be doubted.

You wanted to be effective, or great, or live out your ambition. Oh well. Rather than the leader who earns accolades or becomes another portrait on the wall, you are now something far more important: the leader who is needed.  And since only you can do this, you may as well lead as you.

Keep the ship afloat, prioritize your crew, seek out the winds of the future, and, who knows? Maybe we will sing songs about you in days to come. Let us hope.

Good luck, stay safe.