A loyal MR reader asks me on Facebook:
…if you were giving advice to someone setting up a private school, what
would you want them to consider, or read? If you could start your own
school from the ground up — what do you think it would be most
important to do?
I would say be realistic about how much parents will buy into your vision, and realize you need their support to make your school a good one. Readers, what do you think?
A true standards based system like Marzano and Sizer talk about. One that emphasizes work done not seat time. See http://www.reinventingschools.org/ or http://www.essentialschools.org/
I taught in a RISC school for the past two years and a CES school student teaching. I dread teaching at a traditional school in the fall but my girlfriend said we had to move, so what’re ya gonna do?
For books I would read Fires in the Bathroom and The Students are Watching.
I agree with Tyler in that you have to make sure your school has a reason for existing that will get you students in the door.
Classical liberal arts education with emphasis on appreciation of the humanities and the arts so that students have an understanding of the decisions they are making, integrated curriculum so that students are able to develop logical connections between history philosophy science and the arts, and teacher-student dialog to encourage development of thought processes and communication.
There is a charter school in downtown Indianapolis that accomplishes many of these goals- Heron High School.
http://www.herronhighschool.org/
Get money, lots and lots of money. I have been an administrator at two start up private schools and the fiscal pressure is intense.
At both schools we rented facilities at very low cost from churches that had underutilized space, collected tuition well in advance, and had a concept that was unique in its respective area- still the finances were shaky for many years though both schools are now very successful.
Of all the many businesses I’ve run, a private school is definitely the most difficult. You have to pay attention to all of the constituencies all the time. People’s apprehension is heightened 100 times over when you are dealing with the most precious thing in their lives- their children.
As with any business, the single best thing you can do is work in a private school before you start your own private school. Whatever your vision is, people will not be confident that you can execute it unless you have more than a little relevant experience.
Building a trust relationship with parents and prospective parents will take a lot of time unless you are already have such personal relationships in the community. And that trust relationship can be destroyed instantly by one teacher doing something inappropriate with a child.
Change comes slowly in schools. When you do innovative things, parents will compare their perception of what you’re doing to their own school experiences 20 years before and fight tooth and nail against most innovations. The level of parent involvement in private schools is vastly higher than in the public schools where I taught. This is both a blessing and a curse.
All said, when it works it is fantastic. It is wonderful to hear the seniors speak at graduation about what a huge impact the school has had on their lives. And it is great to visit a well-mannered classroom of fourth graders who are excited to study classical literature that most would think beyond their years.
Please realize what a long hard road it is to go from start up private school to local institution.
(You’re on Facebook?!?)
Hi! I teach in a private school! …but I don’t run one, so listen to that Tom guy up above. That said:
Curriculum: there are a ton of valid ways to do curriculum. Look for holes in your local scene. Read up on the opposite of whatever your inclination is; if you picture a classical curriculum and school uniforms, read John Taylor Gatto, Jonathan Kozol, Sudbury Valley stuff. If you picture a free-wheeling inquiry-based ungraded etc. school, read Nation at Risk, Harold Bloom, etc. It will probably infuriate you, whichever way you go. But curriculum is too big for one mind to make a good one entirely from scratch, I think. Bring people on board who have experience in different subjects and are passionate about curriculum design. Have a mission statement which is SHORT and CONCRETE — none of this vague buzzword stuff that people wave around, but things which have actual prescriptions for your curriculum. (For example, if you’re talking about “preparing students to participate in a democracy”, I’m expecting civics classes, history, maybe political science and economics, a strong student government, and probably significant community involvement. You should be able to point to specific elements of your curriculum and student experience which support your mission statement. If you’re talking about “cultivating lifelong learners”…well, honestly, I have no idea what you could point to or how you could even prove success.)
Labor issues: the labor market in teaching is horribly broken and totally weird. Professional evaluation is broken and often nonexistent. There is an enormous allergy to merit pay, though it has been incorporated successfully in some cases. My ideal school would have evaluations and merit pay — and be a lot more up-front in the interview process about pay and benefits than most places I looked at — but if you cater to me, you might lose. Nonetheless, read Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers by Moultrop et alia (part II discusses alternative compensation schemes which people have tried to implement) and Teacher Evaluation: To Enhance Professional Practice by Danielson and someone, which is basically the only book you need to run an evaluation scheme (it’s intelligent and it’s what people seem to base their schemes off of no matter how much else they read).
Also in terms of labor, think about what a qualified teacher looks like to you, in particular how you feel about certification (be familiar with your state’s standards and what you think they do, or don’t, mean) and how you feel about non-teaching experience.
Think about the population you want to serve, which will be tied into curriculum above. Despite the implicit assumption of the public school model no school is a good fit for every student. Decide up-front, as the students you can and can’t serve will drive your curricular choices (and also affect your financial viability; again, look around and see what your local niches are).
Parental support is the sine qua non. Do everything you can to make sure you’ll have some. Have a parents’ association with a strong, but not psychotic, leader as soon as possible.
Have trustees who are smart about money. Tom Kelly is right — running a school can be galactically expensive, and no matter how much money you have (and my school is drowning in it) you could always use more.
Get a core group of committed teachers early and involve them in generating your vision. Don’t do it all alone and be ready to make concessions. Teachers will work insane hours for dumb pay if they have a vision they’re passionate about.
Have administrators who communicate very well.
Realize that you cannot do everything all at once. Just as with money, there’s always more you *could* be doing…A pitfall of the private school is to have lots of committees and talk things to death and issue shiny recommendations that never get implemented. Don’t. Once you are off the ground (when necessarily you will be doing a million things at once), pick a small number of issues to focus on in a given year — no more than three and that’s pushing it. In fact, allot several years to each issue. And come up with *actions*, verifiable and evaluatable actions, for solving them. And make it someone’s job to follow through. And when people start being upset that you aren’t doing anything at all about, eg, diversity because you’re so focused on, eg, curriculum, that’s where you fall back on those administrators who can communicate.
Back to reading lists — look at syllabi of teachers’ ed programs and read the books that crop up most often. Most of them will probably be crap, but you need to know the state of the field, the language people are talking.
Read a few books written by successful investment bankers because just as with a bank, the school’s most valuable assets walk out the door every day at 4:30, and most of them don’t need the job. Managing in that situation is very, very different than other types of management (politics becomes vastly more important).
Perhaps a deferred compensation program based on a student’s SAT/college admission/first year of college GPA would be an effective way to better align teacher’s incentives with the administration (and the student’s).
What about Hansonian Angels as students? We test kids at a certain age. The we gather those kids who score in the lowest quintile. And we pick one that we secretely designate an angel. If the teachers are able to raise the angel’s tests scores to some standard, then that teacher will be rewarded, say, with double their salary. Since these teachers will not know which kid is the designated angel, they will have to try to their best to make sure everyone performs well.
Money. It depends what the vision for the school is, but even a school with very modest facilities is like a black hole for money, and unfortunately many passionate and talented educators are not so sound on the business side of things. In other words, if it’s not you, find a great money person and enlist them immediately to work out finances. Most established private schools depend significantly on endowment income to cover regular running costs, i.e. even rather high tuition is not going to cover real expenses.
The other thing I’m keen on is values/ethos. Yes, of course, it’s crucial to have talented teachers, etc. But the best schools also are fueled by an ethical rather than a strictly pedagogical vision. Obviously the two overlap, but it’s worth thinking separately about the values aspect of things.
Not to steer the conversation away from the question, but is the number of comments indicative of a general opinion that public education is a lost cause? I’m not scolding here; I’ve been away from the classroom for a year completing some graduate studies, and in the short time I’ve been back (I’m writing this post from my classroom; the kids aren’t back for several weeks yet), my enthusiasm for being innovative is quickly being crushed by the culutre of K-12 education. As I reacquaint with colleagues, the apathy and negativity is amazing. I’m also beginning to think that the only way I’ll be happy in education is if I’m in a situation where the constraints and culture of this lumbering institution don’t exist.
I suppose my advice isn’t limited to private schools.
Content: No matter who the audience is, build the instructional materials around core content that all the instructors and supporting personnel are competent with. Use declarative objectives for students and share them completely with parents.
Process: Map your curriculum fully and engage the whole school/community in it. Tell everyone that in these classes we do (!) this week so you can build on it to do (2) next week.
Context: Don’t assume a school has to be a substantially brick and mortar structure. If you are starting a new school, as an educational system, use the best communication systems you can to provide information to learners and parents. In 2007 there are a variety of online resources available, at lower cost than ever before, that provide outstanding multichannel communication. Staying with a model of single channel, unreviewable, live instruction today is not just poor practice; It’s failure writ large.
My advice would be:
Be a non conformist and teach the students what will help them to live a better life even if it easy. For history let then watch the history channel. It is hard to imagine that some history teachers can make history boring!
Not to seem crass, I would nonetheless pay close attention to branding and to real estate. If you ask yourself why there are not more private schools in NY and LA, where demand is insane and tuition can be raised almost without limits, these are the answers. Without an established brand, it may be hard to attract a full house for some years. This implies you’ll need capital to give you staying power. And unless you are somewhere cheap (in which case demand for an expensive school may be limited), real estate is a potentially signficant constraint–and poses a barrier to entry enjoyed by longstanding private schools that got going when land was cheaper.
Perhaps one question you want to ask is, what advantage do you have over the free service being provided by the government. If the local schools are nightmarish holes, then this isn’t too hard. If they’re pretty decent public schools, then you need to have something else that makes it worth paying for–wonderful academics, religious education integrated into the whole school, radically different instructional style, etc.
Find a “Tom Kelly† and an “Andromeda† and have lunch with
each of them. See if you can meet with them about twice a
year for the two or three years it will take you to figure out
more specifically what you want to do and how you will do it.
In addition to working several years at at least two schools,
spend many days sitting in the classrooms and discussing
finances and management methods of a couple dozen
schools. Both the best you can find and some near failures.
(And if you can find people who failed and are willing to talk
about it, you can learn from them too.)
By being in the room you can learn there things you cannot
learn by reading or talking. Particularly you can learn things to
avoid doing,
If you are going to handle the accounting yourself, find the
best accounting teacher and take the course. Twice if you have
to. If, after this, you don’t have the basics down cold, find
someone to help you with the finances, but still know your
balances – – every day. (Unless you are fascinated by
accounting, don’t go beyond the first year course.)
If you are not going to handle the accounting, take the course
and learn it well enough that you will clearly understand the
discussions you will have. And know your balances – every
day.
It is difficult to get useful advice and information on the art
and science of managing people. This is in part because what
works for some other people will work for you, but what works
with most other people will not work for you. And what works
for you and some of your people will not work for you and
other of your people.
(That is one of the reasons debates about management
methods are as contentious as the debates between Sachs and
Easterly on economic development.)
The most nearly universally useful work I know of is Dale
Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.† Read
the book. Take the course. Consider having everyone who
works for you from board members to janitors read the book
and take the course together.
Lou Gerstner’s book on his experience at IBM is useful for his
comments on the beliefs—the mission—of a business, or in
your case your school. Ignore all the stuff about computers.
(You might also try libraries or the used book sellers at
Amazon, etc. to find Thomas Watson, Junior’s books “A
Business and Its Beliefs† and “Father, Son & Co.†)
Two books by Jim Collins are “Built to Last† (with Jerry Porras) and
“Good to Great,† Collins has also done some writing on non-
profits. There are books by Peter Drucker and Tom Peters
which are also management classics. These three all disagree
with each other. Why, then, recommend them all? Because you
can find things in each that will help you (and things in each
that won’t work for you.)
Blogger Joanne Jacobs’ book “Our School” would be another good read. Note in particular that they discovered several tactical changes they needed to make after they got started.
First, realize that your competition (public schools) is offering FREE comparable service. As a former owner of a private school, I can say this was the biggest impediment to our success. Secondly, the level of personal attention and energy that will be needed to address all of the needs of all of the parents/families/students is not to be taken lightly. Your selection of a Director/Principal will be critical. Also, the politics of all of the interested parties (the board, director, staff, students and parents) will be a never ending source of frustration and energy sink.
Interesting Article on “How To Start A School”
Hi,
Starting a private school is like nothing else you’ve ever done. I agree with Tom’s statements about the challenges you’ll face when starting a private school. I’ve written an article that may be of assistance entitled, “The 13 Steps To Starting Your Own School.” It contains advice on how to start a private school, and much more. Because the article is over 5 pages long, I didn’t want to post it here. Instead, I’ve put a copy on my web site so that you can download it and read it at your convenience.
To find a copy of the article on starting a school, you’ll need look in the section named “Special Reports” on my web site at:
http://www.halladayeducationgroup.com
Good luck,
Doug Halladay
Halladay Education Group
604-868-0002
info@halladayeducationgroup.com
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