School Governance

Background

The term independent school, is a technical term for the governance model. Independent schools are self-governed and self-funded by a board that historically has given “time, treasure, and talent.” If you want to take back your school, it has to start with the Board. Specifically, the board chair works most closely with the Head of School and is usually aligned with the head’s agenda. This relationship is important to understand.

The Board of Trustees has three main responsibilities:

Upholding the school's mission

Trustees must understand the school’s mission and ensure it is central to all decisions. They should also understand its history and any changes made to it.

Overseeing the Head of School

Trustees are responsible for setting goals for and evaluating the board and head of school. While collaboration is important, the head of school works for the board, the board does not work for the head of school. This is arguably the most important job for a trustee. If the head is not acting in the best interests of the school, he/she will need to be replaced.

Acting as the school’s fiduciary

Trustees must understand the budget and financial fitness of the school. They should review and understand finances at a high level, including revenue drivers such as annual giving, tuition, and endowments; more specifically, they should evaluate the budget allocated to programs such as DEI, including staff consultants, student programming, and professional development.

The nominating committee is arguably the most important board committee, responsible for proposing and vetting newcomers to join the board. Try to learn more about who serves on your school’s nominating committee and what they look for when adding trustees.

When someone joins the Board of an independent school, they typically receive the NAIS “Principles of Good Practice: Independent School Trustees.” This guide is how NAIS begins to use its power to steer board operations and culture. The NAIS Principles of Good Practice are largely distributed and accepted by schools. They recommend that each “school establishes the foundations for its commitment to equity and justice in its defining documents (mission, core value, and philosophy statements).” Additionally, they suggest that school boards should exhibit “best practices related to equity and justice.” The message from NAIS is strong, and trustees are not speaking up.

People serve on boards for various reasons, including loyalty to the school’s mission, desire to ensure the institution’s long-term success, status, and the potential influence it confers. However, schools need trustees who are willing to ask the right questions and, at times, challenge the status quo to fulfill their duty. If they fail to do so, they are derelict in their duty and ultimately fail students.

To be a high-functioning board, the group should be composed of strategic thought partners with diverse expertise and skill sets depending on the school’s needs. It is unreasonable to expect heads to know everything about topics that impact school operations, such as medicine, real estate, financial engineering, investment management, insurance, marketing, child psychology, climate change, social justice, AI, innovation, STEM, cybersecurity, etc. This is where the nominating committee should be working strategically to find candidates with useful skill sets.

What's happening?

Unfortunately, most boards only want trustees who have the capacity to give large donations, “diversity candidates,” or those who are “influential.” The DEI activists who end up on boards are usually the ones who are the loudest.

Courageous people who would openly challenge the DEI agenda are not selected to serve on these boards. Instead, most boards consist of parents, mega-donors, DEI advocates, and others who unequivocally support the head of schools’ agenda without asking tough questions. Because so many schools have blindly followed the “leadership” of NAIS, the entire culture of independent schools has shifted, straying from their missions as the social justice agenda has hijacked them. These boardrooms have become inhospitable to viewpoint diversity. Trustees are complicit in this detrimental shift by not speaking up and asking questions.

Since most boards are large, composed of current parents, and meant to be collegial, there is a perceived cost of speaking out against these principles and such topics as DEI. Many trustees fail to do their job because:

They are deterred by the lack of viewpoint diversity on the board.
They fear retaliation against their student, loss of status, or expulsion.
They lack personal integrity, or the board does not value integrity.
They lack the moral courage to stand up for the truth.
They want to be “liked.”
They don’t want to jeopardize their child’s chance for admittance to an elite college.

Trustees must learn why the school has been overtaken by social justice activism. At the very least, the trustee should read the recent accreditation report and objectively evaluate the accreditors' recommendations against the school's mission. If the school’s mission does not emphasize social justice, then these programs should not be blindly accepted and adopted, nor should the school’s mission and values suddenly change to accommodate the recommendations. Unfortunately, this is not happening.

Why should you care?

The infiltration of the social justice agenda in schools has caused a detrimental shift from teaching students how to think to teaching students what to think. Hiring practices are influenced by fealty to DEI, which creates an environment where social justice activist teachers are hired, and students only hear one negative and divisive worldview. This matters because these schools produce graduates who have outsized influence on most of our important institutions.

Most school heads are educators who lack leadership training. Trustees should, therefore, provide oversight and guidance to help fill in the gaps; however, schools are suffering from a lack of leadership at the board level. Trustees are told to follow the head of school’s direction and support them unequivocally, and in doing so, they neglect a crucial function of their job.

Ideally, school governance would include diverse perspectives to best direct the school's operations and future plans. However, it altogether fails when it is ceremonial. Currently, trustees prioritize their personal agendas over the best long-term interests of the school. In most cases, the trustees of these schools are influential since they have high-profile roles in important companies/institutions and on other boards.

Schools are increasingly trying to be all things to all people. It is impossible to make everyone happy.