2005 NAIS Annual Conference: Opening Ceremonies Remarks on Sustainable Schools Given by NAIS President Pat Bassett

February 24, 2005

The 2005 NAIS Annual Conference theme "Educating for Sustainability" reflects our commitment to the United Nations' Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, launched on January 1st of this year, and framed by Kofi Annan's observation that "our biggest challenge in the new century is to take an idea that seems abstract --sustainable development -- and turn it into a daily reality for all the world's people."

Look around the room to see that perhaps 90 percent of us here are baby boomers. Our parents' generation, the GI Generation, has recently been labeled by Tom Brokaw as the "greatest generation." We baby boomers, if not the greatest, are at least the most prolific generation, and apparently, the most wasteful, since the U.S. represents 5 percent of  the world's population but consumes 25 percent of the world's resources. Many of us began our work in independent schools in the last sixties and early seventies as Young Turks: We're now the Old Guard. But "the force" that helped us take on diversity as our mission is still with us and calling for a second revolution we must lead before we depart. It will be our greatest and most important legacy: that of sustainable schools.

When I wrote these remarks from my home office, I had only my 1977 Webster's to look up the word sustainability. Since that word didn't exist then, I settled for the infinitive, to sustain, which Webster's defines as "to keep up, prolong." A useful academic definition of sustainability (the Bruntland definition) notes that sustainability means "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs." One might adopt NAIS's shorthand terminology, "intergenerational equity" (which the CommonFund has used for some time to caution against high spending rates on endowment that deplete the schools economic resources, the endowment).

What NAIS intends, however, is to promulgate an expanded definition of sustainability, once accompanied by a strategic commitment. It is our belief that independent schools must become sustainable along five continua:

1.  Financially sustainable (becoming more efficient and less costly).

2.  Environmentally sustainable (becoming more "green" and less wasteful).

3.  Globally sustainable (becoming more networked internationally and less parochial in outlook).

4.  Programmatically sustainable (becoming more focused on the skills and values that the marketplace of the 21^st Century will seek and reward and less narrowly isolated in a traditional disciplines approach to teaching and learning).

5.  Demographically sustainable (becoming more inclusive and representative of the school-age population and less unapproachable financially and socially).

There is a compelling rationale for sustainability as NAIS's defining theme for the future, and as the primary focus for the strategic focus and planning of schools from this point forward. NAIS believes that:

• If sustainability is dismissed as "a passing fad" led by tree-huggers, the survivability of our "species of school" is at risk.
• Unless we change along all five continua, our very model itself may be incapable of thriving in the future as well as we have in the past.
• Unless we change, we'll in fact become more like what much of the public already assumes about us: elitist, unapproachable, inaccessible financially and socially, taking care of ourselves at the expense of the rest of the world. (Ironically, this sounds a lot like what the rest of the world assumes about America.)
• Unless "school sustainability" for this generation of school leadership becomes the rallying call that diversity was for the last, we possibly will struggle to "keep up" and "prolong" our very existence.

Those four were "the brutal facts," as Jim Collins (Good to Great) would describe them. Fortunately, I believe there are the four countervailing "unshakeable beliefs," the good news about our schools that help us "not only endure but prevail":

• Our Millennial Generation graduates just out of college and their brothers and sisters who are students in our schools: The "theory of generations" suggests that this generation may well repeat the characteristics of their predecessors, four generations ago, the post-war GI Generation who saw themselves as idealists and problem-solvers on a global scale. If so, we'll have a willing group in the next group of teachers we'll be hiring, to inspire our students to become citizens of a sustainable world.
• The Old Guard: To the baby boomers among us, I'd say "We're not done yet." Believing in Margaret Mead's dictum that it only takes a handful of individuals "to change the world," we'll know that there is one more charge left in the baby boomer faculty and leadership in our schools.
• There is a reservoir of social capital and social commitment in independent schools, once harnessed, impossible to stop: Witness our individual and collective response to the Tsunami Disaster: So far, 500 independent schools who have responded to our query have indicated that their students have raised and contributed $2.6 million to the disaster relief effort. At this rate, we extrapolate that it's likely NAIS schools will contribute over $5 million to the cause.
• The early adapters are leading the way. The NAIS website is now highlighting global schools, green schools, "Leading Edge" schools. These schools and many more are showing us all what's possible.

For the skeptics in our own school community, I would share an observation that we know to be true about diversity, that appeals to ideals don't usually work, but appeals to enlightened self-interest do. The best illustration to make this point regarding sustainability comes from Jared Diamond (speaking at the Conservation International dinner, in Seattle, October 28, 2004, and one of our keynote speakers at this conference):

"Most of us parents set as the highest goal of our personal financial planning to secure our childrens' future, by drawing up a will, buying life insurance, sending our kids to good schools, investing carefully, and perhaps setting up a trust. But you are wasting those efforts and you are throwing away all of that money if you don't also invest to ensure that your kids end up in a world worth living in."

So here's the challenge: Let's both teach our children about the decisions we'll have to make individually and collectively so their children will have a world worth inheriting; and since doing rather than telling is the best teacher, let's find ways, together, to model what a sustainable school and world would look like.