Before I joined NAIS, I spent two years working on behalf of the Abu Dhabi Education Council, which oversees public and private schools, colleges, and universities in Abu Dhabi, the largest emirate in the United Arab Emirates. My colleagues and I were responsible for two projects, the training of public school principals to lead a historic change to an English-dominant curriculum and recruitment of a major U.S. university to open a school of education in the UAE to train the next generation of school leaders. The Abu Dhabi leadership recognized that its phenomenal oil riches - 9 percent of the world’s oil reserves to serve a population of only two million - would not last forever. Abu Dhabi needed to diversify its economy, and to do so it needed to upgrade its educational system.
I often recall this experience as I contemplate the needs of independent schools here in the United States. Like Abu Dhabi, our schools have generally enjoyed good fortune. They prospered in the 1990s and early 2000s, adding students, expanding campuses, growing endowments, and burnishing brands. But the good times did not last. After the recession, the economy returned to normal long-term rates of growth - half those of the 1990s - and the student population stabilized as the baby boomlet ran its course. Today, schools are looking at demographic trends that challenge past practices. The number of Caucasian students in the U.S. will decline from 29 million to 23 million over the next 35 years. Students of color will become the majority of all U.S. K-12 students within the next 12 years, and in this same time period student numbers will grow at only a fifth of the rate of the 1990s and 2000s - all according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Our schools also face new expectations. The world of work is evolving so rapidly that it is unclear just what knowledge and skills a great K-12 school should teach. Some of our schools are giving up the Advanced Placement program so that faculty can ply their creativity and get their students doing more demanding and creative work. But are today’s maker labs, innovation spaces, and 3D printers educational mainstays of the future or just passing fads? Online resources have the potential to change fundamentally how students learn and teachers teach, but how exactly should schools fulfill that potential? Colleges and universities are looking for students with “21st-century skills,” even if we can’t all agree on the skills that should be on that list. And even if we acknowledge the value of skills in creativity, problem solving, collaboration, and communication, it’s not clear how best to instill them. Schools have more questions than answers.
No single answer will be right in every school. But one thing is certain: Schools will require special kinds of leaders - leaders with the courage to ask the hard questions and the fortitude to unite their communities around new answers. Finding those leaders is perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity of our time. NAIS data suggest that two-thirds of our current school heads will retire in the next decade - that is the share currently age 50 or above, half of whom are at least 60.
If we follow convention, the vast majority of those new heads will be external candidates recruited from other headships or lower academic rungs of other independent schools. This may not do. Two concerns: External candidates may have largely traditional experiences that do not provide them the knowledge or vision to take a school in a new direction; and even if they have those chops, they may lack sufficient understanding of a new school’s culture to lead the community to change. When I worked in Abu Dhabi, my team had the requisite vision and knowledge, and the support of the emirate’s leadership. But the native Emirati principals generally nodded politely at us for a full year, and then returned to business as usual in their schools. This is hardly a surprise. Our own community has seen plenty of strong heads leave new schools after short tenures, their bold ideas and styles not being the right “fit.”
In Abu Dhabi, the education leadership anticipated the resistance. They asked my colleagues and me to enlist the help of a U.S. university to prepare local educators at the outset of their careers to become transformational leaders themselves. The work of that university is under way today. In the meantime, I learned important lessons in leadership watching that university at work.
After speaking with numerous major universities, all with some level of interest, we were fortunate to attract Vanderbilt University and its top-ranked school of education, Peabody College, to the mission. U.S. universities have been opening campuses overseas for years - and with very mixed results. The Middle East has been the scene of an especially large number of failures. It took a university with a clear view of the need for global strength in the future - and individual leaders to build that strength.
The chancellor of Vanderbilt University is Nicholas Zeppos. Zeppos is a legal scholar and professor who began his academic career at Vanderbilt in the 1980s. He made a fast reputation as a great teacher. He rose quickly through the academic ranks, and by the 2000s was provost and chief academic officer. In 2008, he was named chancellor. During Zeppos’s tenures as provost and now chancellor, Vanderbilt has been one of the fastest-rising universities in the country. It has quickly grown from a major regional university to a highly ranked national university. Putting aside scorecards, the school has become a magnet for top faculty talent and research dollars. Zeppos has been a big part of that change, instituting a need-blind admissions policy and merit scholarships to draw high-caliber students from every background and geography. In this work, he has garnered the unwavering support of the Vanderbilt Board of Trust, including many alumni of this once traditional Southern institution. He knows the culture. He was able to lead the change from within.
Peabody, by contrast, has been led by the consummate outsider. Camilla Benbow is Swedish by birth. She trained at Johns Hopkins University under the famed statistician Julian Stanley and specialized in gifted and talented students and mathematics education. She sets high standards and takes no prisoners. When she came to Peabody, the school was good, not great (having always had a world-class special education program). Under Benbow’s leadership, Peabody’s graduate school of education ascended to number one in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, ahead of Harvard, Stanford, Teachers College at Columbia, and the other traditionally strong programs, reaching the top in 2009 and holding the distinction for five years.
Peabody took something of a chance when it hired Benbow. She was a full professor at Iowa State University, not one of Peabody’s venerable competitors. At the time of her appointment, ed school deans were mostly men. Her reputation was for research, not leadership. But she is blazing smart, a personality to be reckoned with, and committed to the very best in teaching and education leadership. She rocked the culture at Peabody a bit. She won allies, recruited national talent, and built a winning team.
Zeppos and Benbow, who have become friends, have provided me personal proof points of how, I believe, schools can pursue transformational leadership. One way is from the inside. We could be bolder about how we identify prospective leaders among our young teachers and other beginning school personnel, looking for individuals who can be future change agents, who will do more at the next level than replicate traditional strengths. We can work with them to understand what it takes to both embrace culture and help to change it. At NAIS, we overhauled our Aspiring School Heads program and School Leadership Institute in 2014 to help future leaders in our schools develop these skills. Great organizations have strong benches, high-potential people who can step into leadership roles and actually lead, not maintain. We can and should do more to develop school succession plans, including the headship, which enable our schools to evolve and thrive.
We can also be bolder in our external searches. Camilla Benbow would have been considered a “nontraditional candidate” in her day. What a preposterous thought now. Today, schools of education are more often led by women than by men. Only a third of independent schools are headed by women, and a smaller percentage than that in schools with an upper school division. The majority of our teachers, on the other hand, are women. The young, bright innovators who are now leading our classrooms into the future, and are often women, provide us a promising pool of educators soon to lead our schools.
Whether our searches have us looking externally or internally, we should finally consider the students we will be serving. Perhaps the greatest change coming our way is demographic. The students we serve are becoming ever more diverse. Serving them well will require us to become more diverse in our leadership. Today, 15 percent of our teachers and 6 percent of our heads are people of color. We should redouble efforts to bring more people of diverse backgrounds into our beginning ranks, developing their leadership potential internally. As we do so, our external searches will also have more stellar candidates of color.
Through each of these strategies, our future leadership transitions could also be our most significant transformations.