Several years ago, a student asked me why he should take my senior English elective over the others being offered. Instead of a comparison (as I didn’t have the whole story about all of my colleagues’ offerings), I told him why I thought my course was beneficial and what the value of the experience was. After he enrolled in the course, he told me that I did a good job selling it. I didn’t have a problem with that language, as I’ve sold everything from real estate to shoes to art in various jobs over the years. But as much as anything, I was simply articulating the values of a curricular experience I had designed. I believed what I was “selling.”
While educators may not like the language of commerce applied to what we do, education—especially independent education—exists in a realm of dollars and cents. Classroom teachers might not think of this often, but our colleagues in development and admission certainly do. Regardless of our comfort with or awareness of our roles in marketing and communicating our school’s “product,” we are all part of a complex matrix of values—both educational and monetary.
According to Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, a “value proposition defines the kind of value a company will create for its customers.” Not easily applied to schools but important nonetheless, the unique value proposition articulates who we are as a school, why families should choose us, and what our experience offers that our competitors do not. As much as it’s a value proposition, it’s also a position statement—who a school is relative to all others in the competitive market.
When I first interviewed with Kate Mueller, Western Reserve Academy (OH) associate head of school in January 2016, I thought I knew exactly what to expect. Founded in 1826, it’s a campus with stately buildings and a dress code that included the school crest on “Reserve Green” blazers. I expected our conversation to explore how my skills and experiences would fit into their rigorous traditional program, with probing questions into my potential transition from a rather progressive school to theirs. She undercut my expectations when she mentioned early in our phone interview that the school was undergoing a full review of the academic program and considering dropping AP courses, reorganizing the schedule, and constructing new models of instruction.
The school was fully enrolled, college placement was solid, alumni engagement was quite good, and all was well with the school. A glance at the school’s 990 on GuideStar suggested that things were financially solid. After I took the job and began to become a part of the school’s fabric, I realized that the changes at work were part of an overall move to redefine the unique value proposition of a WRA education.
In some ways, WRA is uniquely positioned as it is the oldest boarding school not in New England. It’s in a Cleveland independent school market with many excellent day schools, among them parochial and single-sex schools. In other ways, WRA finds itself in a world like many other independent schools, competing to be more sustainable, accessible, and excellent. But WRA’s journey to reinvigorate its identity and educational product is as much responding to the changing nature of the world, of the needs of students, and of what its mission looks like in practice as it is responding to an educational market defined by competition and choice.
Conversations about 21st century education often reference the four C’s: critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, and communication. However, the fifth C—which is fundamental to the other four C’s—is change. But not just change for the sake of change. It should be thoughtful change in order to stay relevant and to offer something to students, families, and the broader school community that cannot be experienced elsewhere.
Redefining the value proposition can be considered in many different ways, but I will suggest the following seven C’s to use as a guideline: understanding the current market and educational landscape; characterizing student, parent, and alumni constituencies; evaluating curriculum; defining existing human capital; invigorating institutional communications; committing to continuous reconsideration of the school’s program and position; and defining the potential costs associated with both changing and not changing.
1 The Current Market
Staying current is key to articulating value. To understand what a school can offer, it’s crucial to understand the broader context in which the school operates, as well as the critical conversations happening in the educational sector. Schools must consider who they are relative to competitor independent schools—as well as the charter and public schools that are viable options for families. Gaining a proper understanding of how your school stacks up and stands apart from others may require more than a cursory glance at their websites. Pay attention to marketing materials, physical plants, and the students and families other schools attract. When the WRA communications department unveiled the new tagline—“What will you pioneer?”—and accompanying marketing pieces, they presented not only previous WRA materials, showing institutional (and brand identity) evolution, but comparisons to the messaging from other schools. Schools also need to stay abreast of current conversations in the educational sphere: what the media highlights, what research is being published, and what practices are being redefined. If we are supposed to be preparing students for an information-saturated world, we, too, must navigate the information that is relevant to the educational landscape that we shape and by which we are shaped.
2 Constituencies
It’s one of the most basic rules of writing: Know your audience. As a school seeks to define its unique value proposition, characterize your student, parent, and alumni constituencies. Demographic data is certainly valuable, but so is fleshing out the narratives of the people who comprise a particular school through surveys and formal and informal conversations. These communities are your consumers, but also the fabric of the human system that makes up the school. In addition to characterizing your school’s present and past student, parent, and alumni constituencies, this conversation is also an opportunity to imagine what these constituencies could look like with changes to the school’s programs and communications.
3 Curriculum
I was immediately interested in working at WRA because of the discussions about dropping the AP curriculum. In a world of increasing standardization of curricula, both nationally and internationally, independent schools are uniquely positioned to build curricula that are responsive to their constituencies, capitalize on their faculty strengths, take advantage of their locations, and meet the demands of their missions.
For WRA, an AP curriculum no longer offered a unique value proposition. That curriculum could be experienced at any number of competitor schools—public, private, and charter. And the school struggled to believe that a single score on a single test was a worthy signifier of the educational journey at WRA. As the school realized what was not part of its unique value proposition, the exciting work of constructing a fully independent curriculum, unique to WRA and distinct among competitors, began.
4 Human Capital
Defining existing human capital turns the school’s focus to the value of existing personnel. Conducting an audit of the academic and co-curricular strengths and interests of faculty could be the start of creating a more school-specific curriculum and programming. For example, if a history teacher is an expert in abstract Expressionist art, that could present an interesting curricular opportunity. Moving beyond a standardized curriculum allows independent schools to recognize their faculty as both gifted educators and engaged academics in their fields of study. As a school defines the strengths of its personnel, it can recognize those people whose current or potential contributions could be crucial to its revitalized program and messaging.
5 Communications
Connecting with existing and potential audiences is crucial for independent schools. We know that different generations prefer to engage with the world in different ways. As schools communicate across cultures and generations, they need to be savvy in their multiple modes of communicating their value across multiple platforms.
When I arrived at WRA, it had undergone a significant brand reboot. The school’s new tagline refreshed all of the school’s communications, from social and print media to the website, email signatures, and the institutional vocabulary. In trying to capture the unique experience of a WRA education, storytelling became key in every aspect of communications—including the school’s magazine and videos—to convey messages internally and externally.
Students participating in the school’s signature Compass Program, which allows students to articulate a passion and pursue a large-scale project related to that passion, have been featured in a blog on the website. Videos of their TED-style talks have been featured on the web and social media. Print ad campaigns show the “pioneering” spirit of the students.
Telling the stories of faculty who have created innovative courses like Cancer Immunology and Digital Fabrication shows how the school lives its mission of offering a transformative educational experience. And, as the school began communicating the sweeping changes to move beyond AP to an independent curriculum, WRA produced a series of five videos to make the case for the change and to garner interest and participation in a town hall meeting to discuss the school’s new direction.
6 Commitment
Schools often work in cycles of reflection and action. Through strategic planning processes and accreditation and response to recommendations, schools consider what they do well and where they should improve relative to their missions. The scale of these considerations is important. In an ideal school that acknowledges that responsive, thoughtful change is necessary to meet the demands of today’s world, teachers and departments should model reflection and change on a classroom level; and schools must do so at an institutional level through strategic planning and making the most of accreditation.
Institutional research is key, as is responsive action in a timely manner. Self-studies, which often take place during accreditation, can spark vital conversations about the current state of the school. Collecting data about the teaching and learning in the classrooms can facilitate a clearer picture of the school’s academic culture and also identify needs with regard to professional development. If schools are constantly in a habit of being reactive to critical needs and playing catch-up, they will likely struggle to make forward-thinking strategic moves in a market that is filled with attractive competition.
7 Costs
Major curricular changes, increased communication efforts, and potential personnel changes can all be costly to schools. Finance directors everywhere know that independent schools are neither inexpensive to attend nor to operate. And general trends across the board suggest that schools will not become less expensive on either front anytime soon. Our realities are costly, so articulating and communicating our unique value propositions is absolutely crucial to our continued existence. Schools have to consider costs on two fronts: the costs of the specific changes and those of not changing.
The costs of changes themselves are fairly straightforward. The cost of maintaining the status quo and not reimagining value proposition is more speculative. For WRA, we had to imagine what the potential risk would be in keeping AP courses; one potential answer was student attrition to attend free public schools with AP curricula would increase as cost to attend WRA also increased. Once the decision to move beyond AP was made, the time spent speculating about the costs of not changing was redirected in communicating the changes to the school’s various constituencies.
To consider the vast, diverse, and increasingly changing educational landscape can be overwhelming, as can the proposition of significant change, especially in a world that has looked fairly similar for three or four generations. In their book The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations, John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen remind us, “The emotions that undermine change include anger, false pride, pessimism, arrogance, cynicism, panic, exhaustion, insecurity, and anxiety. The facilitating emotions include faith, trust, optimism, urgency, reality-based pride, passion, excitement, hope, and enthusiasm.”
Redefining our schools’ unique value propositions is an opportunity for renewed articulation of our identities as institutions—as powerful catalysts for growth and global citizenship, and as communities of unparalleled excellence and unique personalities. Each of us who works within these schools can also look
at ourselves and ask what our unique value proposition is within our community.