As we were about to close out this issue, we got the heartbreaking news about NAIS President John Chubb’s untimely death. We are running a tribute in The Reporter section (at the center of the magazine), but I want to say a few words about John’s leadership at NAIS and his remarkable overall contribution to the field of education.
John’s final Independent Perspective column appears in this issue. In it, one can find both John’s passion for and key concerns about our complex, evolving, and essential world of precollegiate education. One can also find his deep faith in smart data as a means to leverage the sort of lasting change that leads to better schools. John also underscores what I tend to think of as his most central and moral message: that we need a broad and varied system of education across the private, public, and charter schools that serves all students well — that meets all students where they are and takes them to where they need to be. In moving into the NAIS president’s office in 2013, John made it clear that he felt that independent schools have enormous potential to be key players in this needed transformation.
In particular, John’s column focuses on the need for schools to do more than prepare students academically for college. Independent schools will always prepare students well for college. That’s not the issue. The issue is how we prepare students for success in life beyond. How we inculcate the skills and dispositions students need for work, life, and citizenship. To do this well today, he argues, we need to rethink just about everything we do in school, especially how and what we teach.
Indeed, “transformation” may have been John’s mantra. In one of his early columns on leadership (Spring, 2014), he made it clear where the issues lie. He wrote: “The nation needs schools that serve a diversity of students more successfully. The nation needs schools that prepare students for a rapidly changing, technologically sophisticated, internationally connected future. The nation needs schools that consistently attract our very best and brightest into careers of teaching and educational leadership. The nation needs schools that taxpayers and parents can afford. Schools that meet these needs are likely to look quite a bit different from schools today.”
For all his experience leading and guiding transformation in public and charter schools, John was just getting started with independent schools. He spent much of his time traveling the country, visiting schools and developing an increasingly refined sense of their strengths as well as ways to improve. Simultaneously, he was working to create innovative programs to help propel independent schools to a higher level. For all of us, then, it’s particularly sad to lose John as our community’s leader just at the point where these two projects were converging. I can only hope that this issue of Independent School — focused on how schools approach the teaching of skills (metacognitive skills, 21st-century skills, etc.) — is both a tribute to John’s vision and a valuable contribution to our ongoing conversation on what the next generation of great schools should look like