A. We are a non-profit corporation and, as such, as a non-profit,
non-profit independent school, we subscribe to all of these
non-discriminatory policies, race, creed, color, and national
origin. We have had no incident that relate -- that's
essentially through my perspective or my job -- that's the
only place where there is any potential conflict or incident
with state or federal authorities, whether or not we are
living up to our definition of our non-profit status. We have
no incidents where that has been the case, where there has
been any conflict at all.
Q. One independent school said they had concerns with the
Department of Labor as far as teachers and --
A. We haven't.
Q. -- workers' rights kinds of thing/
A. No, and I think the business manager, of course, has to deal
with some things with OSHA and XXX, in her capacity as head of
the school, and members of the board of trustees, particularly
buildings and grounds, have to deal with state, local and
federal authorities when it comes to such things as our
_______ project because it's an Army Corps of Engineers
project, so there is some dealings there, but beyond that,
it's -- anything involving day-to-day operations, there's not
that. We do fill out all the usual census forms and whatnot,
we do fill out forms, but that is about it. We haven't had
anything to do with the Department of Labor.
Q. Incident -- North Central or the Association of Independent
Schools?
A. North Central, no, not at all. Never have any dealings with
North Central in this light. There was a North Central
representative on the evaluation, the school's evaluation
committee, who, as near as I could figure, was there to make
sure that we have enough days in our year, that we -- our
accreditation is Arizona Association of Independent Schools,
which essentially is for the National Association of
Independent Schools. The only dealings we have had with AAIS
have been in the areas of those evaluations and regional
meetings. There have been evaluation team -- we asked that it
be expended beyond AAIS membership because we didn't feel --
we are in an unfortunate position in Arizona. Because there
are very few independent schools here, we didn't feel that we
would be able to get as comprehensive an evaluation if the
only evaluators were in-state. We wanted -- we didn't want
people to come onto this campus and say "Isn't it wonderful?"
We wanted people to come onto this campus and say, "We see a
need here. We see a need there. We want you to explore these
options." We wanted, I guess, more eyes and more eyes from
people who are far more educationally diverse than you would
find in state; so we asked the AIS, and secured permission, to
bring in people from all over the country. In fact, the head
of the team, the AAIS evaluation team, came in from the
international school in Brussels, Belgium. So we brought them
in from all over.
Q. You had to pay for that.
A. Yes, we did. And were more than willing to do so. The reason
we did that is that it allowed us that sort of breadth and
depth of an evaluation that we really wanted. We wanted our
commendations and our recommendations to mean something. That
didn't mean that our local people here couldn't do it, but
having gone through a lot of the evaluations in the past, most
of them had read an assortment in this wonderful kind of way,
and we wanted to get shaken up a little more, I guess.
Q. What changes or considerations came out of that evaluation?
A. The commendations and recommendations involved such things as
whether our administrators -- there was a recommendation about
our administrative structure. There were tremendous
commendations about the school; the summary commendations and
recommendation were incredibly positive; the recommendations
were such things that we really needed to shape up in our
library, that it's behind the times; that's the kind of
recommendation that we might not have received coming out of
an AAIS evaluation because we have a wonderful 40,000-volume
library and two full-time librarians and most of the schools
in the AAIS don't have the luxury of those things, so they
would walk into our library and say it was great. Our
evaluation team that we brought in that joined the AAIS team
walked into our library and said it isn't automated and it
isn't up to date and it's collection probably isn't what it
ought to be and this needs to be look at and that needs to be
looked that and, lo and behold, we were able to affect those
changes. What we got out of some of those recommendations
were some fairly compelling things that we could bring to the
board of trustees and say, look, this is where we need to
spend some money. There were -- I'm trying to think what else
came out of it. There were recommendations that the lines of
communication, internally and externally, be improved. Again,
those are the kinds of things that an AAIS evaluation alone
might not have produced because, again, given the nature of
the relative fiscal comfort of this school, we were doing a
lot more of that than many schools are able to, and so we
might not have gotten the luxury of that. That kind of a
recommendation, that the marketing efforts of the school be
increased and become a focus, and that has become a focus, we
have worked on them. Again, because marketing has come very
late to some of the Arizona schools as a priority, we might
not have gotten that recommendation. So those kinds of things
-- there was some great effect.
Q. An incident -- by legal or judicial judgments?
A. No. There have been -- I guess I'm like my public school
counterparts, where there have been an increasing number of
suits. I'm thinking about things like the Osborn School right
now going through a suit about whether or not a kid can wear
a particular tee shirt; those kinds of things haven't really
hit us, or haven't hit me. As a school, of course, we have
had to make some tremendous changes as a result of changes in
liability laws and suits that have taken place in other
schools as precedence. We have to be increasingly careful to
avoid situations where liability could be questionable, where
negligence could be defined in a very broad term. We haven't,
knock on wood, had to fight some of those battles. We have
not had, as far as I know, to fight the battle of someone
suing for wrongful dismissal. There are some of those suits
being launched against independent schools. A lot of what we
do, however, is preventative medicine against that so that we
make sure that we have -- if we have a situation, that we make
sure we have the documentation that we need, make sure that we
have the follow through, that we have policies and procedures
that we follow. So, in essence, I think some of what we do
here is a direct result of what's happened in other places.
We have no incidents here, at least to date, where we have had
to learn the hard way.
Q. Incident -- parents?
A. I work with parents constantly and this is a school that when
I arrived here, had an extraordinarily strong tendency toward
being parent-run with parental influence being felt in corners
and corridors of the school where it did not belong. So in my
first year here I had to face issues, along with other
administrators, of getting parents to move from where they
were into areas that were more appropriate for them, which, in
some cases, it met a ______________. Parents here had, at
least by tradition, a tremendous amount of input into areas
where they did not belong, in the design of curriculum to, at
least in one instance, of hiring and firing. It was just
inappropriate. There was even an anonymous letter that was
circulated among the parents during my first year here that
expressed dissatisfaction with the current administration
because the parents were no longer treated as others. And
that's true, they were not treated as others and are not
others; our parents are subscribers to this service and it is
our responsibility to be
service-oriented and to be responsive
to our parents, but it is not our responsibility to place them
in the position of calling the shots. If what we are doesn't
please parents, then we will cease to exist. Our job is to
please, our job is to serve, our job is not to allow parents
to run the school, and if that's all that there is out there
in terms of what people want, then we will probably cease to
exist, because we consider that philosophically that runs
against every human being. We who are running the school now,
and the trustees who hire us, philosophically it runs against
all those things. There are in other cities and other parts
of the country parent-run schools and those are fine and that
may philosophically what those schools are; that is not what
the school was founded to be, it's what it became. So we lost
a lot of parents, we lost 75 families that year as we went
through that change, and it was essentially a change of
control more than it was a change of anything else.
Unfortunately, it was more of a change of perceived control
than it was actual, but it was a fascinating baptism with
fire. Now I believe we have one of the most supportive,
wonderful parent bodies I have ever seen in a schools and they
are with the school, are involved with the school, are active
in the school, in incredibly appropriate ways. And I have
never seen a more committed parent body.
Q. An incident -- professional organization?
A. I do a lot of work through the National Association of
Independent Schools. They, in addition to being our primary
membership body and the body that has the ultimate
responsibility for our accreditation, do a tremendous amount
of work to assist its member schools in advancing themselves
in a number of ways. They work with business offices, they
work with heads offices, they work with admissions offices --
a piece of my responsibilities are, in fact, the marketing
aspects of the school and the NAIS publication on marketing
which gives very concrete and helpful advice in public
relations, very concrete, very good stuff for us to apply.
See, unfortunately, independent schools are different from
just about everything else out there of a service economy. We
are non-profit; that's exciting, it's wonderful; we are non-
profit the way a museum is non-profit, but no museum would
say, "You can come and you can't." So we have the added
component of being a non-profit, non-discriminatory
institution that also has the luxury and the down sides of
being selective. No one would look at a symphony orchestra
and say, "You are elitist," even though the music they produce
is something that only a small segment of the population
appreciates, yet they would look at this institution and say,
"You are elitist," and yes, we, too, are serving a very small
percentage of the population, but because we have the luxury
of selectivity, that brings something else into people's minds
as to what this place is. In cities like Boston, from which
I came, I didn't need the NAIS all that much because we had
each other, we had hundreds of independent schools, 45 schools
within a 10-mile radius of the city of Boston. ____________
had issues that they dealt with where the local population
understood that independent education was very much a part of
the fabric of New England. Independent education is not a
part of the fabric of Arizona; it's an interloper, and as
such, the marketing aspects there didn't quite seem as
important, and now, of course, are because everybody has to
segregate themselves from the market. The marketing aspects
that didn't seem all that important there because the
population was predisposed in a positive sense toward
independent schools, this is a population that isn't
predisposed toward independent education. So it's our job to
educate the community at large as to what independent
education is, and I've needed -- NAIS has greatly helped.
It's interesting; the farther I've gotten -- the NAIS is based
in Boston and is moving to Washington -- but the farther I've
gotten from NAIS, the more I have had to use them.
Q. With 45 schools within a ten-mile radius, what was the basis
of competition?
A. Real competition, but these schools had already automatically
segregated themselves; they had already marketed themselves,
they just didn't call it that. What they had done, there were
boys' schools, there were girls' schools; there is sort of an
instant segregation. There were schools for kids who, say,
are in the top ten percent and there were schools for kids who
were in that middle band, and there were schools for kids who
really struggled and had some learning difficulties and needed
some ongoing support, and what these schools had done, because
there were so many of them, is they had found their niche.
This is what they do well. And had gone about doing it. Now,
what they hadn't done enough of is telling everybody what it
is that they do. But because it's such an educational barrier
and the contacts between and among these schools are so
ongoing and constant, part of the informal network that we on
is that when somebody came to an admissions office who was
clearly inappropriate for school X, the director of admissions
at school X could look at that family and say, "Here's school
y, z and D, and these three schools really might be more what
you're looking for." So there's this wonderful, sort of
ongoing referral network, so that we could help families find
the schools that were right for them. That, and the fact that
in many of the cases of those 45 schools, and there may be
more, but in cases of those 45 schools, many of them existed
before there was public education in this country. Roxbury
Latin School, for example, is celebrating it's 360th
anniversary. That was before there was a country. And many
of those independent schools are pre-revolutionary. They were
set up as the way children who were to be educated would be
educated as academies before the idea of public education ever
even surfaced. So a lot of these places are quite old and
quite well-established. A lot of them have changed
dramatically over the years but they had the luxury and
benefit of each other, and they had done some market
segregations by necessity. Here's what we're good at; let's
do it. There isn't anyone out there in the XXX
metropolitan community who has heard of XXX Country Day
School who doesn't have some assumptions about what this place
is all about. Many of which are completely and utterly
contradictory. You will hear people say that PCDS is a
country club where not much academic happens; and you will
hear people say that PCDS is an academic pressure cooker where
the kids can't have any fun, and you will hear people say that
PcDS is a very good school but they won't admit Jewish
students, you hear people say that PCDS is the best Jewish
school in the valley; you will hear everything about PCDS out
there from people who have heard of it that are based on a set
of assumptions where -- there's an old business axiom, all
voids will be filled, they just won't necessarily be filled
the way you want them to be. So when people don't know what
you are, they try to put you into something that they can
understand, a set of assumptions. That isn't just the
population as a whole in a sort of collective ignorance, but
it can even go so far as newspapers, where a couple of years
before I got here, the Scottsdale Progress printed an article
that talked in rather happy terms about a theory that the
Paradise Valley Country Club, the PCDS and the Biltmore
Fashion Park were connected via a series of tunnels, and that
when one parking lot emptied, the other filled, that kind of
thing, sort of assumptions what the school was about. So it's
been the job of this office and an ongoing job it is as the
population of this valley turns over at a rate of 20 percent
every year, for every five people moving in, four are moving
out, that's the reality of it, it's the net growth that gets
you there, it's incredible, is to educate this population as
to what we are, what we aren't, and then try to get those
parts of -- those mass communication parts of the city, the
TV, the radio, the newspapers, break down some of the stuff,
let them know that we're non-profit, for example, since many
people don't even know that, break down a lot of those things
so that we can use those for resources or for vehicles to
educate the community about what we are and what we aren't.
So we need to do things that are quite public, that connect
us, that link us into this valley. A concrete example: XXX
has joined the zoo board. Did she come on the zoo
board because she's got tons and tons of time? No. She
joined the zoo board because (a) she has an interest in zoo,
in animals and is a scientist by training, and (b) it helps
get this school connected into this valley. I serve on the
governor's Project ZZZ. We get lots of heat from all over
the place but it's a wonderful way for me to get involved in
the greater community of YYY and the state of BB, and
it's good for the school. If my personality can help the
school get connected, XXX's personality can help the school
get connected, then more and more we will start to eat away at
the assumptions about what this place is all about and get to
the reality of it. Long answer to your question there.
Q. Incident -- students?
A. Every single day. There isn't a day that goes by that my work
life isn't influenced or shaped by students. We -- that's why
we're here. I'm afraid to say that many educational circles,
particularly at the administrative level, that's been
forgotten, that some of the administrators spend so much time
administrating that they forget that there's a whole group of
kids out there and that's why we exist. One of the ways in
which an independent school, and we touched on it earlier, but
an independent school is different from a public school is
public education needs to exist and we don't. We could close
tomorrow; we don't need to exist. It's good that we exist
because we're filling a void but we don't need to. Kids would
be educated, for better or for worse, but they would be
educated without us. As a result of that, members of the
administration of independent schools have a tendency to be
far more closely connected and shaped by the student body than
you would find in any public school setting. We all teach; we
are all in the classrooms; we are working with kids; we are
dealing with kids; we're saying no to kids; we are saying yes
to kids; we are dealing with tough issues with kids; we're
setting standards for kids; we are getting input from kids; we
are dealing with each other as people and not as us to them.
We're dealing with them individually, on an individual basis
with no decisions made on the basis of crowd control, but
based on the needs of the children. The -- I can't walk out
of this door without my day being shaped by kids. I couldn't
conceive of myself as an administrator not in the classroom
because I need the kids, I need to feel the pulse of the kids,
because that's what this place is. And if I'm going to sell
this place, this is what admissions really is, it's the
strangest kind of selling because you're selling it to people
you may not be able to let buy it, and it's a weird sale when
you think about that; here's the school, this is what it is,
this is what it's all about, generate excitement about it, and
then pull the rug out from under them and say you can't have
it. But when it's your responsibility to sell a place, you
had better know it. And public education, sadly, doesn't have
to sell itself. If they had to sell it, it would help them to
get to know their kids better.
Q. I was going to say, can they get to know their kids better
when they have 2000 --
A. Whether as individuals you can get to know them better, I
don't know; but to feel the pulse of them, yes, you definitely
can. I don't think -- I mean, God knows there are enough
middle managers in public education -- every single one of
those middle managers in one way or another, they were trained
as teachers, they ought to be in the classroom. I don't care
if they're team teaching something and they're only able to
get there twice a week, they ought to be in the classroom,
they ought to know the way kids are right now. And will they
ever get to know -- in a school of 2000, all of the kids? Of
course not, but they will feel the pulse and not be dealing
with them as numbers and abstract concepts. Public education
is dealing with problems that we don't have to fight. They're
dealing with gangs and drugs and pregnancies and growing
populations of students whose cultural needs are immense,
where the differences between kids are just night and day,
where safety has become the number one issue in schools -- it
used to be education -- now it's safety, the number one issue
in parent's minds about the schools. How awful! They're
dealing with all of those issues on an ongoing basis. They
need to be in the classroom like I'm doing; we're dealing with
happy, compliant, motivated kids who are going to college, who
whether I was in the classroom or not would be happy,
motivated people who are going to college. They are dealing
with problems that are absolutely immense and having to deal
with them as bits and pieces of paper. That's not the way to
do it. You get in the classroom and you see what those
teachers have to face. It's the same question that people had
about the growing dissatisfaction with Washington, D.C., that
once you get inside that beltway, that you are out of touch
with what the American people are thinking and what the
American people are feeling, and when George Bush, any
president, it doesn't matter Republican, Democrat or
independent, in the day-to-day busyness of the business of
government the guy who has lost his job, who is going to have
trouble feeding his family of six, is not the guy who sits in
front of George Bush with his paper saying the unemployment
numbers are blank, blank percent. That's not the same. Now,
can you govern and still see that guy who -- all those people
out of work, see everybody who is out of work? No, but the
realities of those things have to affect the way that you
govern and the realities of what's happening in schools have
to affect the way schools are governed, decisions are made,
and to do that, you have to be with the kids and you have to
be with the teachers. I know that sounds like a sermonette
but it is one of the areas I feel passionately about. Most
superintendents of schools' offices aren't in schools. That's
awful. They aren't even in the school. They're in a
bureaucratic building someplace.
Q. Incident -- colleges?
A. Nope.
Q. A college prep school?
A. I mean, we define ourselves as a college prep school, we
define ourselves as not only a college prep school, but an
extraordinarily strong college prep school. College placement
is a piece of what goes on here. In my particular province,
it isn't part of what we sell. It is part of the way that we
separate ourselves within this market. Our responsibility is
to bring the kids to -- close whatever gaps there may be, the
best we can, between their potential to perform and their
performance, and prepare them for the best colleges and
universities in the states. Beyond the fact that the colleges
and universities are a piece of the selling here and a piece
of the product here, there aren't any incidents where we have
been affected by them. We have about 80 or 90 colleges and
universities come on our campus each year, mostly looking for
our kids. They are quite receptive; they wouldn't be here,
they wouldn't visit itty bitty PCDS if they didn't think they
wanted our kids, so they take the time and they do come here,
and they deal with our college counselor who works on a
completely individualized basis, which I think our kids
benefit from being handled well. But as to my day-to-day
existence, the colleges and universities have no influence on
me.
Q. What about in determining courses you offer?
A. As a college preparatory school, again if you're defining as
to what the school does as opposed to what I do, as to what I
do, no. The school, of course, has to be sensitive to the
needs of students as they hit the future. A lot of that is
post-collegiate really. Our responsibility is to educate
children to continue their education but also to educate them
to think of the functions of life. We are philosophically not
an old-fashioned root school; our kids are not memorizers; our
kids are thinkers. And it's our responsibility to teach
children and that prepares them for college, yes, but that's
really a side issue. I mean, yes, they're going to do fine in
college as a result of the way that we teach them, the way
that we teach them has implications well beyond college, it
has implications for the 21st century, it has implications as
to -- the kind of student we reward is the one who is capable
of taking data and applying creativity to it to come up with
something else, it's not the memorizer, not the regurgitator
of information, and in college that's always been the case,
the one who is most rewarded is not the regurgitator of
information, it's the one who is able to apply some intellect
and creativity to known information, whether it's the ability
to pull things together that other people haven't pulled
together before or whether it's the ability to look at
something from a completely different perspective. Those
things are rewarded here. Now they're rewarded in college,
too, but we're not doing it so that we're preparing them for
college; we're doing it so it becomes part of their
conditioning in the way they face their world.
Q. And that's the philosophy behind your admissions policy then?
A. Our admissions policy does affect that. If we look at a
student and see a student who is a great concrete learner, we
will ultimately not be able to serve that student well. We
know it, because if that child is extraordinarily concrete,
our teaching methodology increasingly becomes abstract,
increasingly ask that child not to be concrete, and if we're
going to be setting a child up to fail within the system, the
child who we can set up to fail, often, sadly enough, those
families come to us and their children have straight A
transcripts, they have done really well in school. Why?
Because they have done everything they were asked to do and
they memorized and they do all the things right. You teach
them a concept and they get it ingrained into their head and
they can repeat it and repeat it and repeat it, and that's
wonderful, and they do great in school, and they're pleasers.
Get them into a system like this that's going to ask them to
think and take risks and do all of those things that have
nothing to do with the mechanical repetition of a function and
those kids can go from A students to B students. That's
tough. So, yes, there are implications for the admission
policy, but, again, that's not within the college and
university's needs or relationship as much as it is our
_______________. Does that make sense to you?
Q. Yeah. Can you tell me what kind of influence, if any, you
have on establishing curriculum?
A. Within my own world, for example, I have tremendous
flexibility in designing the curricula for my courses. As to
the curriculum as a whole, I do have input. No piece of my
job description involves curriculum design and I don't sit on
the curriculum committee per se, but if I have some ideas
about gaps or overlaps or anything that I feel really ought to
be a piece of our curriculum, because we're a small enough
institution, it's very easy to have input in those areas. For
example, the course I designed for this year, for my seniors,
it was a British Literature I and II course, and I was allowed
to choose virtually everything, requiring no one's approval.
That's nice. I chose a group of books that for lack of any
other term could be British Literature's greatest hits, but
there are things that I felt, in terms of curriculum, there
are things that I felt that every senior -- by the time you're
a senior you should have been able to walk away from your high
school career with those books under your belt. And that was
my opinion but it was my opinion that everybody should have
read "A Tale of Two Cities" and everybody should have read
"David Copperfield" and everybody should read MacBeth and
Hamlet, and those are an integral part of our culture, they're
certainly an integral part of our Western culture, and so
those things were to me important, and I had direct input as
to the design of that course, and it came about as a part of
my own thoughts of things that were perhaps missing from our
curriculum.
Q. Is there an AP --
A. Uh-huh. My course was an elective course for anybody in the
12th grade. Actually I had a 10th grader in there in the
spring semester. So there are AP courses and they're AP in
the sense that three kids were also doing AP who were taking
this course.
Q. And it wouldn't matter what they're reading?
A. Well, AP has a lot of choices. The way we design AP, they're
going to be reading some books together, but they're going to
be reading actually -- they're going to be doing a lot of
choosing.
Q. Could you tell me what kind of influence you have on
determining instructional methods in the classroom?
A. Personally I don't have much influence in that area. I do put
forth my own ideas about instructional methodology, but I'm
not a part of the evaluation process for the teachers; it's
handled at a departmental and divisional level.
Q. What influence do you have on allocating funds?
A. I can pull a relatively substantial -- series of substantial
budgets -- marketing budget, community relations budget -- as
to allocating funds within the school for the purposes of
curriculum and program, none. That's really handled at the
head's level and delegated there through divisions and
departments again. The financial aid budget is one that I do
have -- a few of us put that together, which is in the amount
of $400,000, so it's a substantial budget but she is in charge
of the budget as a whole.
Q. And what influence do you have on hiring of new, full-time
teachers?
A. Quite a bit. The hiring process here, because we are a three-
division school -- I know you're largely focusing on this --
but because we're a three-division school and one that has
division heads, that has department heads, that has a head of
school, all of that has to be somehow coordinated, and people
who need to be a part of the process for hiring faculty, such
as if you're looking for a Spanish teacher, obviously the head
of the Foreign Language department is involved, the division
in which that teacher would be teaching is involved. On a
rare circumstance where a faculty member is crossing
divisions, two divisions are involved. Obviously, the head of
the school is the one who actually does the offers of the
jobs. My job is in part to coordinate all of those, who needs
to see all of these resumes, to get the routing structure set
up, to be in essence the point man for initial screening. XXX
does not see everybody; I don't see everybody; I see everybody
who is going to be seen, so we do a routing first, where the
appropriate division head --
Q. Who starts with the big pile?
A. I do. I start with the big pile and I share the big pile
among the department heads, the appropriate division head.
Then we take the big pile and the three of us who are -- the
hiring assistant director of admissions for the lower school,
for example, and we do a routing, okay? And what we do is we
send it around -- in this case it happens to be, since it's a
lower school position, the head of the lower school is the
administrator so XXX is involved and I'm involved, and so that
pile goes along and send these things around to each other. We
don't route anything if there isn't an opening -- it just gets
stored. Then they come back to me. Once they're back to me,
we then take it to the next step and that's to meet with the
small pile, and that's where we get XXX involved. XXX and the
division head and the department head and myself, and we divvy
up the responsibilities as to who is going to make the initial
call. Then once we've made the initial calls, we get together
again, perhaps calling references in the process, and decide
who it is that we would like to fly in, as most often we are
dealing with candidates who are not local; most often we get
candidates with independent school experience; it almost
precludes what we do. We conclude who we're going to fly in
and then fly those people in and set up the schedule, their
schedule for the actual time here, division heads, etc. and
then I see everybody again. It's not an easy system, but it's
one that has been -------- (end of side one of tape)
Q. One independent school, well, someone who worked in an
independent school, said to me, and it wasn't from any of the
school sites, that endowment is what constitutes autonomy,
that once a school is endowed, then there's a greater freedom
to give autonomy in all aspects. What do you think about
that?
A. That's true. However, when you start talking about endowment
in those terms, that autonomy that stems endowment has to be
autonomy that comes from a substantial endowment. I'll give
you an example. Since endowments are routinely very
conservatively invested, we have probably the highest
endowment of any independent school in the state, a 2.4
million dollar endowment, which is considered enviable. Its
impact on our operating budget is minimal. Let's say, for
example, if it is conservatively invested, by the time you're
done paying your fees to the endowment managers, let's say
you've earned five percent, that's $120,000. The impact of
$120,000 on a six million dollar budget is inequitable. Now,
if we were St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, from
which I graduated and you had $198 million endowment and
you're talking about a five percent return on that endowment,
you were talking about $9 million. Now, can St. Paul's School
be autonomous? It can be its own country, that's how
autonomous it can be. Could it even go tuition-free?
Probably. It's a remarkable autonomy. Ambula (?) toyed with
the idea of going tuition-free at one point because their
endowment was so large, and then they decided that what they
needed some of their endowment to do was to allow their
endowment to grow, so they reverted back and backed off of
that decision and probably rightfully so. But it is
endowment; and the amount of endowment that you have that
allows you some remarkable flexibility and it allows you also
to weather the inevitable changes that the marketplace brings.
Institutions are not static and the -- most independent
schools are largely tuition-fueled and we are not exception to
that. It is a large endowment that allows you the luxury
perhaps of weathering some market changes. In the early
1970s, toward the end of the throes of the Vietnam War and a
kind of anti-elitism, and a whole bunch of things kicked in.
And private schools, very traditional, very conservative
private schools, found themselves out of the mainstream in
which people were thinking. They suffered greatly in
enrollment and those without endowments disappeared, they
became bye-bye. Others had to dig into their endowments in
order to survive; others used greater and greater percentages
of their interest on endowment in order to survive; the
strongest schools filled anyway, but maybe instead of talking
about admitting maybe one out of every ten candidates who
apply, they were admitting one out of every four candidates
who applied. Their base was shrinking. They were never on
the edge of survival. The endowed schools have tremendous
flexibility, tremendous in-service possibilities, for example.
Let's say that we were able to use our endowment and not put
it into operating and we budget in order to put our endowment
____. Let's say we had that wonderful luxury, had so much
money that we could take $100,000 a year and spend it that
entire $100,000 a year on in-service for our faculty. Imagine
what we could do! We as a school are looking to raise
endowment money. We are looking to raise bricks and mortar
money, also. Bricks and mortar money, in states like Arizona,
are easier to raise than endowment money. Not everybody here
understands the concept of building for the future. They
understand buildings, but not necessarily building for the
future, and endowment monies are hard to raise. But there are
those people out there who know and understand endowment and
we hope to appeal to those people as we -- but even if we
raise our endowment to say eight million dollars, which would
be an awfully nice place to be for a 30-year-old school, even
if we raised our endowment to 8 million dollars, you are
talking about only a $400,000 hit on operating. Now what do
you use that $400,000 to do? To offset potential increases,
offset the potential tuition increase so that you can make
yourself more affordable to a greater percentage of people
when your tuition is already quite high. Do you use it for
faculty in-service or part of it for faculty in-service maybe?
I mean, it does give you some flexibility that you didn't have
before. But right now this school is about 80 percent fueled
by tuition. So if large chunks of tuition went away, and a
huge depression hit this country and families pulled their
kids out left and right because they suddenly couldn't afford
the education, we could not weather that storm long. We would
probably weather it longer than anybody else around, but we
couldn't weather it very long.
Q. Current debate in education -- private school teachers have
greater autonomy -- primarily influenced by the parents and
students, not a school bureaucracy.
A. Most teachers in most public school settings are dealing with
mandated curriculum. Our faculty is allowed the luxury of
creating the mandate. And because of the relative absence of
bureaucracy, the ability to change, and change rapidly, if
need be. And that's a substantial difference. Our faculty
may not, if they dove their entire life in the independent
school, they may not realize how much -- how empowered they
are in that way. But it is remarkable. Most faculty in most
schools are told what it is they have to teach, told what they
can teach, told what they can't teach, told how to teach it.
The independent school teacher is not put in that situation.
Q. Public school teachers, as you say, are subjected to a variety
of influences and pressures that restrict their autonomy in
meeting students needs, among these influences are state and
federal regulations, unions, court orders, threats of
litigation, organizational rules called bureaucracy -- what do
you think about this and could you compare, for example,
Sunset High School and Crestwood Country Day School in respect
to these issues?
A. Only in the most surface kind of a way. I would be remiss if
I talked about Sunset High School or Portales or Chadwick, or
any of the high schools here. I don't exist in their day-to-
day environment, but I can certainly draw some conclusions
and make some assumptions. Some of them have been made before
but it's _____in a different light. Yes, our counterparts are
hamstrung by a tremendous number of either statutory or
regulatory issues. They are also dealing with a non-selected
population. They can do some selecting within their
population, for honors programs, for this or for that, but the
average teacher in the average classroom setting is having to
have zero one to 99 on the 100 point scale in terms of
abilities, in terms of learning capabilities, in terms of
backgrounds, you name it, there's a mixed bag in an incredibly
large setting. When you deal with -- if you look at
education, the management of a classroom the way you look at
the management of a business, there's something called spans
of control. And the span of control in a business that's
effective, the smaller that span of control, one to whatever,
the more effective that control, the ability to move that
group -- Now there are some spans of control that are
incredibly inefficient, one to two, probably an inefficient
model. Yet at the same time, there is a medium between one to
thirty, and one to two, that the independent school largely
fills, and those spans of control are extraordinarily
important issues. You cannot ever discount the fact that a
teacher in a public school classroom not only has all of these
regulations as attendance forms that I don't understand, has
things that they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis in
terms of the red tape that is the law of education, or the
rule of education, either one, it doesn't matter, both are
hamstrung in the same ways. Plus sheer numbers --
Q. Well, let's say Sunset, which has a high graduation rate,
lots of AP classes, let's say Sunset is the same size as
PCDS. What would that mean to the autonomy of teachers?
Would there be any differences?
A. APs are a fairly poor example for that because when you sign
on for an AP, you're largely signing on to a mandated
curriculum. That's not true in English, but let's say in
physics. What happens in an AP physics class, what material
has to be covered in an AP physics class is the same at
Sunset High School as it is at PCDS. The teacher of AP
physics at Sunset is going to have a class of 34 kids; the
teacher of AP physics at PCDS is going to have a class of 12.
There's a huge difference between those two in the kind of
depth and breadth of knowledge that the teacher can impart and
the kinds of collaborative work the students can do with the
teacher. When I have a class of 12, I know every single
student in that room inside and out, I understand what they
don't understand, I can look at them and I can see by the way
that they're looking at me if they understand what Shakespeare
had to say about an individual's right to choose, they're with
me, they're not with me, and I know these kids so well that
they don't have to put a flag and say "I haven't a clue what
you're talking about." If I had a class of 32, I couldn't do
it.
Q. Well, if Sunset had classes of 12, would they look like PCDS?
A. Sure, sure they would, they would be AP level, because we're
dealing with a mandated curriculum.
Q. If the whole school were the size of PCDS?
A. Yeah.
Q. Would they look like PCDS?
A. With what population? With a cross section of their current
population?
Q. With happy, complacent, college-bound kids --
A. Sure, they would be.
Q. But they're still public schools?
A. Sure. I totally believe, and have always believed, that the
independent school is in fact a good model for public schools.
However, the cost per child is radically different. One of
the reasons that we can do what we do, one of the reasons that
PCDS can be PCDS is because our cost per child, even though
our tuition is $8,500, our cost per child in fact is $9,000
and something. Now, that's because we have 71 full-time
faculty for 570 kids. There's an awful lot of us around here,
because the administrators are in the classrooms. All of
those things can exist in a public setting but not until or
unless the investment in education becomes incredibly high.
Now there are some things that numbers do for you, sheer
numbers do for you, whether you're talking about Sunset High
School not being able to pull that off in terms of cost per
student so that their classes by necessity have to be larger,
there are certain things that sheer numbers, however, can do
for you. The best example of that, I guess, is the argument -
- I may have even told you about this -- the argument I had
was -- the then headmaster of Andover, a man named Ted
Sergeant. He is now the head of Browns Graduate School of
Education. Ted had an argument for Andover, which was a very
large independent school, 1200 kids is a lot of independent
schools kids or a lot of kids for an independent school. He
said that the school of 200 and the school of 1200 are
essentially identical in the way that they deal with children
if the ratio of faculty to students is the same. So if the
ratio of faculty to student is one to nine here, and it
becomes one to nine in Sunset, keeping their 2000 kids of
however many they have, that they would in fact be in that
sense identical. And I disagreed with him and disagreed with
him vehemently because in PCDS where the ratio happens to be
one to nine, every single faculty member knows every single
student, and just because their ratio is the same at Sunset,
every single faculty member cannot possibly know every single
student. If Sunset couldn't afford the kind of education
that we put out and had to have larger classes but still had
a small school, every single teacher at Sunset High School
would know every single student at Sunset High School, and
there are advantages to that that go well beyond simple
educational bottom-line issues. You know them as people and
that luxury, which Sunset doesn't have and we have, is one
that helps keep kids on track because what you do -- if
everybody knows everybody, then somebody is going to notice
when the child starts to slip, somebody is going to notice
when things aren't going the way they ought to be going for
that kid, and somebody is going to pick it up. If everybody
doesn't know everybody, then there's that chance of a kid
falling through the cracks. And how often do you hear about
kids in public schools falling through the cracks? Part of
the reason for it is people don't know them. They go to these
great big places and people don't know them. You talk to a
guidance counselor who has 300 kids and that guidance
counselor knows two kids, the kids who are getting all the
awards, who happen to be within their group, and the kids who
are causing all of the trouble, so that two percent at the
top, that two percent at the bottom, there's still 96 percent
in there, and that poor guidance counselor doesn't have a
prayer of knowing all of those kids and what their needs are.
If I was a kid, and kids need attention, if I was a kid and I
walk into my guidance counselor's office, and my guidance
counselor, who might be the hardest working person on this
earth had to look at my student ID number and pull me up on a
screen to figure out who the hell I am, I would be very, very
cynical, but that's what our conditions are conditioned to in
these large public schools. So, yes, size alone, if Sunset
High School could be 200 kids even if that meant having 10
teachers or whatever it would be, they would be a better
school.
Q. Tell me about what you would guess teacher autonomy to be
differences at Sunset High School and PCDS, that Sunset
being a public school, is still subject to state and federal
regulations, there may be a teacher's association, they're
still affected by -- by terms that define public school.
A. Teacher's associations, I think -- I'm not necessarily a union
person in general but I have to -- just as the way I look at
kids, the way I look at kids as individuals, I have to look at
teachers individually, I think just about everybody who goes
into teaching starts out walking into it thinking that they
want to do some good things for kids, that they end up having
to put up with an awful lot of crap, that has nothing to do
with doing good things for kids, and that's really where the
unions can help them more than anything else, but there's a
kind of central cynicism that grows up within these faculty
because they become more or less and less able to do what it
is that they really want to do to give them their education.
And then there are those wonderful, rare teachers who rise
above all of that, get all of that out of the way, refer to it
simply as mental baggage to be shed, and get into the
classroom and work miracles in public school classrooms. I
mean, there are people who get by all of that stuff, but I
don't think that's the norm. So we're -- our wonderful
redesigned Sunset High School that is now very school, you've
learned to live within all of those regulations and all that
it had to be because you're now dealing with handfuls instead
of dealing with huge groups, and those handfuls have names and
faces and smiles and all of that stuff that right now they
can't have. So as a teacher you're going to probably have --
yes, you're going to do all these mandated things, but you may
also be able to have a relationship with your kids that will
allow you to experiment, that will allow you to take risks,
that will allow you to do all that stuff that you have to do,
but also get to know them, which knows that you become less of
a teacher and more coach and mentor. All of that -- or a lot
of that is numbers. Public education fills an incredible
role, has an incredible responsibility, most of it right now,
or a lot of it right now, might as well be an assembly line
and the teachers sit there putting their parts on. If they
had the luxury of knowing -- even with all the regulations --
of dealing with handfuls instead of huge numbers, a lot of
that would be more palatable to teachers and a lot of it, as
a result of being more palatable, would be incredibly
positively affect the way that they approach their job, or
would be able to approach their job. Instead of going home
and saying when am I going to do all that I have to do? What
can I do for Stephanie? That is what fulfills the teachers,
what made the teacher get into teaching in the first place,
that's what our teachers have got. Our teachers have got here
still what they wanted to teach in the first place.
Q. So if PCDS were to become part of a school choice, open
enrollment voucher system, --
A. That's a whole political issue with tremendous consequences.
Q. -- wouldn't that make you more like a public school in that
with the vouchers come some --
A. It depends on whether we have selectivity. Can we choose our
kids within this voucher system? If we can't, we don't want
them. We won't participate.
Q. So selection has a great deal to do with the difference. More
than size and --
A. Yes, but not more than size. It's a huge part of it. We
don't make the assumption that public schools have to make.
Public schools have to make the assumption that they must
educate everyone who comes there, or at least try to. And
what they have to do is to develop some minimum set of
standards that show yes, we've done that, the child has
mastered this much, and so given this child's circumstances,
yes, we've done that. We make no such assumptions that we can
educate everyone that comes our way. Because, in truth, we
believe it to be impossible to be all things to all people.
And public education over the years has taken a lot of hits of
not being able to be enough to enough people. If we can do
something wonderful things with a broader cross section
perhaps than we have because of our numbers, yes, that's going
to help us a lot in being able to get things we want, but that
isn't how we've chosen to define ourselves, that isn't how
we've chosen to be -- to function as a school. There's a
segment of the population that we serve well, we choose to
serve that segment of the population well, that is a far
broader spectrum than most people would think. But we know
what we do well and are able to choose students to do that
rather than having to do the reverse saying here's your pile
of students, now figure out what to do with them. That's the
essence of selectivity. This is what we are, let's find the
students that fit that, and then be good at it. Here's your
philosophy, play it up. The public school can't do that.
Would we be better perhaps than the public schools if we could
have everything that we have here minus the selectivity and
still be small? Yup, because numbers have a big part to play,
but would be as successful at reaching every kid? Maybe not,
probably not, because that isn't what we're designed to be.
As a teacher, I don't know how a teacher ----- if I had, in a
12th grade English class, if I had kids of such a mixed bag of
abilities, and English is one of those areas where there are
so many different parts and pieces that go into whether you're
good in English or not good in English, that I would such
disparity in that room in a regular English class, I would
have so many disparities within that room that I don't know
how -- it would be difficult not to teach to the middle. It
would be difficult for me to make sure that my kids got it
unless I went to an old-fashioned recitation class. Whereas
I know here, we can study Shakespearean play (inaudible), and
part of it is also just plain time. I have class at 12:00,
I've got to assign a ten-page paper, read them, respond to
them, give them the kind of reactions that they deserve for
all the work that they've put in, and if I have a class of 30,
I can't do that, because I can't read 300 pages and respond to
it and some of it is just numbers. But if I had such a huge
group of kids, I would be scared of losing those kids at the
bottom and I would be scared of boring to tears those kids at
the top.
Q. That's the end of my questions.