A Vital Balance

International schools, especially those with governing boards with members all or in part elected by parents and teachers, exist in a state of a perpetually wobbly balance among often-conflicting interests.

• Clashing curricular expectations of parents and teachers based on countries of origin or most recent school experience;
• Long-term strategic matters that contrast with the short-term interests of current stakeholders;
• The school as a business standing at odds with the lived experience of expatriates of school as a surrogate community; and
• Differential price elasticity effects on local (self-pay) and expatriate (paid by others) parents.

One can usefully think of each of the above as tensions that are always at play, threatening to destabilize a balance that is, at best, wobbly. Smart school leaders--heads and boards alike--recognize that maintaining the balance is crucial to smooth school operations. Just as there is no such thing as a sustainable competitive advantage (advantages are easily copied elsewhere), there is no such thing as a perpetually stable balance (one or another interest is always pulling more strongly). It takes tremendous political skill to minimize the wobbliness.