Become a Board on Which Leaders Want to Serve

NAIS recommends that boards of day schools be composed of at least 50% non-parents of current students, and this target has proved tough to hit for a large number of schools. In fact, it is our observation that if many boards were not all or almost all parents of current students, there would be no board. Even when schools are successful at recruiting from outside the parent ranks, we often find that these members are still from "inside the extended family;" that is, alumni and parents or grandparents of alumni. It is rare, outside a handful of day schools, for many unaffiliated individuals--community political and business leaders, presidents and provosts from universities, etc.--to populate our boards. Adding insult to injury, when schools are successful at recruiting unaffiliated board members, we often hear the lament from board chairs and heads alike that such trustees are less involved than others, doing less work and attending fewer meetings.

One culprit in the above is no doubt the collective failure of independent day schools to position themselves as cultural institutions on par with universities, orchestras and art museums. This failure produces a chicken-and-egg type of conundrum: community leaders see mainly parents of current students on our boards and infer that the school exists primarily to serve the needs of a narrow and, too often, homogenous subgroup. To the outsider, the public purpose of private education is not at all obvious. We end up looking more like a country club, operating for mutual benefit, and not enough like an elite private university.

So, a first step toward becoming an institution viewed as valuable by community leaders is articulating a public purpose; in other words, answering the question of why anyone other than parents of current students should care whether our school exists. Day schools that find a compelling answer to this question will be a leg up on their competitors when it comes to attracting unaffiliated community leaders to the board.

A second and no less important step toward attracting unaffiliated trustees is to make our boards into ones people will want to join. In the process, maybe we change the nature of board work itself to be about matters leaders will want to discuss. After all, field experience as well as decades of research shows us that a prime way to do this is to focus board work on big complex issues where members can feel they are accomplishing something for the larger community.

Nor would one infer much public purpose from an examination of the typical structure of meetings and the sorts of issues many day school boards discuss. For example, it is fashionable for heads of school to provide newsy sorts of updates to boards, chronicling the accomplishments of students and the comings and goings of teachers. Even when delivered in writing and on a consent agenda, I still see too many head's reports becoming rabbit holes into which board members are happy to plunge. Hearing that your child's (and, therefore, your) favorite teacher is leaving at the end of the year often prompts an audible groan and a request, spoken or implied, for more information. This is probably normal human behavior, but it is both bad governance and toxic for becoming an institutional board. It also sounds way too much like a meeting of a country club governing board! Ditto for airing of anecdotal parent complaints.

Questions such as the following engage board members in high impact intellectual work; moreover, the discussions themselves constitute the sort of generative meaning-making of which we see too little:

• How should we expect education in the K-12 space to be reinvented in the years ahead, and what do these changes mean for program, capital expenditures, and keeping our school relevant to the market?
• What is our public purpose? More to the point, how do we benefit the community beyond our campus and how should we do so in the future? 
• How will the inevitable tide of demographic change affect our community and therefore our school? How can our institution remain relevant as this happens?
• How are the changing domains of privacy law, security of financial information, and how schools handle business relationships with customers affecting liability and risk?
• In what ways should our students' lives be changed as a result of their time at our school, and, by extension, how will this make the larger community a better place? 
• In what ways should we compete with other educational institutions, and how should we cooperate?

These are meaty questions worthy of serious and deep board discussion--in other words, the real work of being on a private, independent school board. They are also not for everyone. Rather, they are topics that would engage community leaders interested in making Atlanta, Cleveland, Los Angeles or Moline a better place by creating and sustaining the sorts of institutions that do so. Anything else on the board's plate is a distraction. Important, but routine, matters can be handled in committees without much (or even any) airtime at board meetings.

If we want our schools to be valuable community assets and to attract unaffiliated board members to the cause, it likely means a radical rethinking of what we consider board work. In full disclosure, I am in my seventh year as an unaffiliated trustee at Wildwood School in Los Angeles, a school founded with a public purpose. By far the most frequent question I receive about my board work is about why I do it when my own child didn't attend Wildwood nor do I live in the city. That's a shame, but hardly surprising since I hear something similar from many unaffiliated day school trustees in other places. Independent schools need to make their boards into bodies on which other leaders will want to serve.