By Kevin Roose, The New York Times (from January 12, 2023)
Recently, I gave a talk to a group of K-12 teachers and public school administrators in New York. The topic was artificial intelligence, and how schools would need to adapt to prepare students for a future filled with all kinds of capable A.I. tools.
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By Stephanie Saul, The New York Times (from January 15, 2023)
MIDDLETOWN, Conn. — In 1964, hoping to erase its image as a privileged cloister for white rich families, Wesleyan University contacted 400 Black high school students from around the country to persuade them to apply.
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Center for Creative Leadership
If recent years have shown us anything, it's that we cannot predict what's on the horizon. But as we look back on the past year and ahead to the next, it's a safe bet that change and uncertainty will continue to be major themes — along with the growing challenges of the hybrid workplace and the ongoing need for more equitable, diverse, and inclusive organizations.
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By Luyen Chou, LinkedIn (from January 9, 2023)
Like many other educators I've been spending a lot of time in recent weeks learning about and playing with new AI technologies like ChatGPT and DALL-E. As an edtech veteran and an early AI developer, I've also been asked by a lot of friends and colleagues for my thoughts about the implications of these technologies for teaching and learning.
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By Tim Elmore, Growing Leaders (from January 17, 2023)
One of the best decisions my parents made was during the summer of my eleventh year. I begged them to let me go to Bobby Leonard's Sports Camp, one state over, and three hours away. I pestered them long enough to convince them it was a good idea.
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By Kalley Huang, The New York Times (from January 16, 2023)
While grading essays for his world religions course last month, Antony Aumann, a professor of philosophy at Northern Michigan University, read what he said was easily "the best paper in the class." It explored the morality of burqa bans with clean paragraphs, fitting examples and rigorous arguments.
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By Margaret Anne Rowe, NAIS
"The pandemic era's unfathomable number of deaths, pervasive sense of fear, economic instability, and forced physical distancing from loved ones, friends, and communities have exacerbated the unprecedented stresses young people already faced," wrote U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy in December 2021 in a remarkable advisory on the youth mental health crisis in the United States. "It would be a tragedy if we beat back one public health crisis only to allow another to grow in its place."
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By Jeff Shields, NetAssets (from January 9, 2023)
Inflation: that vexing itch, that dull pain that doesn't seem to go away these days. In my last Projections column, I wrote about inflation and tuition setting, and I'm writing about inflation again in this issue because it's making an impact on so many aspects of business officers' work – not least of which is the budget's largest line item: faculty and staff compensation and benefits.
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By Joshua Dolezal, The Chronicle of Higher Education (from January 4, 2023)
Sarah Trocchio recalls a moment during her mid-tenure review when she could no longer ignore the contradiction between her research as a scholar of inequity and the ways that her contributions to the academy were being measured. After a dispiriting meeting about her research productivity, she took out a Post-it note and wrote "I am done."
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By Dina Denham Smith & Alicia A. Grandey, Harvard Business Review
(from November 2, 2022)
Effective leaders have long managed the emotions they display at work. They project optimism and confidence when team members feel thwarted and discouraged. Or notwithstanding their skepticism about the company's strategic direction, they carry the company flag and work to rally the troops.
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By the Center for Creative Leadership
Good communication is a core leadership function and a key characteristic of a good leader. Effective communication and effective leadership are closely intertwined. As a leader, you need to be a skilled communicator in countless relationships at the organizational level, in communities and groups, and sometimes on a global scale in order to achieve results through others.
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By Matthew Lynch, The Edvocate (from April 29, 2019)
I was having a conversation with an old school teacher who thinks that AI is ruining education. They challenged me to name 20 ways that artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming education for the better, and instead, I came up with 26.
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By Randall S. Peterson & Heidi K. Gardner, Harvard Business Review
(from September 28, 2022)
The need for boardroom diversity is well-established. Many European countries have mandated that at least 40% of directors of publicly listed companies must be women, and similar laws have been passed in several U.S. states establishing gender- or race-based quotas. And to be sure, these policies have led to substantial progress: For example, one report found that representation of women on FTSE boards has grown eightfold in the last 25 years, from 5% up to 40%. But is simply changing the composition of boards enough to ensure that diverse perspectives are actually integrated into decision making?
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By Erik Ofgang, Tech Learning (from October 20, 2022)
"When you think about a traditional grading system, there's one data point, 'I got a 75 on this quiz,' or 'I got a B on this essay,'" said John Camp, head of teaching and learning at the New England Innovation Academy. That's part of why at his school the focus is on competencies rather than letter or numerical grades. "There are several data points for each assessment so that a student can understand what skills they're working on, and when they get that back with feedback, they understand how to improve," Camp added.
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By Ian Symmonds & Associates (from November 17, 2022)
The leadership model is a strange beast in education. We define the leadership function of education as executive leadership (head, president) and governance (board of trustees).  Both models seem underpowered and ill-prepared to handle the fast-paced innovations that have recently and will continue to drive the industry.
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By Donna Orem, NAIS (from November 15, 2022)
The Great Resignation, The Great Reshuffle, Quiet Quitting—all terms coined to describe a quickly changing workforce. The tumult of the past two-and-a-half years has spurred early retirements, hybrid and fully remote work arrangements, and a rethinking of life priorities. The quest to recruit and retain talent has intensified as the national unemployment rate, at 3.5% in October, is at a 50-year low. The education workforce has been buffeted more than most, leaving teachers, administrators, and school leaders exhausted and questioning their futures. What's ahead for schools as they seek to recover from this challenging time?
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By Jeff Shields, NetAssets (from November 8, 2022)
As leaders of independent schools, it is the rarest of situations that we are expected to maintain the status quo. Boards did not hire the head of school, and your head did not hire the business officer to keep all processes, programs and approaches the same. It's up to us to meet today's many challenges and help our schools succeed despite them.
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By Kara Newhouse, Mind/Shift (from September 8, 2022)

There's a story that didn't make it into Linda Flanagan's book, but it's so appalling she has to tell me about it. It's about a family in her town whose son was on the "A" team at the local soccer club one year but placed on the "B" team the next. He was humiliated; his parents were livid. So livid that the father, who worked in a higher position at the same firm as the coach, had the coach transferred overseas.
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By Keith Ferrazzi, Harvard Business Review (Fall 2022)
Eric Starkloff was on a mission to reinvent his company. As the incoming CEO of NI (formerly National Instruments), a Texas-based automated test and measurement engineering firm, he wanted to speed up decision-making and accelerate growth. He wanted pushback and alternative directions from his leadership team but was met with conflict avoidance. One team member recalls, "We were overly polite but not necessarily kind to one another. And people certainly didn't speak their minds."
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By Peter O'Neill, Carney Sandoe (from July 26, 2022)
The CS&A Consulting Team has spent much of the past two years helping heads and boards guide their schools through unprecedented times. Just about every aspect of independent education has been disrupted by a series of elements that we've described in an earlier blog post as education's "Perfect Storm." Schools have faced a plethora of challenges, but at the heart of the storm are the concomitant emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic along with intense social and political conflict and polarization. As a result, heads and boards have had to venture into new organizational territory, making numerous quick decisions about programming and policies.
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By Jim Wickenden, Intrepid Ed News (from September 5, 2022)
The May-June 2017 issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) contained an interesting article entitled "What Sets Successful CEOs Apart." As a consultant to independent schools for over 35 years, I decided to see whether or not the research done on CEOs might be applicable to Heads of Schools.  Despite the fact that not all leaders of independent schools see themselves as being in a business, they are.  That being said, the four significant behaviors mentioned in the HBR article that set successful CEOs apart are not uniformly applicable to Heads of School.  Thus, the purpose of this article is to define the following four behaviors and to explain which are and which are not relevant for Heads of School.
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By Monserrat "Monsie" Muñoz, Well-Schooled (from September 2, 2022)
As a student, I learned early on that my name was different. A kind of difference that was not bad, but too complicated for someone to engage with during formal introductions, let alone daily, transactional encounters. That lesson is one that I learned on my first ever day of school, and that seemed to play in a loop every first day of classes for the rest of my time as a student.
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By Byron Sanders, Forbes (from September 1, 2022)
Every young person is born with greatness. They are unique tapestries of strengths, passions and traits that are perfect for a place in this world. Yet the opportunity to build those assets in young people is often correlated to one's demographics in life. These assignments that no young person chooses, such as race, socioeconomic status and zip code, have real impact on their options. The achievement gap is a contextual misassignment; it is, rather, the opportunity gap that acknowledges that it is society's responsibility to create the conditions for a young person's agency, for their effort and creativity to shine through. I think the opportunity gap is one of the most pressing challenges facing society today.
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By Mark C. Pena, Forbes (from August 9, 2022)
There are plenty of parents stressing a bit with the new school year looming—especially those feeling the pinch of continued inflation or fearing a looming recession. Finding room in their budgets to invest in their children's education could be a challenge.
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By Lindsay Ellis & Angela Yang, The Wall Street Journal (from August 12, 2022)
Not taking your job too seriously has a new name: quiet quitting.
The phrase is generating millions of views on TikTok as some young professionals reject the idea of going above and beyond in their careers, labeling their lesser enthusiasm a form of "quitting." It isn't about getting off the company payroll, these employees say. In fact, the idea is to stay on it—but focus your time on the things you do outside of the office.
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