AISAP52

The 26th of December is a good day for contemplating value. The orgy of holiday spending, giving, and receiving is today replaced by an orgy of returns and perhaps even regrets: gifts, their value or utility assessed and found wanting, are taken back to the store whence they came to be exchanged for something more desirable.
 
Over the past year there has been considerable airplay given to a 2013 book, "The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools" by C. A. Lubienski and S. T. Lubienski. The thesis is that, when socioeconomic and other factors are filtered out, students in public school perform better—mostly on a few standardized tests—than kids in private schools.
 
Of course, the issue in our industry has been around the word “private.” We are independent schools, a relatively small subset of the vast range of religious and other non-government-run schools that make up the full private sector. NAIS president John Chubb has offered up a spirited critique of The Public School Advantage, and the Southern Association of Independent Schools published an interview with one of the book’s authors that worked to draw a bright line around the independent school world in the sea of private schools.
 
We’ll leave it to others to decide whether separating the independents from the generality of schools is a good idea in the long run, but both Chubb’s response and the SAIS piece make a point that cannot be overemphasized within the independent school admission, marketing, and communication communities: Independent schools are different from other kinds of schools, and we need to do a much better job of spreading the word on the nature and importance of these differences.
 
In particular, industry-wide we need to develop and promulgate an effective short, short definition of “independent school.” The membership criteria from the NAIS website are thoroughly expressed, but a bit long-winded and legalistic. (And we’d be happy to learn if any AISAP member has a quick version that has proved useful in their own messaging and/or internal discourse.)
 
But even more to the point is the imperative that each of our schools develop its own clear and compelling value case. Too often we appear to be in headlong competition to look more like one another, as a marketing guru observed to us the other day, when in fact we should be differentiating ourselves as to our particular value and values and our special and program-and-mission-specific effect on the children and families who come to us.
 
It’s all about the value that is felt and internalized by our communities of families, students, alums, and friends. And of course “perceived value” is absolutely tied to real value, to actual experience. It should go without saying—but we’ll say it anyhow—that the quality of the experience a school offers must live up to the promises embedded in its rhetoric.
 
On Boxing Day 2014, with application deadlines near but generally not yet passed, with school terms over or nearly over and at least one round of report cards received, we really don’t want our customers—as much as we may hate the word, on one level that is what our students and families are—regretting their enrollment decisions. We need to understand and to underscore the special value of each of our own schools and the real advantages—to character and to intellectual, spiritual, creative, and physical growth—that membership confers on our students and on our communities.