Education is in the news every day and it is sometimes (often?) frustrating and confusing.  I have had the opportunity to work and teach in a variety of schools, parochial, public, and for most of my career, independent.  This has been a conscious choice I am sure in part due to my own independent nature but mostly because of the climate I found.  The direct interaction with students, parents, and faculty and staff in a school community promotes a sense of shared goals and shared effort.  There is an immediate and personal sense of accountability.  Each of us is working to provide the best educational experience possible for the students.  This is of course what all good educators do however in an independent school there is a responsiveness to the local community that is unmatched.  Our decisions and actions are based on the students currently in our classes with an ever watchful eye on where they are going and how they will get there. 

I have always been amazed, as I have visited schools across the country, that without a common curriculum or strict set of regulations independent schools are uncannily similar.  You know within the first five minutes after walking into a school that it is an independent school.  There is almost a feeling that permeates everything.  Although it may seem counter intuitive that independent schools could share so much I believe that it stems from the core belief that independent schools put the education of the child first.  It is always about the child and his or her learning.

The following is an excerpt of an article in Education Week written by the president of NAIS I hope you find informative and reassuring.

Have a great weekend,

Rick St. Laurent

Headmaster

Patrick F. Bassett

President, National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)

With all the spotlights on educational reform, we might just pause and shine a light on ourselves: In a democratic society, schools reflect the character of the culture.

For anyone in the baby boom generation, the term countercultural inspires reminiscences of our '60s and '70s pasts, replete with anti-establishmentarian grooming (basically hirsute), dress (heavy on beads and headbands), behavior (sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll), and politics (anti-war). From the vanilla-flavored culture of the '50s emerged what our elders regarded as a horrific abomination: a generation that seemed to share none of the values of the prevailing adult culture, and in fact snubbed its collective nose at those values.

The irony of youth, of course, is that its possessors eventually become their parents, as the generations replace one another. Witness, for example, the incarnation for this generation with the resurrection of swing music, the resurgence of attendance at church and synagogues, the re-emergence of children's museums, and the revival of sanitized family experiences, such as Disney cruises.

What is unusual about our times is that the American culture projected in the popular media and popular imagination has become so distorted and grotesque - so reflective of only the more sordid aspects of our collective values and aspirations - that counterculture is something we long for. Indeed, when it comes to education, the best schools (both public and private) are now, ironically, countercultural.

What the research shows about schools of all types and in all locations is that the best of the lot share two main characteristics: They have exceptional teachers and appropriate moral climates. (The latter, often a product of small schools with communities sharing common values, tends to attract the former, exceptional teachers wishing to teach in such an environment.) What is equally certain is that the school's internal moral climate runs counter to that of the external culture, at least the prevailing popular culture. Such a paradox is evident in manifest ways:

With all the spotlights on educational reform, we might just pause and shine a light on ourselves: In a democratic society, schools reflect the character of the culture. If we are unhappy with the character of the culture, we may wish to turn to those schools that are countercultural - and allow more such schools to come into existence and flourish. If, in the garden of good and evil, flowers and weeds coexist, perhaps we should allow more flowers to bloom.