The Stars You Hire: Talent, Courage, and the Long Game of School Change with John Gulla

John Gulla spent 14 years as head of The Blake School and came away with one answer when asked what he was most proud of: not the buildings, not the campaign, but the talent he attracted and retained. It was an instinct from his first divisional role at 25 that headship confirmed.

As executive director of the EE Ford Foundation since 2013, Gulla has visited more than 780 independent schools across 43 states. What he sees at the foundation level confirms what he knew at the school level: the most meaningful change projects, from rethinking faculty compensation to launching the Mastery Transcript Consortium with a $2 million grant, share one ingredient. They require a leader willing to push on the third rail. At EE Ford, his job is to find those leaders, fund the early bets, and connect them to fellow travelers doing similar work a thousand miles away.

The hardest lesson from Blake was a seven-year effort to reform faculty compensation that met sustained faculty resistance. The insight he carries now: build the evaluation infrastructure before introducing the initiative. Sequence matters. But the deeper takeaway, confirmed across hundreds of school visits, is that the deciding variable for any real change project isn't the design. It's the courage behind it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Welcome to Evolution Stories by Middle States. This interview series is devoted to teaching you how to lead change in education. We're here because facilitating change in schools has never been harder or more important. So this is your place to learn from those who are leading the way. Welcome back, everybody. My name is Christian Talbot. I am the president of the Middle States Association, and I am thrilled to introduce today's guest. John Gullah is the executive director of the EE Ford Foundation. He's the former head of school at Blake, and before that, many leadership positions in independent schools. He is not only a leader in the world of independent school education, but also someone I've come to see as not just a mentor, but also a good friend. So I am really excited to have this conversation with him today. John, welcome to Evolution Stories.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Thanks, Christian. It's good to be with you.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

So I always want to know from the beginning how did someone become a change leader? And for some people that starts early in childhood. For other people, it doesn't happen until later in their career. But what was the moment or what was the series of moments that made the light bulb go off for you, or you thought, my job here is actually to lead change and not to keep things the same?

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Presuming that in our conversation today we will get to change leadership in the world of education, I think I best begin how I came to education, which was a bit uh unexpected for me. My mother was a public school teacher. She taught uh in the Norwood and Walpole public schools even before she was married. My father ran a, what in in Massachusetts lingo was called a packy, uh, but a package store, a bodega uh in New York parlance, and then went back to school and ended up getting a degree and going into teaching. And they, as uh members of my extended family on both sides, father and mother, all were public school teachers. I went to a public school, Walpole Mass, uh, had no interest, zero interest in following in the family uh occupation, uh, had a reasonable education at Walpole High, uh, a very good athletic uh experience, and was highly recruited out of high school, but was not interested in pretending I could ever play professional sports, and was admitted to Amherst College, uh, which was of the selective schools, the one I most wanted, because the other Ivy League schools uh said that if I was going to be recruited for football, I couldn't major in science, which was my interest, because they had labs in the afternoon and I'd be out on the football field. Um, and I said, no, thank you, and went to Amherst, where the coach uh took the academics seriously. Um and while at Amherst, uh, I came to realize that uh my fellow students had a richer, deeper, more profound preparatory education than I did, uh, WAPO was fine, but I was outclassed in many ways in terms of the breadth of the curriculum. And there, I'm a competitive person by nature, and wanted to do well, took challenging courses and fell in love with learning in a very classical liberal arts way. I remember distinctly the pain of the second semester senior year when I had the course catalog and came to realize I only have these last four classes to choose from. And there are so many more I still want to take. And I was the lowest person, the only non-professional in the Amherst Admission Office doing ironically what I do now. I traveled around the country visiting high schools, talking to sophomores and juniors, um, sometimes seniors, about Amherst. And came to realize, both as a combination of the final years of college and then this year of visiting schools, that I wanted to be in a school, and I, in addition to being competitive, impatient, public schools wouldn't hire me because I wasn't certified. And I said, I'm not going to go spend time getting certified, and came to understand independent schools would hire me, and um applied for a couple of jobs in New York City, was hired by two schools, St. Anne's and Horace Mann. I think I made the right choice for myself at the time, and uh was a math and physics teacher at St. Anne's, and that was whatever it was, 45 years ago, haven't looked back. Um St. Anne's to Isidore Newman, to Riverdale Country School, to Blake, and then to the foundation. Um the the more direct answer to your question, I led change, but this is me thinking about it in hindsight as middle school director at St. Anne's, and I was appointed as the middle school director at St. Anne's at the ripe old age of 25. I had no business being the middle school director, but St. Anne's was nothing if not idiosyncratic in lots of ways. And I learned an awful lot. And then I was the upper school director at Newman, initially upper school director and then associate head at Riverdale. So the phrasing of your question, I can look back, and I did lead change then, but it was not conscious uh for me, and it was really under the direction of the head and would suggest things of how I thought we might improve the divisions under my responsibility. But I don't have a conscious uh understanding of choosing to lead change until I was at least a couple years into my headship at Blake. Can you pause there though?

SPEAKER_02 6:20

Because I I think this is actually really interesting, possibly for the audience to hear. It wasn't obvious to you, it wasn't explicit to you that your job was to lead change, but your head was telling you to do things that were change related, improve things.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Sure. Um yes, that that's accurate.

SPEAKER_02 6:45

Yeah. So at that juncture or those junctures when your head was inviting you to improve things, it's just a different way of saying change things, right? Did you have a model in your head for what that would really mean in terms of like, oh, okay, like we're gonna go from this to that, um, and therefore I need a certain skill set or um set of resources, or was it simply like just change this stuff, make it better, and you just sort of threw the spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick?

SPEAKER_00 7:21

No, I there's a uh a pattern, a thematic pattern in all three of those leadership roles, middle school director at Ced Ends, upper school at at uh Newman and uh at Riverdale, that as you asked the question uh give me uh an opportunity to say, I I I came with hunger and interest in hiring. I thought one of the most important things I could do, and and all three heads were quite happy uh to have me be the leader of all searches for those divisions, middle and then to upper, and really be the one uh interviewing candidates, inviting finalists, uh, and then I, as I remember, I didn't make the decision without Head's approval. But bringing talent to the school was important to me. I wanted the right people coming and wanting to teach for the right reasons. And I think I was quite willing to hire people who might have been younger and didn't necessarily need to have proven themselves as experienced teachers because I saw them as uh an opportunity for shaping um what they would bring. And from the very beginning it occurred to me that it was a risk management decision to always hire experienced teachers. Uh it'd be less work and they're less likely to crash and burn. But it also occurred to me that we were missing out on the opportunity for hiring some stars who would grow up and stay at the school. So I was looking at at the promise, at the potential of people, and and was given a lot of latitude to do that. And we're speaking here at the NAS conference, and it's incredible joy to me to have stayed in touch with a good number of people, some who have gone on to lead change themselves. So I think of that, at least in terms of the divisional work.

SPEAKER_02 9:31

Yeah. Did you see something of yourself in the candidates who are non-traditional? Is that was that part of the appeal?

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Well, certainly for the breadth of interest, wanting people to come into independent school work for the right reasons. Again, I did not know it at the time, but I would say that that uh the four schools that employed me, I thought were quite different. I mean, St. Anne's uh was much more kind of radical in a way, no grades, very arts-oriented, uh very vertically integrated, where math prodigies could be in as early as fourth grade, the schedule was consistent, fourth through twelfth grade, and kids who, in sequential disciplines like mathematics or language, or sometimes arts and music in particular, could be mixed with kids who were three, four, five, seven years older than they were. And when I was even a teacher before becoming the middle school director, I by choice asked to teach students as young as fourth and as old as seniors. Um I was interested in trying to hire people who might have a prospect. I didn't much less interested in hiring people who were going to teach for two years and go to law school. I wanted to hire people who I think were open to a career in independent schools.

SPEAKER_02 11:01

Yeah. Do you think you had was it an instinct or was it maybe a clearer thought that hiring was a point of significant leverage for creating the kind of school environment that you wanted?

SPEAKER_00 11:18

That was absolutely clear in my mind. And given that that, I mean, as I moved uh forward in my career, had more influence, went to more board meetings, got involved in in issues of school finance and similar matters. But uh initially it was classroom and pedagogy and curriculum and and assessing student performance and and managing a community of either middle schoolers or upper schools and and all that goes with that. But yes, the idea of culture shift, of changing culture, and why were they coming? I mean, the you know, people along that period of my career would say, what do you look for in someone? And I would look for somebody who was as psychologically healthy as any of us can be, and had an abiding passion for what it was they were going to teach. I mean, I wanted them to feel once they were in the classroom, if students said to them, you know, why do we have to learn this? For them to say, ah, you're giving me yet another chance to tell you why your life would be shallow and meaningless without whatever it was that they were going to be teaching.

SPEAKER_02 12:30

Yeah. I think, you know, it's interesting. I I haven't thought about this for a while, but it took me, it took me longer than it should have to realize that the changes that I wanted to see when I was at Malvern could be perfectly designed, but without the right people, we're never going to achieve the impact that I wanted. I think I had an intuitive sense that, of course, hiring important good people is an important thing to do. But like in thinking about the kind of systems-level nature of change, that that piece, you know, having the people who are going to change the culture is so fundamental. It sounds like you knew that early.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

I think I did have an instinctual understanding of that that matured with time and continued to uh develop because I I distinctly remember when I left Blake after 14 years in headship, and there's the usual uh interviewing and and uh and pieces of writing, etc., and over what what uh uh has happened in the school over your time. Uh what I was proudest of that I proclaimed, you know, what have you brought to the school? It wasn't a uh a campaign or buildings, though we ran an ambitious campaign and built buildings. I said with absolute certainty that the biggest contribution that I'd made to the school were the people I helped attract and retain at the school. And then I I mean I remember it to the same extent that that I would, once I was head, hire administrators and often would would uh, upon offering them a job, look them in the eye and say, I'm offering you this job, but I I want you to commit to staying for three years or five years. Because I don't want to spend the time investing in you and then have you just jump ship and go to the next big thing on the ladder upward. But I remember uh my board saying, Well, why do you don't hold on to people for longer? And I said, I could, I absolutely could have a track record, but I would forego some stars. I could hire people who would have the director of admission or middle school director as their terminal career aspirations. I was much more interested in people who had that drive to want to do the absolute best they could, and the appetite for learning as much about how independent schools worked and what they could learn from their colleagues. And that tended to be people who were going to be ambitious and and I'm almost as proud of the people I hired at Blake as the people I hired who went on to headships. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:07

Yeah, and that list is is long. Um well, some of those people I'm sure are at the heart of the next two questions, which are about change projects. So what's a change project that you were involved in, whether you let it or not, doesn't matter, but that um failed, or at least didn't succeed the way that you wanted it to?

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Sure. Uh it's easy. That's not I'm not thinking among things, I'm I'm thinking about one and how best to explain it. So it was the single biggest uh effort that I made at Blake, and I've been now gone for 14 years. I don't know quite how it exists, if at all, at the school. But it had to do with faculty and faculty compensation. Um I just have never been comfortable with the model that almost all schools, independent and public use, most all schools have some form of a matrix with two major variables, years of experience and badges of accomplishment uh earned in some uh academic institution. Uh I don't uh deny the valid uh element of of consideration of those two, but with regard to experience, all research that I've uh seen shows an incredible benefit during the initial period of a teacher's career, first five, seven, ten years. Um but I think that that with a good number of teachers the the things do plateau. They don't continue to improve on the whole, there are exceptions to this, but on the whole at the same rate. Yet that's how schools would continue to retain faculty. And it's uh there's a uh a lack of imagination, a lack of of uh responsiveness to the needs of the school, as well as sometimes to the faculty. The vast majority of all schools, independent and public, have a scale that essentially hews to the following highest paid faculty, lowest paid faculty, it's a ratio of two to one. Um and those shift up uh annually. But uh we as a uh collective profession are very comfortable with more compensation uh for more duties. You're gonna be the model UN advisor, we'll pay you a stipend for that. You're gonna coach the JV soccer team, you get a stipend for that. But it just didn't make sense to me. Why couldn't I choose to invest my effort and talent to be coming to be the best math, English, history teacher the school's ever seen. Uh the fact that that most schools hiring two uh uh faculty who come uh with the same experience and the same educational background in the same year advance through their career if they stay at the same rate without any element of their contribution to the advancement of the mission of the school. So on a very practical level, this this model, I I I one argument I have uh about it is that in most schools, even though the schools will try to guard against this, the heaviest student load is often carried by the strongest teachers. So we have this somewhat at least unintentionally counterintuitive model. The better you are, the more work you're gonna have. And we also have a model that generally seems to me in most schools to focus too heavily on that point of inflection, good enough to get a contract again next year or not? And there's a component of all school faculties for whom that's a legitimate and important question, but there's a huge range of faculty who are clearly going to be faculty the school wants to continue to employ, but they weren't advancing uh them. We were sort of ignoring them. Why not figure out a system where everybody is annually getting better, is on a path to chronic improvement. So one of the ways I wanted to accomplish that was in some way to maintain the predictability of faculty compensation, but introduce into it some performance-based component so as to shift the locus of a desire to improve from those doing the supervision, department chairs, division directors, to the faculty themselves. I wanted the faculty to actually work with those who were charged in the administrative structure of the school in supervising them. I wanted those faculty to come and say, I want to be the best darn teacher I can be. Please give me some feedback because I you will say that I'm doing a good job, but I want to do an even better job. So that's a long-winded way of saying that that's the project I took on. The faculty at Blake did not want anything to do with that, absolutely resisted it. Uh and I pushed. I pushed hard for years. Uh and in the Oh, this was a seven, eight, nine-year project. Well, because at one point um the faculty members that I'd gotten to know, who I did respect, um, that said, I'm not sure that I like this, John, but I I can at least understand the logic, but we don't have a means in place for assessing our performance. We would have to have that in place first. For me, this was an you know a set of individual faculty members conveying this to me. I would need to believe that the means by which our performance as members of the school's faculty were being assessed uh was valid in my mind. And I thought that a legitimate concern. So I paused. I said to everybody, we're gonna stop this right now. I'm not gonna bring it up uh again until we figure out how we will evaluate. Faculty. It's, I don't know, do you know Lisa Lyle?

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

Yeah. So it was at that point and when the then assistant head of school was leaving, and I was hiring somebody. The reason I hired Lisa, she was coming from Lawrenceville without the kind of administrative portfolio that somebody might have had coming in as assistant head of school, but she was all over this. And hired her, she knew what she was getting into, with the sense of her responsibility to help the school build a system. And we did. And that, so my call it three years in trying to get it passed with a lot of board support, and then pausing, hiring Lisa, building out a system for faculty evaluation. And then I think there were some faculty who thought, ah, he will have forgotten all about this other thing.

SPEAKER_02 22:53

Of course. We're hoping anyway.

SPEAKER_00 22:55

But we had this system, and they said, now we're coming back to it. And I really was very intent on it, even to the extent where faculty members were making the case that they didn't like this because it was going to be a zero-sum game. That I'm going to make more money, but whatever the school can afford to pay, if I'm going to make more, somebody's going to have to make less. And again, I was willing to compromise to achieve what I wanted to do and said, I'll go and raise the extra money. We will create a permanent restricted endowment fund, and that additional compensation would come from that. That still didn't satisfy a number of people who resisted it, but we did do that. So that took some time and then implemented this. But it it might have been the particular Blake culture or my approach to it. I haven't backed off of my belief that this is something that needs to happen. I just don't think I succeeded in that school with that, the single most important thing I was trying to do. The biggest change I was trying to lead.

SPEAKER_02 23:59

So you actually implemented a a program.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

So I don't have a sense of how it developed after that.

SPEAKER_02 24:18

But in those two years you you would say it didn't do what you wanted it to do?

SPEAKER_00 24:25

No, I think it was starting to do what I wanted it to do. I mean, I'll give one example with you know protecting uh identities of people, but you know, there are things that happen in in schools. There was a uh a teacher who was truly gifted. That uh any school would want to have. Uh she could not get her reports in to save her life on time. Every year. It was a struggle. I've seen that movie before. And and and it just became a headache for the administrators and for uh communication with parents. And I wanted some leverage. It wasn't going to mean somebody couldn't pay their mortgage or or healing bills, but something to say like you were eligible for this additional compensation, but you've got to fix some of these specific things if you want the maximum amount. And you know, you choose to continue to do that. We're not gonna f I couldn't imagine fire is usually too amazing as a teacher. But why can't you do this one thing? So I wanted, and and that that manifests itself in lots of different ways, but where you could set some performance expectations that wouldn't ultimately jeopardize uh the security that people had that they were providing value to the school and had a future there. But it was some of the expectations that I think a school can legitimately bring as an employer in the performance of their professional responsibilities.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

Yeah. If you could get in a time machine and go back to counsel that younger version of yourself from the beginning of this project, what would you have advised?

SPEAKER_00 26:13

I would have not had the preliminary effort of trying to institute it without first revamping the means uh for those who were charged by virtue of their position. And and it's I mean it's a little different in early elementary education because the organization uh isn't as departmental. In almost all departmentalized divisions, I think effective uh faculty evaluation has to be a partnership between the administrator who is in charge of the division and the uh disciplinary expert. A lot of people may be upper school directors, middle school directors, but don't know uh AP calculus or Chinese. Uh so you have to have that kind of combination to have, does somebody have the chops uh to to teach really smart kids and and are they getting it right, uh uh along with the person who's more uh concerned with the overall contribution to the successful working of the school. Uh but I would have have tried to do what I ultimately uh did do in uh hiring Lisa and then working on uh that program, I would have done that first, and without even what might follow, and if I would have kept that to myself, perhaps. And that would have shortened by at least three or four years. But it still strikes me as I think back into now, perhaps a bit duplicitous to have done that because it was going to be my why are you doing this? I would have been tempted to because I wanted to always be transparent. I'm I'm doing this because I see these are gonna be the follow-on steps that would come later.

SPEAKER_02 27:56

I was picking up on something, and I don't I don't know if this was true or if I'm maybe projecting, but I got the impression as you were narrating the events that there was at least a subset of the faculty who were going to resist this no matter what. It didn't matter how it was designed, what the configuration was, they would they would have some reason not to want to do it.

SPEAKER_00 28:25

Your your instincts are good. You're picking up accurately. I I I it extends beyond the the scope of of this conversation today for me to give you a full appreciation of that, but I'll I'll give you a little bit of a hint. Um in this city that I loved uh and that uh has caused me no small amount of heartache given what Minneapolis has gone through going all the way back to uh even before the George Floyd. I mean, but there are other murders um that took place in terms of of uh police violence. Um but certainly more recently with what's happened there. The the community is wonderful and I loved my time there. I'm I'm so happy that that uh we raised our our sons there and were a part of it. But the upper Midwest um has its own regionality to it. The uh uh blue party in the state of Minnesota has a a name that's different than most other states. It's the Democratic Farm Labor Party. Oh, interesting. I bring that up because the L component of that. Yeah. Um it is uh uh I mean there were a number of this was one of the biggest surprises there, how many faculty uh really thought of themselves as akin to public school faculty. Didn't have a fundamental understanding of the difference uh of working in an independent versus a public school. Example would be that that I think it still exists, but throughout my time there, we had a committee uh to ensure that uh earned credits were being uh counted and logged and credited should members of the faculty want to leave Blake and go back to public school. They would have accurate reflection of their professional development as represented in that particular way. And just that that seemed to me so um foreign to the understanding I had of independent schools before I got there. But I say all that because, yes, I think you picked up on something, and it was explicit in some of the conversations I had with people. They would even say to me, like, well, I think mostly I trust you, John, but you're not gonna be here forever. And this creates a tool of tyranny, of control, that if my compensation is going to be subject uh to the my supervisor's assessment of my work, and that I found uh head-explodingly illogical.

SPEAKER_02 31:11

At EE Ford, I mean you you select projects, not you personally, but you know, you're you're involved in the projects that are presented to the board, the board has to select them, but um, but you see an incredible breadth and depth of change projects. This phenomenon strikes me as something that must recur in schools, no matter what the change project is, that there is a set of faculty, a percentage that may vary by institution, but that um is kind of sort of like irreducibly present in resisting change. And I have all sorts of mixed feelings about that, but I'm curious, do you do you talk with grantees about this part of the process of trying to create the change that EE Ford is partly funding?

SPEAKER_00 32:06

Yes, is the the one-word answer to that question, and in varying ways depending upon what the change may be. Uh one of the elements that is of uh particular interest to me is uh if the the change is successfully implemented, what are the going to be the means by which the school will ensure that it continues to be successful?

SPEAKER_02 32:31

I remember you asking me that question when I was at Albert.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

Yeah, I mean it's it's uh because uh we are coming in uh with some potentially catalytic funds to do it. Uh we would expect a school to assess the success of that project, but I tend to want to know going in if it's successful. You know, it's fine that that there'd be experiments, the schools would try things, and I have no negative reaction to a school that tries in good faith to pursue some project, and then I get the stewardship report on the implementation of their project and find out that it was not at all successful and they are not going to continue it. Uh that is not uh in any way uh a mark against that school, as long as it was in good faith. I mean what we would want is the school to have tried it, and it's our job to ensure there's a reasonable chance of this succeeding. It seems not like a pie in the sky kind of thing. Uh but yes, the the the uh both the implementation of that and integrating it into the culture of the school, into the finances of the school, uh, and aligning all levels of support that would be necessary. And those, I mean, there are times in which I think a school is too ambitious. It's coming to us for a traditional grant for something that that the traditional grant is not gonna really allow them. It's too big, it's too fundamental a shift. And then there are others that that uh we could have, you know, five times the the uh educational leadership grant level, and that's not gonna be enough to do what they want. And I'll end up counseling uh why don't you think about phase one of this, uh, because it's a much more ambitious sort of project. But in the end, the way in which the foundation works is this my board will say, we want to see the best ideas that you can bring to us, and then we'll collectively make the decision on what we want to fund. Um so there are some that they recognize when they say yes. Now, this is we look forward to hearing from you, John, how this goes, because this is going to be a uh a real, a really ambitious uh effort on the part of School X.

SPEAKER_02 34:43

Well, that's a good segue into a change project that you were involved in that did succeed, even if it succeeded in ways maybe that you didn't anticipate.

SPEAKER_00 34:53

Well, the the the f what comes to mind is not a distinct single project so much as a slow, steady shift of the way in which the foundation is distributing its philanthropy, uh distributing its its grants and money. Um It started in in the late 1950s, and it was a decade or a little bit more before they even hired anybody. It was uh E. Ford himself and his family and friends who were receiving proposals from people they knew in the independent school world and were making those decisions. Um but it has uh continued to evolve in a fairly steady way to a more sort of integrated uh professionally run, not to say they weren't professionally run, but they didn't have employees, um, in ways in which we were trying to identify if our mission simply stated is to support independent schools that meet certain eligibility criteria, how can we best support them? And I think there's an appetite that has grown to try to do some things. We'll continue always, I think, their traditional grant giving. But Bob Hallett, my predecessor, shifted toward the end of his time as executive director to giving the educational leadership grants, a larger amount of money to a smaller number of schools. That was sufficiently convincing to the board of something they wanted to continue to do, that they said, look, let's ratchet that up another notch. Let's think about uh taking uh funds to the extent that the market growth of our assets allow, and timing for a much larger grant for even more ambitious, which we did for Mastery Transcript Consortium. So that $2 million grant to Hawken at the time, led by Scott Looney, but with a lot of other people involved, that launched MTC. And I think Scott would say that that grant came at a particularly uh important moment in building out the tech platform for MTC that was going to be necessary if they're ever gonna get the buy-in that's ultimately allowed them to become part of the educational ecosystem. The board continues to be interested in that and and uh not yet ready for for public announcement, but but certainly um research and and efforts taking place now on you know how might that next big grant and what might it focus on, and how will we have just a general RFP or will we identify some area? So and the way in which we uh also with the board's full support introduced special grants. Uh so taking some amount of the philanthropy and just figuring out areas of the independent school work collectively when we can have reach. Are there things that we can do? There would be a grant to a particular school or to we always need a fiduciary, we always need somebody uh who's in the independent school world, preferably a school that has a history with us that will be the ones responsible for ensuring that the money is used as it was intended, and because all of our distributions have to go to 501c3 organizations. Um but there are plenty of schools that are willing to step up and do that, and and anybody could find on the eFord website, eFord.org, on the homepage uh under special grants, some of the things that were funded, which I think continued to bring benefit to this sector of the educational world.

SPEAKER_02 38:32

What was the insight for you in that um evolution that you just described that maybe hadn't occurred to you prior in your career? I'm wondering, it was it something like we need to have a diverse portfolio of bets? Is it that um we need to allow space for non-traditional opportunities, which I guess is maybe a different way of talking about a diverse portfolio of bets? But if this has been a successful change set of projects, really, you know, and you zoom out sort of what what's the the meta insight about it?

SPEAKER_00 39:09

I I think there are areas of the independent school world that really do benefit from an entity like EE Ford that can provide um funding for things that just are likely not to happen without that access to some money. I'm gonna give an example that you you can decide how far you want me to take this example, um, but you and I have been talking for many years about governance issues, and I knew that this world that we share, too uh informed by anecdotal tale telling and not as often by hard data, would benefit with a little bit more hard data on governance, and was able to convince Banivici and Daikesa to consider a proposal that would give them money where they could begin to do what they did, which was to get buy-in from a number of accrediting associations with legitimate promises of anonymity, get accreditation reports, develop a protocol, read those reports, and score them for governance issues, for both commendations and recommendations, to get some hard data. And you know, the the uh the headline of that result, this is unfair because it's too uh gross a distillation, but it's blocking and tackling. I mean, it's really fundamental governance issues. It wasn't esoteric things, it's just very fundamental issues that that are a concern of governance of a good number of independent schools. And you know, we've continued to talk about that and still do to this day. So there were all kinds of those things, the the head search database, uh work on coaching, is uh sort of several stages work on coaching, initially with Peter Bachman and then with Alan Sparrow. Um more recently, some of the the work with John Austin led uh the framework. Um uh some of these are are uh time-sensitive things that arise at a moment in the world of independent schools where EE Ford can can perhaps use its either reputational capital or the the uh literal capital that it has to give. Um but it's sometimes it's assistance in those things and thinking through them and and making connections. Uh I mean I do have, I feel, it's just dizzying to me when I think back uh when I was leaving Blake, I really thought I knew independent schools. I didn't. Now I think I do.

SPEAKER_01 41:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:52

I have an appreciation of this world born of the 780-something schools I visited in 43 states.

SPEAKER_02 42:00

I have this theory, and I wonder if what you just said would validate it or invalidate it or maybe reframe it. Um so you had you described your own experience at Blake doing something that I'm guessing was at least initially unpopular. Um but you but you were you had conviction about it. Um then you you you were just talking about, you know, at E Ford seeing really the entire landscape of the independent school world. Um and the governance report, uh the governance analysis by Case is a good example, not just because I think it produced some counterintuitive insights, but also because um in in some circles it's a little bit of a third rail to talk about governance, um, because boards are you know the fiduciaries of their schools, um, and they're also often the power brokers of those schools, and they may not necessarily want to see the insights that are in a report like that. So my my my theory is that real meaningful change projects, not the superficial cosmetic ones, but the ones that are really going to move the needle, whether it's faculty compensation or good governance or something else, ultimately hinge on the amount of courage that the head and partners are willing to exhibit.

SPEAKER_00 43:41

A valid point insight analysis. I agree with with all that you just said. I mean, add to that a little bit. Early on in my time at the foundation, it it became clear to me that on the whole, there were clearly exceptions to this, but on the whole, The fat and happy schools were not leading change. Change was coming out of necessity in schools whose future existence was being challenged. And it took me a while to fully understand that. And as I said, there are some exceptions to that, but largely those schools that were riding high, they were ultimately governed by boards that would say, it ain't broke. Why are you trying to fix this? We've got waiting lists at all grades, uh, uh, our college uh admission list is the envy of the world, uh all measures of s of constituent satisfaction through the roof. Why are you pressing on changing things that that seem to be working? Uh and that was uh an inherent uh point of resistance for because I and again there were there were exceptions. I think of Tang Institute at Andover. Andover has plenty of money to do whatever it wants to, but it was it was pushing in some areas, and there are schools of that sort that were doing that. Um but I I think there was a uh uh a hesitancy, and because we're friends and have known each other for a while, I I I could live to be 300. I wouldn't get to all the ideas that I want. I mean, I I I'll mention just a couple because you and I have talked about them at times. Uh I would love to see schools truly rethink themselves in some fundamental ways. You have to be a student of some educational history to understand that the standardization that took place in the wake of the common school movement really was uh based on a noble cause of making education more broadly accessible to a wider swath of the population. You know, 10% of U.S. citizens uh get a high school diploma in 1900. I mean, we've come a long way and overcome some uh gender racial biases in our society to make it more available to more people. But that committee of 10, it was an efficiency and a standardization process. What is Finland doing with its school system and looking at phenomenology and reconceiving of an entire curriculum? Could that not happen with an epistemological outlook? Couldn't you imagine a school? And this is one of my dreams, is if I had multiple lives to lead. You could create a school that that could graduate kids who could go on to college, but not with math and English and history and science and a foreign language and arts and PE and access to sports, but you could create a curriculum. How do we know what we know? That's accessible from pre-K through 12th grade. It's entirely reconceived around three basic ways of knowing. How do you know what you know in math and science? Uh knowledge that is falsifiable in a Karl Popper way, uh, that's knowledge that is fundamentally different than knowledge in the arts, of aesthetics. And that's fundamentally different than the knowledge you get about questions of the good life, of honor, of, of valor, of other values that uh access in history and social sciences and English and the like. You could conceive of a school that children from pre-K through 12th grade could go through a curriculum that just wasn't as hidebound as ours is with uh the the kind of academic discipline. You'd still need the expertise on the part of the uh faculty, as kids advanced, to be able to keep with them, and there would ultimately be lots of the things that we still want. But the organizational principles. So the things that that are fundamental, how do we use space, how do we use time, or how do we organize the curriculum of things, those are the ways in which the 10,000 flowers could bloom. The independent school can be this place where experiments take place, and sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don't. But we have too limited a conception of this, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_02 48:21

Aaron Powell And a lot of investment in an infrastructure that is difficult to shift.

unknown 48:26

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 48:27

And a and a legitimate hesitancy on the part of parents who may not want to experiment with their children. Yeah. Like this, this, I don't know this. Why would I do this? Well, but it goes to another point that is clearer to me than it was when my wife and I first had children. I wish it had been clearer to me then. But I've come to understand the wisdom of uh school rankings are ridiculous in so many ways. Uh but school differentiation is not ridiculous. And having different schools actually shifts a lot more of the responsibility to parents. If you have an agreed-upon ranking, then parents are going to try to get their kids into the best school they can, best in that one limited dimension. But if you have a whole array of schools, then parents are forced to say, where is my child going to flourish? And now I have to I have to start by focusing on my child, and then what kind of school out of this whole menu of schools, that's a lot more difficult. But it would ultimately, I think, make us a happier society.

SPEAKER_02 49:27

Yeah. I have one last question for you, John. Um, you have a lot of gas in your tank. So when you think about the next phase for EE Ford's impact, what's the thing about either facilitating change or enabling others to facilitate change that you want to get even better at?

SPEAKER_00 49:51

Yeah, I I think if if I'm understanding the question, I'm focusing on the change. Um there are a good number of proposals that simply augment what's happening at the school, are beneficial, uh, are perhaps not as critical for a school with limited finances. They would like to do something, but it just isn't in the budget because uh they're they're hard pressed to try to balance the operating budget annually. So some of these are aren't really change projects so much. And it doesn't mean that they're not valuable or or uh bring something positive to the school. But I think for projects that we fund that are more um uh change oriented, that's why I'm increasingly supportive of educational leadership grants, which have as one of the components there must be reach beyond the school itself. There is no school that comes to us with an educational leadership grant that's gonna be successful if the board doesn't see inherent in that some way in which the idea that they're going to pursue could benefit others beyond the school itself. And I'm glad you're asking this question, because it gives me a chance to say one of the other things that up until this point hasn't been explicitly mentioned this afternoon, is that one of the things I love about the independent school world is we share. We share generously, eagerly. If s if somebody at one of the uh independent schools comes up with something that's phenomenally successful, they're flattered when somebody calls them and says, I hear you doing this thing and it's really great. And they'll spend oodles of time on the phone telling them how they did it and what the details were. They don't hold it in a proprietary way uh for the benefit of their school only. But because we share ultimately this commitment to children and to wanting to do good things, and that is part of one of the things that that gives me the energy that I have for the work is that I see, I travel and I see, and I'm constantly making connections. Hey, do you know this school that's doing something really similar? You you better reach out to them. Uh, and they'll respond well. And if they don't tell me, because I'm gonna make sure that they do, because that's part of the ethos that we have. And that networking, that intercommunication, because uh schools are really operate in large part in an isolated pods. You tend to know what's going on down the street or within your association, et cetera, but you don't necessarily know what's happening a thousand miles away.

SPEAKER_02 52:32

Yeah. It's a great uh connection back to thematically what you said at the beginning about hiring as a lever. When I first spoke to you 12 years ago, whatever it was, and pitched an idea for Grant. You said, Well, wait a minute, have you talked to Scott Looney? Do you know about the Mastery Transfer? And I had no idea. Um and that connected Malvern to that press to the Mastery Transfer Consortium. We were one of the first 30 schools to join. Malvern still does advanced credits, um, which I'm really proud of, and that's largely to the credit of Patrick Silp, who's the head now. But um, but nevertheless, like your your move there was to say, okay, I see a community, maybe it wasn't a specific individual, but I see a community of talent and uh and uh potential, and I'm gonna connect them to another community of talent and potential um because growing this kind of uh core of C O R P S of talented change makers is a way to raise the tide for all the boats.

SPEAKER_00 53:45

I mean, there are so many metaphors that we could use in this, but but think of neurons and just the the interconnection, the the more connections that that do exist. I mean, I I find that to be one of the the greatest values that that I personally bring. I don't know, I mean the board, my board supports that, but I don't know that that they necessarily see that as mission critical, but I do, which is why I go about the job in the way in which I do, for just those sort of reasons that that it would be why would I not tell you about that? Why would I withhold that information? Right? It just it it it it helped you, it helped Scott, and I've been constantly trying to to find ways in which people can find fellow travelers, uh uh uh allies in different areas of of school development and work.

SPEAKER_01 54:41

Yeah, that's great.

SPEAKER_02 54:43

Well, thank you, John, for sharing your wisdom.

SPEAKER_00 54:46

My pleasure, Christian.