INDEPENDENT SCHOOL INNOVATION CONSORTIUM: HOW AMERICA’S MOST PRESTIGIOUS AND INNOVATIVE PRIVATE SCHOOLS CAME TOGETHER TO REVOLUTIONIZE SCHOOL STANDARDS

The Independent School Innovation Consortium (ISIC) was founded in 1996 to bring together some twenty-three of the nation’s leading and most-celebrated private schools. The consortium was established to foster collaboration and knowledge-sharing between these schools to advance educational research, innovative educational methodologies and to define assessment criteria for new technological approaches and delivery methodologies such that college admissions professionals could better understand the impact of such an enhanced education on a candidate’s application. If you are looking to find the best schools in the United States, the schools of ISIC are a good place to start. The consortium’s member schools are generally rated as the best schools in the United States and consistently feature at the top of prestige rankings and admissions to the most selective colleges and universities.

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ABOUT

The consortium, which brings together the elite tier of independent college-preparatory schools in the United States, was launched in response to sweeping reforms in the American education sector which sought in inject innovation into public schools and to redesign how pupils were assessed and, ultimately, graded. These schools share a long history of developing new and exciting approaches to education and of working with one another on research, development and raising standards.

The 1990s saw successive waves of transformation within the American education sector as state and federal level administrators explored ways to revolutionise domestic schooling. They wanted to identify and foster new and innovative approaches to enhance pupil outcomes and prepare young Americans for the future of digital, globalised work.

Many states and their subsidiary school districts introduced vouchers that would allow parents of limited means to choose to send their children to participating independent schools. These vouchers opened the independent sector up to new families under the pretext that expanding educational choices and tapping into latent potential would be a net positive for American taxpayers and would ensure greater equality of outcomes. For many independent schools, this was a welcome development, presenting a greater customer base and locking in fee income whilst maintaining independence from public school boards. This had been a common practice in more remote regions where school options were limited or where pupils might have to board at an independent school to access education (this hybrid model having become a common feature to Vermont and Maine where “Town Academies” operate as independent schools but admit pupils whose fees are covered by public authorities).

Many parents, and certainly the management of beneficiary independent schools, were happy about this scheme. However, many local authorities were finding it hard to make the case for sustaining such a model – often at great cost to taxpayers and at odds with political directives and the move towards state-delivered universal education.

Thus, the concept of charter schools would begin to take hold as the preferred means of adopting alternative pedagogies and methodologies and for trialling innovation within educational delivery whilst still operating under the auspices of public school boards and districts. In effect, charter schools would have the independence given to private schools but would be incorporated within the public school sector and would not charge fees to applicants from their respective districts.

Charter schools have since become ubiquitous and, in many states and districts, are largely indistinguishable from public schools generally – however this was not the case in the 1990s when a significant number of new charters were awarded. Such schools could (and still do to some degree), establish themselves as specialist schools of maths, technology, arts, vocational training and so forth (corresponding to the more recent Academy movement in the United Kingdom). Many more also identified their niche in saturated markets where provision for pupils of minority background might fail to adequately accommodate unique needs or cultural differences. Other schools were launched to counter socio-economic hurdles in specific neighbourhoods or communities. The evidence suggested that, at that time, public schools were not as capable of recognising minority community needs and developing diversity nor were many focussed on preparation of pupils for college matriculation or results attainment – particularly in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics (the so-called STEM / STEAM subjects). Whilst most charter schools aren’t as clearly differentiated from public schools today, there is evidence to suggest that their existence has been the catalyst for improvements to public schools and the closure of poor performing institutions to improve the overall standard.

The emergence of charter schools, coupled with the slow withdrawal of private school voucher schemes presented an existential threat to many private schools. No longer could they expect to rely on their independent management structure and/or embracing of alternative educational approaches to differentiate their offer from that of the public school system. Furthermore, charter schools and public schools alike were beginning to close the gap in educational attainment and were threatening the long-established stranglehold that private prep schools had on elite college and university admissions pathways.

This timeframe coincided and corresponded with a separate but related transformation in American education which saw the widespread overhaul of report cards and grading methodologies. The issuing of single-letter grades (A through F) was commonplace in America and had become so widely accepted and understood that there was a reluctance to challenge the status quo for many decades. Yet, such grades were often considered arbitrary reflections of a pupil’s performance and potential whilst also encouraging an education that was geared towards test day regurgitation as opposed to real applied education. Faculty at schools and colleges had, for decades, been engaged in discourse as to the value of this traditional approach and how it really failed to give a fair portrait of a pupil and was subject to the subjective framing and viewpoints of individual staff or institutional approaches rather than a reliable, universally tested representation of student performance.

Many school districts made the decision to abandon the traditional grade approach to report cards and opted, instead, to furnish parents with a detailed assessment as to how their children were doing. Report cards began to shift from simple A-F grade scores towards more detailed and descriptive feedback, including: greater emphasis on standardized testing scores (like SATs or ACTs), inclusion of specific learning objectives, more frequent progress reports, and the integration of student self-assessment components to provide a more holistic picture of a student’s academic performance and development incorporating elements like social-emotional development, citizenship, and attendance to provide a more comprehensive view of a student’s performance.

This reporting shift would also prove useful when attempting to assess the performance of new approaches at their innovative charter schools. The schools and the teaching professions welcomed these new developments and celebrated how such reforms would provide a much more accurate representation of pupil performance and, moreover, how the teachers were doing in delivering results.

Parents, however, rejected these changes almost completely as they struggled to interpret the new report cards which varied drastically from what they were familiar with (see ‘Parent’s Views of Traditional and Alternative Report Cards’, Olhausen, Marilyn M., Powell, Richard R., and Reitz, Bradley S. (1994), The School Community Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring/Summer 1994). Parents complained that they no longer understood how their child was doing and were extremely concerned about how they could assess these new metrics against other pupils at other schools across the country. Indeed, the fundamental concern was what this would mean for college admissions. Concerns were also being raised about new educational approaches and whether they were as innovative as the schools incepting them claimed.

Clearly, there needed to be a standardised framework to assessment and grading that would be acceptable for college admission programmes, and there would also need to be a standardised framework to assess innovative educational methodologies to ensure that they were consistent with this grading regime.

These problems framed the objectives of the Center on Learning, Assessment and School Structure (CLASS) which was established in the mid-1990s and quickly became a go-to authority on these issues. The institute was founded by Grant Wiggins, who also founded Authentic Education and was a well-regarded educator who authored ‘Understanding by Design’ (McTighe, Jay, and Wiggins, Grant (2004), ASCD, Arlington, VA) – a blueprint for curriculum development. CLASS helped to set the fundamentals for peer-reviewed assessment matrices for innovative curricula design and for understanding grading and reporting frameworks in this new paradigm. Wiggins and his work at CLASS would have a significant impact on the future work of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) and worked closely with influential faculty at the education departments at Rutgers University and Princeton University. CLASS research also shaped the development of the Coalition of Essential Schools with Ted Sizer (a professor at Brown University who founded the coalition) and Grant Wiggins regularly collaborating.

A select cadre of independent schools took notice and engaged CLASS to establish their own peer-review community – a consortium in which testing and knowledge-sharing would properly determine the adequacy and effectiveness of new educational technologies and methodologies. In 1996, this would become the Independent School Innovation Consortium (not to be confused with the similarly named Innovative Schools Cooperative). It’s membership would include the nation’s most renowned private schools, such as the Group of Seven or Eight Schools Association (ESA), thus giving the consortium great cachet. The consortium would maintain a very close relationship with CLASS, who facilitated funding through their key donors and who would support research carried out by the group. Indeed, the consortium’s first annual symposium would be convened in Princeton, in 1997, where CLASS was headquartered and would be opened with a presentation from Grant Wiggins. Ted Sizer also spoke at the conference and many of the ISIC member schools were also a part of the Coalition of Essential Schools.

The consortium was founded, primarily to explore ways to make secondary teaching more innovative and to look at the connection between innovation and the college admissions process. The group would facilitate the sharing of best practices and new ideas and would collaborate on research and development, testing and reporting on the failures and successes of new approaches.

The consortium would commission a body of research testing hypotheses and ideas agreed at various conferences and symposiums. This research and these events would bring together representatives of the twenty-three member schools, renowned invited professors from leading colleges and universities, and select invited representatives of peer schools that did not form part of the consortium (such as those that form the Select 16 or St. Grottlesex schools).

The Independent School Innovation Consortium identified early in its development that independent schools were often at the cutting-edge of innovation in education and in preparing pupils for a changing future. They determined that they should build upon a body of evidence that demonstrated that innovative private schools not only had a greater track record of placing students in leading colleges and universities but also that those students tended to perform better and thrive in these more challenging environments because of their early exposure to innovative ideas and technologies, and make the case for continuing to embrace innovation and to do so cohesively.

The consortium’s early research further ascertained that approaches towards college admissions were often misconstrued and at odds with what the colleges themselves sought in a successful applicant. Schools had generally come to focus on SAT results despite concerns that these results are not the only indicator of academic ability and are merely a means of measuring mathematical and verbal reasoning skills not a representation of intellectual potential or applied learning capability. They further recognised that many pupils are taking on subjects and programmes of study or extracurricular activities that do not represent them or allow for them to demonstrate their full potential – instead pupils, often with encouragement of faculty or parents, are attempting to game their college entry at great risk. The ISIC research also found that many pupils were ill-informed as to the college admissions process and felt pressured into Early Decision applications. Having engaged the appropriate Deans of Admissions from Carnegie Mellon University, Dartmouth College, Hampshire College, Williams College, and Princeton University at their first conference, the consortium would hear that these issues were often immediately obvious and there was an apparent disconnect between how college admissions candidates prepared and the enthusiastic, curious mind that those respective colleges sought: graduates with an enquiry-based ethos.

The ISIC consortium resolved, instead, to work with college admissions officers and to better demonstrate the value of alternative approaches rather than devoting the entirety of their focus towards standardized exams. It would be the consortium’s mission to make the case for innovation and variety in school programmes and to prove why pupils who are the product of such an education are a better quality of candidate and have a greater likelihood of being successful in college and thereafter.

The success of that strategy is evident today, with these schools maintaining their strong pedigree and success rate in placing students into the most selective colleges and universities in the country including, especially, the Ivy League, Ivy Plus, Seven Sisters, Little Ivies, and Selective Liberal Arts Consortium colleges. They have also been at the forefront adopting new curriculum designs or programmes such as the International Baccalaureate (which Wiggins was himself involved with developing).

At the formation of the Independent School Innovation Consortium, these schools regarded one another as peers and as being amongst the most innovative schools in the country. Some thirty years later, those epithets remain true with these schools still being amongst the most selective and prestigious in the country.

The extent to which the consortium still meets is unclear and little has been published since its early years in the mid-1990s. Wiggins died in 2015 and his institute, CLASS, appears to have suspended activities since at least the early 2000s. However, the schools that comprise its membership do, still, regularly collaborate and cooperate on education innovation and are members of various other consortia and associations with one another.

All the schools offer a rigorous, college-preparatory high school programme accredited locally with their respective regional bodies and nationally with the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), the leading voice for the independent school sector in the United States. The ISIC member schools also include many schools that offer an expanded education, including some from pre-school, through elementary and middle school. Many of the schools offer boarding. The schools are all committed to diversity in their student body and faculty and are members of organisations and schemes to this end. Many offer needs-blind admissions or access to significant scholarship and financial aid packages to support the best and brightest regardless of circumstances or background.

The majority of the Independent School Innovation Consortium schools are also members of the National Network of Schools in Partnership (NNSP) and the Independent Schools Experiential Education Network (ISEEN). Many are also members of the Folio Collaborative. In addition, many of the ISIC member schools are also active members of international benchmarking and innovation advancement organisations like the Global Education Benchmark Group (GEBG), the Global Connections Foundation, the G30 Schools, and Round Square. As internationally recognised and celebrated schools, many are recognised as being amongst the Leading Schools of the World (LSW).

If you would like to find out more about the consortium or its activities, perhaps you might like to reach out to one of the member schools as listed below.

Please note that we are not connected in any way with the Independent School Innovation Consortium or related entities. As such, we are not able to facilitate your efforts to get in touch with the organisation or any persons that may have worked therewith.

If you participated in any of the Independent School Innovation Consortium’s work, either as a pupil at one of its member schools or as a member of staff, we would welcome any insights that you are able to share with us in the comments.

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MEMBERS AND ASSOCIATES

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