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The Net Assets podcast delves into the most pressing issues in independent school business and operations. Delivered by NBOA, the only national nonprofit membership association focused exclusively on fostering financial and operational excellence among independent PK-12 schools, each episode is based on a popular article in NBOA’s Net Assets magazine. Chief financial and operational officers alongside other leaders of school business share what inspires and challenges them as well as their approaches to problem solving and innovation. In each lively exchange, host Jeff Shields, NBOA president and CEO, teases out the human stories behind the printed story.
If I distill the lessons learned from the hundreds and hundreds of schools that I visited, from that to a single sentence, not just one right way to do this work. The thing I love about independent schools is they are independent to fashion their own mission, to design their own approach, to create their own culture. And there are lots of different paths to success. Welcome to the
Speaker 2:Net Assets Podcast. I'm really excited about today's episode. I'm still relatively new at hosting a podcast, and my understanding is the host is supposed to have some sort of introductory pattern, and I'm still developing my introductory pattern. I feel like I'm giving weather reports from Washington DC, and I'm gonna go with that again today because the cherry blossoms peaked last week. They're in full bloom.
Speaker 2:They're flying around, and it's a really beautiful day in Washington DC. But that's not the reason why I'm so excited. I'm really excited about our guest today, and thank you for joining us. I think you're probably excited about it too. I am so pleased to welcome John Gulla, who's in his thirteenth year as the executive director of the Edward E.
Speaker 2:Ford Foundation, which seeks to improve secondary education by supporting US independent schools and encouraging promising practices. And by the way, a little factoid about John is that he's visited over 750 schools during his tenure as the executive director of EE Ford. Welcome, John.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Jeff, and thanks for inviting me onto
Speaker 2:your podcast. I have mad respect for a road warrior like you who's visited 750 schools. Are you still keeping count?
Speaker 1:Yeah. At the end of each year, I try to ensure my approximate count is accurate, and I'll do that this summer.
Speaker 2:Wow. That that's impressive, and I'm sure the schools are better for it. It's such a great opportunity to talk to you a little bit, and I definitely wanna pick your brain. But it's so informative to me and to folks listening to the podcast to hear about your career and your journey. How did you end up in this very unique role with E.
Speaker 2:E. Ford?
Speaker 1:I'll give you the abbreviated version, but it's a long life story because this is my forty fifth year of professional work, and it has all been in the independent school world. I come from a family of educators. My mom and dad both were public school teachers, and my aunts and uncles, virtually everyone, were also involved in public school. I was interested in teaching but had no patience with getting certified, and the school that would hire me was an independent school. So I began my career at Saint Anne's, an unusual arts oriented, no grades school in Brooklyn Heights that gave me a start as a teacher math and physics teacher.
Speaker 1:I was also the middle school director at St. Ann's, and St. Ann's is where I met my wife. We married and had a, what I tell my wife, was a two year honeymoon Orleans where I worked at Isidore Newman in New Orleans. Our first child was born.
Speaker 1:I was happy at Newman, but once we had a child, we wanted to move back closer to family, all of whom are in the Boston or New York area. So I came back to a position at Riverdale Country School initially as the upper school director and then the associate head of school and knew that I wanted to try my hand at being a school head. Was fortunate to have had a number of opportunities, offers, took the offer to to be the head of the Blake School in Minneapolis, a pre k through twelfth grade school founded in 1900 and then enrolling about 1,400 students. Was there for fourteen years and loved it. I have been willing to play the career out there.
Speaker 1:I was so happy, but I was even happier in my marriage and my wife's a New Yorker.
Speaker 2:I always knew you were a very smart man, and that just proved it.
Speaker 1:Once our children, the youngest of our two boys had graduated from Blake, she began to to ask when were we gonna go home, as New York really is home for us. And I tried to delay that. I delayed it once successfully for four years while they were in college. But then at the end of that, it was clear that either we were gonna have to have a marriage at a distance or I would join her and move to New York. I decided on the latter.
Speaker 1:And wasn't initially thinking about E. E. Ford because I wasn't aware that the foundation was a movable feast, and it was located, their physical office, when the executive director was my predecessor, Bob Hallett, in Portland, Maine, and we were moved back to New York. I was only looking at jobs that I could commute to by subway. So I actually looked at a couple of school head positions, but they were replicating too much of what I'd done at Blake and the other schools.
Speaker 1:And then I got a call from Rob Ball who was consulting with the foundation trying to find an executive director and was really intrigued. And the more I thought about it, the more I liked it and applied, was appointed the position, have not looked back. This has has been a job that has kept me involved with a world that I really love and in a very different way.
Speaker 2:That's really interesting. I didn't know that about your background, and it's something similar. When I first came to NBAA, they were based in Boulder, and it was really, no. I'm not going to live in Boulder. I built a career and a family and a life in Washington DC.
Speaker 2:Can we make that work? And sure enough, it does, but you don't know until you ask. Isn't that a lesson? But I'm really intrigued. You're born to teachers.
Speaker 2:You started your career as a teacher. Are you still a teacher at heart? Yes. How does teaching inform your current role?
Speaker 1:Largely, my work is with school heads. And while the foundation has certain parameters for eligibility, that is we make grants to independent schools that are located within The US, they must have a ninth through twelfth grade division. So I don't work directly with schools that are k to six or k to eight, but they can be nine to 12 or six to 12 or k or pre k to 12. There are other eligibility criteria. But a large part of my professional life is involved in conversations with school heads who contact the foundation to initiate making a proposal to us.
Speaker 1:And then it's my job to work closely with those heads as they pursue the proposal, as I learn about their school, to fully understand the institution that they lead. And the teaching comes that I have had a lot of experience in the independent school world and can help those who might be new to headship or perhaps have not had exposure to as wide an array of practices in the independent schools, learn more about how they might best meet some of the challenges that their schools face.
Speaker 2:That's really impressive, and I'm sure that gives you insight into schools in a very unique way. That must be helpful to you and instant credibility, I would imagine. You've been in the classroom. You've been in those intermediate leadership roles, and you've been ahead. There must be just a connection of sorts when you go in, especially because you're going to help them solve a problem or advance an initiative that's important to them.
Speaker 1:I think that's true. The sense I have is that and I pride myself for this is how the foundation runs, is that an engagement with us as a school pursues a proposal. Whether or not we fund that proposal, I think actually working with EE Ford, engaging with us, drafting that proposal, providing us the data that we seek, analyzing that, answering my endless questions for a visit to the school. I hear it, and then I don't believe it's idle flattery. But they'll say, did not know that this would be as insightful or as beneficial to me as a school leader, independent of getting the money if they do.
Speaker 1:But the process itself, I think, is often clarifying.
Speaker 2:I understand that. And you were recently just returned from a sabbatical, and we managed to time that with your recognition as the 2025 Sarah Daniel Outstanding Support of Independent schools award from MBOA in New York. That was really dicey for us. We said, we think John deserves the recognition, but can we get him in the room? We can't recognize someone who's not there in the room, and it all worked out.
Speaker 2:How'd that feel? Just being in front of a room of business leaders, independent schools who are all familiar with your work and your contributions.
Speaker 1:It was an honor and a real pleasure. True. I have, in addition to heads, work often with business managers and the business operation of independent schools, both as a head and as an employee in other roles at other schools. That too is central. But being there and receiving that recognition, that honor meant a lot to me.
Speaker 1:And thank you to NBOA.
Speaker 2:It was a pleasure, and your remarks were really on point. I wanna talk about this sabbatical. You go on a sabbatical to reflect, gain a new perspective, take a break, recharge the batteries. What were some of those reflections? Or when you came back from sabbatical, what was different?
Speaker 2:How had your perspective changed taking that short time away?
Speaker 1:I hadn't requested the sabbatical, board of the foundation. And that board is 12 in number. Half of the board are descendants of the man who started the foundation, and the other half are former school heads. Many of those, the family members, some of them have served on the board for twenty or thirty years. Some of the school heads for an extended period of time, not quite as long as some of the family members.
Speaker 1:But it is a representative group and one that that I greatly respect. They had suggested that they thought at the twelve year mark that it may make sense for me to take a sabbatical as I thought about the future, as I thought about how long might I want to do this. I came back from that sabbatical. There was a commitment that I'd made for minimum of eighteen months upon return, but I was able to come back and say, don't have to gear up for a search. I wanna stay.
Speaker 1:And beyond that eighteen months, I don't know for how long. The travel that we mentioned earlier is a bit of a bear.
Speaker 2:I completely understand.
Speaker 1:But I would not give that up if allowed to because it's too central to this work. Being on the campus of a school, even if it is for six or seven hours, and having the privilege, really, truly a privilege to talk with a group of teachers, a group of students, to tour the campus, to meet with administrators, to watch an assembly, to see classes in action gives me a sense of each of these schools. And of the hundreds and hundreds of schools that I visited, if I distill the lessons learned from that to a single sentence, not just one right way to do this work. The thing I love about independent schools is they are independent to fashion their own mission, to design their own approach, to create their own culture, and there are lots of different paths to success for schools. And that has been a real eye opening experience.
Speaker 1:I visit day schools, boarding schools, day boarding, boarding day, all boys, all girls, faith based schools, Montessori schools, experiential schools. The range of schools that I see represents the fullness of independent schools throughout our country.
Speaker 2:John, I love that you said that, and I have a question for you because I think that independent stream that we have in our schools if I have a source of frustration, it's sometimes I don't feel like we exercise that independence enough. I feel like we sometimes conform to models, compensation that we borrow from public schools. I feel like sometimes we benchmark our way into kind of a status quo or a homogeneity that may or may not be right for your school or necessary for your school. So I'll pose the question to you. Do we exercise our independence enough?
Speaker 1:No. Here's my quick answer. I agree with you that I think, particularly in highly competitive urban markets, there is a real need for independent schools to differentiate themselves. It's one of the things that early on in my time at the foundation, I took issue with the overuse of the word innovation because schools were all claiming to be innovative, but they weren't being either courageously or dramatically, originally innovative. They were claiming innovation, but that was really innovation around the edges.
Speaker 1:I do think there are all kinds of opportunities for schools to rethink the way in which school has taken place for so long, and I'm limiting it just to our country. Never mind going back in the whole history of education. I always feel that there are these generative experiments going on that could be even grander. Go back to the sabbatical for a second. One of the things I explored in the sabbatical was reading more about the way in which public schools in Finland are altering their approach to education.
Speaker 1:They are remaking their curriculum based on phenomenology. So rather than the organizational principles being the same academic disciplines that were handed down to schools by the Committee of Ten in the late nineteenth century and having English and history and math and science and languages and arts. That's one way to organize a school. It's not a bad way necessarily, but Finland is trying something quite a bit different in the organization. And when I first came to know about that, it spurred in me an interest in organizing schools around epistemology, not phenomenology.
Speaker 1:You could create a pre k to twelfth grade school that I think could be very effective where the organizing principle was, how do we know what we know? Mhmm. And you would do that differently at the early childhood level than you would at middle school than you would at upper school. And students would still gain all the skills that they currently gain, but we would be organizing it because the epistemology of mathematics and the natural sciences differs significantly from the epistemology of aesthetics in the arts, differs from the epistemology in the social sciences, which is in some ways a bridge between the two. So in the sabbatical, I I I read up some and wondered if I had an extra life to lead at the same time.
Speaker 1:Could I think about how I'd create a curriculum, or how might I start a school that would be an epistemological school at its foundation?
Speaker 2:It's really interesting. I'm hearing you, and it feels like you came back from your sabbatical with a clarity of purpose, with just really knowing that I think of teaching as a vocation. And I think you've found a new vocation, an extension of your teaching. And I'm gonna use words that you shared with me when MBUA was going through its process with E. E.
Speaker 2:Ford, and you called the resources catalytic. How I would encapsulate your role is you are a catalyst for innovation and that you are fortunate to not just think that way, but that you have resources to help move schools in that direction. Because no school feels like they have the resources, right, to innovate. That that always comes up first. We wanna do something really big.
Speaker 2:We wanna do something really different. How are we gonna pay for it? They're all working on tight budgets. So I think occupying that lane must be so gratifying. As I observe it, it must be so gratifying to know that you could do that.
Speaker 1:I think you've accurately described part of the great satisfaction gratification that I find in the work. There are grants we make to individual schools concerning projects that are wholly within the school, and we do a lot of good in that way. But it is the opportunity to catalyze change, particularly change that might involve partnerships, alliances among schools, doing things together, and changing practices, trying to find a way in which something might start with a group of schools in one area of the country and then spread to others that really bring some of the even greater gratification satisfaction to me in the role I play at EE Ford.
Speaker 2:That's what attracts me to something that's truly innovative. Is it replicable? Can other schools learn from it? Adapt it? Is it portable?
Speaker 2:When I look at innovation and if it has that type of impact, that's really exciting to me.
Speaker 1:There are different grant making programs within the E. Ford Foundation. The bread and butter for the sixty seven years that we've been supporting independent schools are in traditional grants. The next sort of expansion beyond that came with educational leadership grants. And I speak to this now because one of the criteria for educational leadership grants is that the proposal must have reached beyond the school itself.
Speaker 1:We will not fund an educational leadership grant if we're not convinced that in doing so, there'll be beneficiaries beyond that school's community itself. And there, as you suggest, lots of ways in which that can happen. It can happen through replication. The school might be conducting experiments and then the promulgating the results of those experiments. A school might do something and then commit to writing about it, presenting about it in other schools that might be interested in trying to copy some of the ideas.
Speaker 1:And this, on some level, is close to the heart of one of the things I love most about independent schools. There is a willingness to share good ideas. If you, Jeff Shields, were Uber and I were Lyft, we would never share our site. But if you're school x in Chicago and I'm school y in Boston and you call me and say, hey. I hear you're doing this.
Speaker 1:Could you put me in touch with the people there? Or do you know enough about it that we could talk about it? Because I'd be interested in pursuing that. I'm a flattered that you're asking me, and I want to spread it because I believe in turn, if I were making the call to you, you'd do the same.
Speaker 2:100%.
Speaker 1:Schools are these nodes of excellence, and we're willing as this whole network of schools nationwide to share best practices, to make each other stronger.
Speaker 2:Business leaders have that in droves, John. If you know anything about our community, business officers, the collegiality of this community, it blows people away because people come into the business officer role likely from another profession. They come in. It's a second career for many, and I can't count on one hand how many times financial leaders, they've been in finance or some sort of operational business role previously, and they can't believe it. They can't believe the level of sharing, the level of collaborating that they could have with their peer down the street or across the country.
Speaker 2:So it's really part of the DNA, and I do think that's really special. I wanna switch gears a little bit. And the first time I heard you speak, you talked about three buckets. Is that the model? I it seems inelegant for someone of your stature, but is that accurate, three buckets?
Speaker 1:It was a metaphor, a heuristic, if you will, that I began to use to help both business managers, but often school leaders and those with a stake in independent schools to understand that there are a range of schools with regard to the urgency of their own need to change or to innovate or to grow. And I don't mean grow just in in size, although that sometimes is helpful. The three bucket heuristic was to say there are schools whose reputational capital and financial capital, There are, who've been around some for two or three centuries and who occupy a position in the independent school world that their future is relatively secure. They've been around. They'll stay around.
Speaker 1:They could begin to do things differently if they so choose, and I think even those stronger schools ought to regularly question practices to ensure that they're best serving their students. But they don't have to change in order to stay healthy and successful, to be in demand, to be selective, and to balance their budgets and see an open ended future. That was bucket number one. Bucket number three were schools that were challenged, that they had either shrinking enrollment or precipitously decreasing full pay families that weren't allowing the flywheel of their operation to operate, and they had increasing financial aid. They even perhaps have been engaging in the merit award practice as a tool for enrollment management that worries me greatly.
Speaker 1:But they were in that role in trying to stay solvent and afloat, but they weren't changing any practices because they thought the challenges were temporary. We've had bad times before. This is a bad time. And if we just hunker down and outwait it, things will get better in the future. And I thought they were mistaken and I thought that they should begin to lift their gaze, see that because schools do not and really should not live forever unless they can draw a market, unless they respond in some way and do have a path to sustainability.
Speaker 1:But that was bucket c. And bucket b were the otherwise occupants of bucket c, but they were acting on things. They were trying to change. They recognized the threat, the urgency of the threat, and were keenly endeavoring to create a path to sustainability. Schools are hardy in the sense that they don't easily fail.
Speaker 1:And oftentimes the financial argument for schools is one that they should close. But there's emotion involved. And there are people who love the schools, and those in the leadership often wanna preserve them for the sake of the students, for the sake of the employees. But nature doesn't teach us that nothing there there aren't entities that that live forever. There's evolution, and that evolution is necessary to survive.
Speaker 1:The greatest level of creative thinking innovation, where I found were coming from, and this is part of the reason for the heuristic, in those bucket B schools, because they were innovating and changing and experimenting by necessity. Mhmm. That they knew that was the only way in which they might ultimately find a sustainable long term open path in front of them.
Speaker 2:Do this is a really great question. In bucket one, those schools that are on such solid footing, are they complacent? Do you still see those schools innovating, or is that not a factor? That's really interesting to me, your perspective.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't lump all of the first bucket schools into a group of complacent schools. I do think that a significant number of those really off insulated financially secure, reputationally secure schools have an obstacle to overcome that is related to their governance. When change is being proposed at an otherwise successful school, successful on all metrics, we've got long waiting lists at every grade. Our annual fund is through the roof. The families are all happy.
Speaker 1:The kids are all happy with their postsecondary school placement. And you're proposing that we change the school in this dramatic way. Why? We are succeeding. Why should we change?
Speaker 1:And that argument is more difficult to make in those bucket one schools. I can give you one sort of prime example. One of the engines of great creativity and research in the independent school world comes from one of the most central at the heart bucket one schools, Phillips Ann. They have the Institute. Things that are happening at the Tang Institute are among the most creative approaches to solving problems in independent schools.
Speaker 1:So not all really deeply bucket one schools fail to innovate. But yes, I did see patterns as I began at the foundation with a certain level of complacency in a number of bucket one schools.
Speaker 2:And that's not unreasonable with schools that are wildly successful over a period of time. So there's no criticism there, but it is a harder case to make for change. It's a harder case to make to do different because success in a lot of people's minds breeds success.
Speaker 1:True. But I wish some of those schools would compete with each other because they even do that, not with yet more lavish investment in facilities. I think they wrongly believe that the next Xanit performing arts center or athletic complex. And I don't know you need to have facilities that will be worthy of the tuition that some of the schools charge, particularly in boarding schools. So I'm not poo pooing that entirely.
Speaker 1:Curb appeal is not irrelevant to schools in a competitive market. But I wish that the more of that investment were in the professional development or faculty or some other investigation of practices that might continue to serve students in a world that is rapidly changing. Just one data point that I did mention when speaking with your membership on the Sunday before I received the award. I'm doing this from memory. I don't know of the exact figures, but the Pew Research Group showing families and students particularly who, as recently as I think a decade ago, 70% would say that college university was very important.
Speaker 1:Five years later, that had dropped to perhaps 50 or so, and now it's in the 30%. I don't know how to make peace with presentism. That is the fact we always think things will continue as they are, and we often simultaneously forecast dramatic change in the near future. And that's been said before. I do think that we're at a precipice because of a number of different things, technology being but one of those, as well as population decline and other such things.
Speaker 1:They do make me think that twenty years from now, the independent school landscape won't look as similar as it did twenty years ago to today.
Speaker 2:John, remember why I heard you for the first time. You were the first person of any note that I can recall who put out the concept that schools may not be intended to exist in perpetuity. And I thought, wow. Someone's really saying that. And I think you've really made an interesting case around why, because of just the way communities change, the world changes, and schools that were founded in one period of time may not successfully adapt to a new period of time, and the market does sometimes indicate that.
Speaker 1:The well respected former executive director of the California Association of Independent Schools, Jim McManus, had a about the graveyard of independent schools. Jim did a little interesting project to one of those compendia of independent schools. I don't know if it was Bunting and Lyons or Port of Sargent, but found one of those back when we had a hard copy compendia of listing all independent schools in the country. He found one from the early part of the twentieth century and then compared it, just went through and gathered all of the schools that did exist at that point. I think it was well before the first World War, and how many of those no longer existed and wrote a little bit about that.
Speaker 1:That was in my mind. I I subsequently have written about this, but I saw Jim's analysis as being the first great extinction of independent schools. And many of those many independent schools started as proprietary schools. And it turns out that the children of those who found a school don't often wanna go into the family business. So when the founders were all done, there was no one to inherit the school, and those schools often became five zero one c three not for profit schools.
Speaker 1:But without the founder, not all of them were prepared for perpetuation into the future. So a number of those schools then closed. So that's the first extinction. Second big extinction of independent schools comes in the tumultuous time of the sixties and early seventies, where there was both a huge merger of single gender institutions because wrongly schools thought at the time that if they didn't become coeducational, no market would exist, and they'd be condemning these places they love to the dust heap of history. They were wrong.
Speaker 1:More girls schools stayed girls schools, in my opinion. Too many boys schools became coeducational. I wish there were more all boys schools. Because I think there is a role for both single gender schools as well as coeducational schools. But that period, mid sixties, mid seventies, second extinction.
Speaker 1:We're in the early stages of third extinction, but schools do cling tenaciously to life. And then it's really what in the end closes a school, it's when they no longer can pay faculty. They are insolvent. And there are plenty of schools that I do think that those numbers have been accelerating and probably will continue to accelerate. I wish those schools again, I put this some of this is on governance.
Speaker 1:No one joins a board so they can work to closing A
Speaker 2:100%.
Speaker 1:Because they care about it, because they were asked or they were flattered. Their children went there. They went there for whatever reasons. And then it's a difficult conversation to introduce at the board level, and it's only the board that can do that. And there are times in which boards need to make that courageous decision because the best time for schools to either merge or close is when they still have some resources and they can chart a runway of several years.
Speaker 2:I really agree, and that's always the most difficult part of getting boards. And really even heads of school or school leadership who wants to vote themselves out of a job or out of a career, especially one they love and students they love. We have to close. I have been an irresponsible timekeeper because I enjoy speaking with you so much, but I do wanna close with what's the future of independent education in The US, which you work with most closely. If you could look in your crystal ball, how would you summarize what the future looks like to you?
Speaker 1:It's always risky trying to look into the crystal ball. But I would say at this moment, April tax day as we're recording this, 2025, I think the role for independent schools is as necessary and as urgent as it's ever been. One of the primal motivations for my continued work over my entire career in independent schools is I want that independent voice. I want schools that are free to determine who they are going to admit to the the schools, who they're going to hire, what they're going to teach, and how they're going to teach. Those are four freedoms articulated by justice Felix Frankfurter in the case Sweeney versus State of New Hampshire back in 1957 as essential then in the middle of the McCarthy scare as they are today.
Speaker 1:Independent schools can be a beacon for that freedom of teaching. Not being afraid of ideas, not having that control come from the government as long as there is a market of those who are willing to pay the tuition or schools that have the resources to provide aid for those that cannot. So that's one level. Technology will continue to evolve, and I think the best of independent schools are not afraid of AI. They're embracing AI.
Speaker 1:How can we use this tool? Same way math teachers learned how to use graphing calculators. So the technology never gets stuffed back into the genie bottle. We have to figure out how to responsibly use that. And independent schools have long shown that they can be more nimble.
Speaker 1:But that's the three things for the future.
Speaker 2:No. I appreciate that, and I appreciate you and your time so much. Great conversation. I hope it's not our last. Everyone, thank you for joining the Net Assets Podcast with our guest, John Gulla of the E.
Speaker 2:E. Ford Foundation. Join us each month as we continue our conversation with business leaders and key voices who are shaping independent school business, finance, and operations. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. For more information on MBOA, visit us online at mboa.org.
Speaker 2:I'm Jeff Shields, MBOA President and CEO and your NetAssets Podcast host. Tune in next time.