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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.
It's like everybody else involved in education right now. We are trying to understand this train coming down the tracks in the form of AI, right, and understand what that will mean for our business. And I do think that a premise that most of us are pretty comfortable with is that the way we are going to teach and assess students is going to be very significantly transformed. Even if nothing changed in terms of classroom practice, the whole business of creating, delivering, scoring assessment, practicing for an assessment. All of those things are going
Jeff Shields:be deeply informed by large language models. Welcome to the NetAssets Podcast, the official podcast of MBOA Business Leadership for Independent Schools. I'm your host, Jeff Shields, MBLA President and CEO. If you're not familiar with MBLA, we're the only national association focused exclusively on business and operations professionals working in independent schools. MBLA empowers our members with knowledge, community, tools to lead with confidence and clarity.
Jeff Shields:And today, we're thrilled to welcome our guest who's been at the forefront of innovation in independent school education, Mike Flanagan, CEO of E3N, the newly formed organization born from the merger of EMA and ERB. Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike Flanagan:Thanks so much, Jeff. Great to be here.
Jeff Shields:I'm really appreciative that I could get on your calendar. I'm sure it's been a busy several months for you, but we'll get into all of that. I wanna just congratulate you. A new role, a new organization, a new name, e three n. That's a lot of change in a short time.
Jeff Shields:How are you feeling about everything right now?
Mike Flanagan:We're incredibly excited. I think the folks in the space may know that we actually announced the merger way back in September 2024, and then I joined the organization in May '25. And even then, we hadn't really reached legal approval. Well, legal approval didn't happen until several months later. And so there was this really anticipatory holding period where I was able to travel around, meet with member schools, but we weren't really allowed to dive in and make E3N happen.
Mike Flanagan:And now that we're full speed ahead with that, it's really exciting, and the teams are great. And the feedback we've gotten so far from the independent school community has been incredibly supportive.
Jeff Shields:But good things are worth waiting for, Mike. And you built anticipation, and that was certainly present at the fall meeting. And speaking of which, I have to ask, you may not know this about me, but I love good swag. And e three n delivered with swag everywhere at their annual meeting this past fall. What's your take on swag and its branding power, especially for a newly formed organization like e three n?
Jeff Shields:Does it matter? Is it important?
Mike Flanagan:Oh, that's a thoughtful question. I do believe it matters, particularly when you are launching a new brand. The advantage of this merger is we've got these two amazing organizations with really rich history, almost a hundred and seventy years of combined service to the independent school sector. Right? ERB turns 100 in a couple of years, and EMA, I think, as SSATB, when it was founded, turned 70 around the same time.
Mike Flanagan:The disadvantage of launching a new brand is that we're starting fresh. And so we really have to lean in and make sure people understand E3Ed. It's a new name, but what we're good at is not new. So I think the swag certainly helps with that. I will say just too, though, as a personal tick, somebody who travels a lot and goes to a lot of events, Definitely a quality over quantity person.
Mike Flanagan:Anytime I see a piece of swag and it's unfortunately made or and it's going straight to, like, the dustbin or the landfill, that kinda makes me cringe a little bit. Definitely less is more on that front.
Jeff Shields:I agree. Quality matters, especially in swag, and I appreciate your comments on that. I wanna dive into your really fascinating career from teaching ed tech. I think a lot of people who are listening know you from NAIS's financial aid product, SSS, and then the Mastery Transcript Consortium. I know you shared this once before, but I want everyone to hear what's that through line for you through these roles and how they shaped the leader you're going to be for e three n?
Jeff Shields:I appreciate that question, Jeff.
Mike Flanagan:One way to to answer it is to contrast. I have friends and classmates who have lived incredibly successful lives and careers that look extremely linear and well planned. I think I'm an example of the fact that sailboats can make progress by tacking and zigzagging. I started my career, as you said, as a teacher in an independent school in Honolulu, Hawaii. Iolani School gave me my first job as a high school English teacher and track and cross country coach.
Mike Flanagan:And I really thought leaving Iolani to go to graduate school that I was going to be a professor, that I was going get more degrees, more education, teach older students in a higher ed setting. And for a lot of reasons I won't bore your listeners with, I realized, oh, the people who are really successful at that are wired a little bit differently than me. To be successful in academia, the short version is you have to love a very narrow area of something so deeply that you never want to do anything else. And I think what I found is that I'm the person who's happiest when I'm learning new and different things with a lot of velocity. So I went into technology because startups and also management consulting provide that professionally.
Mike Flanagan:Every new project, every new client is a new challenge. Every startup has with it a lot of failure and a pretty steep learning curve. So those things scratched an itch that I didn't even really know I even had when I was in the classroom. And then when that took me back to the world of independent schools through NAIS, so much the better.
Jeff Shields:I really relate to that, and I think our business officers relate to that. I think individuals who are successful, particularly in business officer roles, have a broad appetite because their portfolio is so wide, and so their day is filled with, I'm gonna go deep, but in a lot of different areas. I feel that way, and tell me if you agree, about CEOs of organizations such as ours because it's not just mastering the content that you're delivering to your members, But you have meetings, you have product development, you have writing, you have all sorts of varied portfolios. So it sounds like you're well suited for that. You realized that early on.
Mike Flanagan:I appreciate that. I think one of the things I took away from the privilege and the challenge of being part of a very high growth startup early in my career is that you realize when you're in hypergrowth mode that it doesn't take long for you to get promoted out of your domain of subject matter expertise, like where you're gonna be leading people who are technical experts in things that you may not know a lot about. And so understanding how you function in that environment has really come in handy at a lot of different stages.
Jeff Shields:I wanna dive into one area in particular. I have to ask, at first blush, the philosophy of the mastery transcript consortium and student assessment appear to be at odds. What say you about that? That seems like quite a pivot.
Mike Flanagan:Yeah. I think to get at that, you have to go really to, like, the first principles of what we were trying to do at master transcript, and I won't assume that all of your listeners know what that is. So to nutshell it briefly, the big idea there was we would create an alternative kind of transcripting system, an alternative credential for high school students. And what we were trying to do is solve two specific problems. One is the problem that the way we grade and evaluate inside of academic courses in school, for a lot of reasons, is actually deleterious.
Mike Flanagan:It's actually harmful to the process of learning. Now I could go long form on that with you and your listeners, but I've spoken about it at length elsewhere, and they could always kind of click and find that. The second thing, though, and I think it's one that gets overlooked a little bit because that first one is it's got a a man bites dog quality to it. Right? Independent schools, high performing schools are rethinking grading, getting rid of GPA.
Mike Flanagan:It's right. It's pretty catchy. But the other thing too is that it's not just the way we measure academic work. It's that there are things that are measurable, that are important, that are predictive of success both in school and in life that aren't measured at all currently in schools. And that, I think, is the big idea that really helped mastery transcript take off.
Mike Flanagan:When we started to reach scale, when we were getting enough traction and awareness where the folks at educational testing service reached out to us to acquire us, that was what they saw as the value proposition. There are essential skills, what they now call skills for the future, and a really critical and very predictive of success both in professional life and also things like happiness, like health outcomes over one's lifespan. And these kinds of things like leadership, empathy, communication skills, they're not limited to classroom work, and they are measurable and teachable. That was the big idea of MTC, and I think it's the one that translates best to e three m.
Jeff Shields:That begs the question, are we going to see that influence your leadership and future assessments offered by e three n?
Mike Flanagan:One of the things that excited me about the opportunity presented by merging ERB and EMA together is that both organizations actually already have a toehold in that space. ERB has a number of amazing assessments that they bundle under what we call the whole child assessment, but it includes social emotional learning, belonging surveys. We've got actually curriculum tie ins for younger learners in terms of social emotional development. And EMA has the character skills snapshot, which has been helping admissions leaders and enrollment offices for a while get a more rich portrait of what young people are bringing to their campuses potentially. So those things are already in place.
Mike Flanagan:So if, albeit for me to say, oh, we're going start something new, I'm bringing this in from left field, I think already the awareness, that buy in to the idea that, oh, we really want to be able to measure young people in a multidimensional way if we're going to give them the most assistance, the most boost as they navigate independent schools, which have always been committed to whole child development.
Jeff Shields:I think that's really exciting and a real differentiator for independent schools to dig into and to offer our pre k through 12 students. So let's talk about the big news that rocked the independent school world, the merger of EMA and ERB into e three n. Now in full disclosure, I've had a front row seat to this transformation. I agree with you. It did not happen overnight.
Jeff Shields:Let's just leave it there. It did not happen overnight, but I am a member of EMA's board of trustees, now e three n's board of trustees, but many of our listeners may not be as familiar. So what do independent school leaders need to know about this merger and what it means for enrollment professionals and, frankly, their collaboration with business leaders at their schools?
Mike Flanagan:I think a few things. First is that the merger is, I think, a bit unusual, at least in my professional experience, and that it is truly a merger of equals and that both organizations are in a strong position. Mhmm. That is atypical. Normally, it's more typical to have a merger where there's a bit of an imbalance, right, one organization absorbing another, like to put it more bluntly, someone's limping into it.
Mike Flanagan:And that's not the case here. What is interesting is that some of the strengths that they're bringing to the table are very complementary. Complementary. And so a shorthand version of that would be to say when you ask people about EMA, enrollment management association members, they have a really strong outsized emotional affinity for it, and that's really because of the sense of community and professional development that Heather and the team have fostered over these years.
Jeff Shields:I've seen it, and that's very true, Mike. You can really feel it. It's palpable, and I appreciate you giving a shout out to Heather because I think that's one of the things she really developed during her tenure.
Mike Flanagan:Yeah. And then in tandem, you've got ERB under the leadership of Tom Roshan has developed a really real set of core competencies around product development. Right? People love they really like using and value the assessments that ERB builds. And I think what's complementary, though, is that as rich as the relationship is with the enrollment management officers and leaders that EMA has built, all the work is really focused on that preenrollment stage.
Mike Flanagan:The whole question of what happens inside of schools. Right? How are the schools actually delivering on the value proposition that is central to the communication process and the recruiting process with families? We don't really have a great story around that right now. And ERB, in contrast, has these amazing tools that do support and track student learning, both in academic growth and in whole child development post enrollment.
Mike Flanagan:But I don't know that we built the same set of relationships and community with academic leaders, and I think there's an opportunity area there. So I think at on day one, that's how we think about these two areas of strength. How do we have a full life cycle of best in class products that go through the entire student journey? And how do we also have a rich set of community and professional development and research tools that are available not just for enrollment management leaders, but for leaders in other aspects of independent school life?
Jeff Shields:That's, I also think, very important to our independent schools retention efforts, and that's getting more and more attention. I know business officers and enrollment leaders and, frankly, heads of schools are all realizing how important retention is, not just to our school communities, but to our school's overall financial health. Now I've heard you say that e three n will be more than the sum of its parts. Now what does that mean in practice? And again, what can business leaders expect from E3N in that regard?
Mike Flanagan:We have, for decades, as I noted earlier, these two competing assessment tools that are used on the intake side. We've got the ICEE and the SSAT.
Jeff Shields:That's right.
Mike Flanagan:Look, I come from a for profit background. I believe in competition. I believe in customer choice. But we're in a pretty interesting space where the biggest problem that's facing our schools is a diminishing number of families and students, who exist. But demographically, we're not making more kids.
Mike Flanagan:Family sizes are getting smaller. And we also have a value squeeze where the value proposition of higher education, which is at the core of college preparatory independent schools, and also the value squeeze of increasing forms of competition through ESA programs and microschools. More than ever, we wanna make it easy for families to identify an independent school, see themselves in profile for that school, and then access that education. Anything we can do to streamline and unify that process, we think lifts the boats of the entire sector. So even if we did nothing new, just unifying those efforts, pulling together in one direction, I think, is a net addition.
Mike Flanagan:Now the reason I've emphasized that even if is that we are going to do new things. Once we get through the very necessary and frankly extended blocking and tackling of merging these two great organizations, we're going to identify opportunities where we will have earned the right to do new things. Right, areas adjacent to what we do right now. Some of those could be along the lines of the whole child assessments that I was talking about earlier. Some of it could be about better stitching together and visualization of the data that we're gathering at all these different points of the student journey.
Mike Flanagan:I think one of the traps of product management, and I say this as someone who's been in product management for most of his professional career, is that product managers have a tendency to say, Oh, everything you need is right there. There's a click. There's a report. Just go here and everything you need is there. But we know that school leaders are really busy.
Mike Flanagan:So being able to leverage the data that sits inside of our products, inside those reports, and make it more accessible and at hand through services by combining products and services is an area that I think we're gonna lean into quite a
Jeff Shields:That's really interesting. I appreciate you sharing that because one thing I know is that boards don't hire new CEOs to maintain the status quo or just to, in your case, survive a merger. Let's come out of this, and let's get through it. So it's exciting, and it's also exciting to hear open to the possibilities. You see where the strengths are.
Jeff Shields:You see where the natural connections are, but you're gonna build on them. What are those opportunities? And dare I say, allow that to be slightly organic and see where these synergies are between these two powerhouse organizations.
Mike Flanagan:Yeah. I appreciate that. And I I think one thing that we have to keep in mind too, as I said and I meant it earlier, that both organizations are in a true position of strength. However, that isn't perpetual. That's not infinite.
Mike Flanagan:It's like everybody else involved in education right now, and frankly, in the business world and even in politics, we are trying to understand this train coming down the tracks in the form of AI, right, and understand what that will mean for our business. And I do think that a premise that most of us are pretty comfortable with inside these two organizations is that the way we are going to teach and assess students is going to be very significantly transformed. So again, even if nothing changed in terms of classroom practice, the whole business of creating, delivering, scoring an assessment, practicing for an assessment, all of those things are going be deeply informed by large language models. So now joining these two organizations, it feels like the right time.
Jeff Shields:So we're talking about artificial intelligence and that we are just at the very beginning of understanding its impact, which I also think is exciting. I've actually moved past being unsure and then intimidated to now I feel like I'm moving into active user of AI, that I see it as a partner. I see it as a way to improve, expand my thinking, my work, my team's work, etcetera, etcetera. Who knows that impact in the long term, what it's gonna have on students?
Mike Flanagan:Completely. And I think there are two recurring activities. I call I would call them problem spaces in the jargon of product management that are at the core of independent schools. One is the process of admissions and reading folders where we basically have a lot of well trained humans who are looking at and being asked to synthesize lots of unstructured information, essays and teacher recs and test scores and grades and transcripts and possibly work samples and interviews and feedback from the tour. And then you've also got classroom teachers who are not just being limited to quizzes and worksheets, but are also looking at portfolios and complex projects and how students interact with one another.
Mike Flanagan:Both of those are opportunities to take massively unstructured sets of data and find meaning in them, which is exactly the kind of thing that large language models and AI are starting to get good at. With that said, I am an enthusiast, but I'm not a utopian. It's really important that we keep a human in the loop, certainly for the foreseeable future. None of these models can be trusted to do things independently. And that's doubly true for us because if we do one thing well, both at EMA and ERB, it's that we build tools that are psychometrically valid.
Mike Flanagan:That's a really important bar for us in terms of quality and rigor. And I think one of the challenges is that educators and administrators are being flooded with a bunch of AI driven tools that aren't held to the same standard.
Jeff Shields:It's really exciting to hear you talk about that and the idea that we could eliminate the piles of folders and including financial aid review. Think about that activity, which I know you're very familiar with. Think about how AI could be beneficial. And my hope would be that the equity in financial aid allocations and financial aid awards is improved drastically because of that additional support. We can't talk about assessment without talking about the discussion that has been really pervasive in our community in higher ed around testing.
Jeff Shields:Does it play an outsized role in admissions? There's concerns about bias and equity, the financial burden that testing places, particularly on families of different socioeconomic means, both in independent schools and in higher ed. Can you give us the lay of the land and where you stand on some of these aspects of testing? Because I know test optional feels like it's peaked. People have retreated.
Jeff Shields:Where are we today?
Mike Flanagan:Just as we talk about the importance of a well balanced diet, I think it's important to talk about the importance of a well balanced portfolio of metrics when you're talking in the admissions context, particularly for selective schools. But I also think that sometimes we shorthand thinking about standardized tests in the admissions context just for those highly selective schools. And as you and your team know better than anybody, Jeff, we have a very large number of independent schools right now where having way too many students wanting to get in is not the problem.
Jeff Shields:I would say for about 70% of our schools, that is not the problem.
Mike Flanagan:So I think what we have to think about is how the instruments that we deliver to schools and the administrators in them can be useful at both ends of the spectrum. Right? If you're fortunate enough to be a school that has a very large number of families seeking entry, I do think standardized tests give an important third party backstop to make tough decisions and communicate those decisions to stakeholders who might not always disagree with every decision you're going to make on any given day. At the other end of the spectrum, I'm really interested to see, particularly as we start to be in a position to connect the results of our entrance or admissions tests to those of our achievement tests to the ERB, to really think about how we can use the whole admissions process to better guide placement and to guide support. How do we take families and students that we might not have considered to be admissible academically five or ten years ago and say, you know what?
Mike Flanagan:We actually think they are because we now have a better sense of what structures and supports are gonna be helpful and necessary to help that student thrive. If you can widen the aperture, right, of the number of students that you think you can support successfully in a school, you're giving yourself more chances to win.
Jeff Shields:And that has an impact not just on enrollment, but obviously the school's finances. Mike, we're gonna have to leave it there, but it sounds like we have a lot more to look forward to from the future with you at the helm of e three m. So thank you for sharing your insights with us today, Mike.
Mike Flanagan:Again, thanks so much, Jeff. It's been a delight.
Jeff Shields:To our listeners, thank you for joining us. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe and share it with your colleagues. Until next time, I'm Jeff Shields, and this is the NetAssets Podcast. For more information about MBOA Business Leadership for Independent Schools, please visit us mboa.org.