Sunday, February 23, 2003 DR. KATHLEEN GILL BOWMAN.

MS. LEE: If you can take your seats, our speaker is here and ready to begin. We're going to begin. Please take your seats. Think of this as a fire drill and don't say another word.

Thank you so much. I am now going to have Shep Shanley, who is our college representative from Northwestern, introduce our distinguished speaker, Dr. Kathleen Gill Bowman, who is the president of Randolph-Macon Women's College. Shep.

MR. SHANLEY: Thank you, Liza. Are we delighted it isn't last Sunday? Quite possibly we would not have a speaker. I don't know.

Dr. Kathleen Gill Bowman is the president of Randolph-Macon Women's College, and has been since 1994. Randolph-Macon is a long-standing member of NAPSG, as well, so it all comes together. The title of her talk to us tonight is, "Fostering Women's Leadership: A Matter of Global Concern."

Well, she has had long experience in fostering international education. Just at Randolph-Macon, among many advances during her tenure, the college has enhanced both Asian studies and international studies. It's created an endowed visiting international professorship. It has set up endowed funds, get this, so that every student can either study or work abroad. It has increased the number of international students. Now they represent 47 countries within the college population. And the National Association of Foreign Student Advisors, NAFSA, voted last October to make Randolph-Macon one of 16 college and universities nationally that are exemplary in achieving success at internationalization. So there's no doubt that she knows what she's talking about.

The rest of her time before coming to Randolph-Macon shows a clear interest in international education. She was, immediately before being president, the vice provost for international affairs at the University of Oregon from 1989 to 1994. And before that, for five years, at the University of Oregon, the associate vice president for research.

And in her career before that, among other things, she had spent five years at Reid College in two administrative positions and started out for three years as an assistant professor on the faculty at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. All her degrees -- bachelor's degree, master's degree and Ph.D. -- are from the University of Minnesota.

As if it weren't enough to be president of a college, she has deep involvement in a number of associations in Virginia, including -- this was at the top of the list -- president of the Council of Independent Colleges of Virginia. She's obviously in great demand. If you expect to ask a president to serve your school in some way, just don't. She's way too busy.

And it struck me, as I looked at the list of all that you have done, that you think to yourself, next year I'll just say no.

Well, we're glad it's next year, and not this year. Kathleen Bowman is here, thanks to my colleague Rebecca Dixon, who is associate provost at Northwestern for enrollment, admissions aid, records, and also an enthusiastic Randolph-Macon graduate. She asked President Bowman to speak to us. And Rebecca told me just last week, along with many, many enthusiastic comments about President Bowman, that over the years, Randolph-Macon alumni have turned up, at least in her experience, in the strangest places. And regardless of age difference, they always connect through an ongoing Randolph-Macon spirit that transcends generations.

That connection continues today, enlightened by the vitality that Kathleen Bowman has brought us. Randolph-Macon is lucky that you are there, and so are we today. Thank you very much. Please welcome Kathleen Bowman.

DR. BOWMAN: I am delighted to be here. When I left Virginia this morning it was about 38 degrees and raining heavily, and we had to traverse at least two highways that were covered with water. After the snows of last week and then the rain for several days, I'm afraid to go back. So even though I'm only here for a few hours, it's just a delightful break for me.

I realize that I am the only thing standing between you and dinner. So as Elizabeth Taylor reputedly said to her eighth husband, "I won't keep you long."

Seriously, I'm very honored to have been asked to speak to you today. For me, there is nothing so inspiring as being in the presence of people who care deeply about the education of women and who have dedicated their professional lives to women's growth and success.

I would like to begin with a personal story. It explains how I, the product of public co-educational schools and colleges, first came to understand something important about women leaders and the power of a woman-centered educational environment.

In 1976, in the middle of completing my doctoral dissertation, I took a break. At least that's what I told other people. Secretly, I was entertaining the idea of not finishing. It had been an arduous ordeal in an all-male department, rampant with the behaviors that we now call sexual harassment, but which then were standard operating procedure.

With the birth of each of my three children, my august advisors could not conceal their disappointment that I was not, after all, going to be the youngest Ph.D. they had ever produced.

I'm sure that the chairman of the department considered it the finest compliment he could give me when he said, "Your analyses are very powerful. You think just like a man."

During my break from my dissertation, I developed a proposal to a publisher that I write a series of books on contemporary women for middle school students. In those days -- I'm old enough now to be able to say "in those days" -- in those days, there was virtually nothing a young boy or girl could read that portrayed the talents of women who were succeeding in the world. If you were lucky, you could probably find something about Susan B. Anthony, and maybe a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. But there were virtually no books that showed the full range of contemporary women's talents. This seemed very important to me because my own daughter was then nine years old. What was she going to read?

My proposal was approved by the publisher. The books were to be six volumes in all. Each would focus on a particular area of women's achievement, politics, media, medicine, social science, art, and dance.

Since each volume was to include seven profiles, which needed to be balanced in terms of such factors as race, ethnicity, geography, and age, I found myself researching virtually hundreds of women, from whom I ultimately selected 42 to be interviewed and included in the books.

What did I learn from this experience? First, I was astonished at the sheer abundance of remarkable women doing important things in the world. I was even more astonished that so few of them were visible in American public life. While some may have been written about in local or regional newspapers, or were known in scholarly communities, they were not the subject of national media coverage or of books and articles that were accessible to the general public.

It was clear that my daughter's generation would be denied the legacy of accomplishment of these women just as I had been denied the legacy of my own mother's generation.

Secondly, without being aware of it, I was being empowered. Through my months of research and interviewing, I had acquired 42 role models. I was immersed in, and making my own, the stories of 42 women who had found ways of succeeding in the world. I didn't realize the power of it until one night I sat bolt upright in bed, turned on the light, and said to my husband, "I am going to finish that dissertation. I am going to be a professor," which I did. I finished it less than a year later.

Thirdly, as I did my research on the 42 women to be included in the books, I began to notice a pattern. Many of them were graduates of women's colleges. This observation intrigued me, and it led me to read the early studies of Elizabeth Tidball, which showed that professionally successful women were three times more likely to have graduated from a woman's college. As a result, I developed a keen interest in creating the kind of educational environment in which women thrived, and I vowed that if I ever had the opportunity to join a women's college, I would do so, and happily that came to pass.

Women's college graduates account for fewer than 4 percent of all college-educated women, but they continue to produce a disproportionate number of women leaders. Of the 60 women members of Congress, 20 percent attended women's colleges, including Senator Blanch Lambert Lincoln, Randolph-Macon Women's College, class of 1986.

Of the 4,000 highest-paid officers and directors of 1990 Fortune 1000 companies, less than one-half of one percent were women. Of these women, 36 percent were women's college graduates. In a 1997 survey, 20 percent of the 100 most powerful women in Washington, D.C., graduated from women's colleges. Finally, graduates of women's colleges are more than twice as likely as graduates of co-ed colleges to receive doctoral degrees. My own college, Randolph-Macon Women's College, produces the highest percentage of graduates who go on to earn a Ph.D. of all the private colleges and universities in the state of Virginia.

But we must not lose sight of the fact that in the United States, women in public leadership positions are still very few in number, despite the gains that women have made in education and work force participation. Women now comprise 47 percent of US workers. They earn 51 percent of all bachelor's degrees, and 45 percent of all advanced degrees awarded.

These data might lead us to believe that gender equity has been achieved. However, in Fortune 500 companies, women comprise only 4 percent of the top officers and only .4 percent of CEOs. In the military, women make up only 2 percent of the top officers. Currently, although 30 percent of all lawyers are women, they represent only 15 percent of law firm partners and a mere 5 percent of managing partners in large firms.

Of the 50 state governorships in the United States, women hold only six, and there are fewer female state legislators this year than there were in the year 2000. And who in this room believes that we will see a female president in our lifetime?

Thus, in the United States, though there have been tremendous increases in women's education and work force participation, women continue to be quite absent from the most powerful leadership positions in business, politics, and the professions. The consequence is that we do not as a society harness the vision or talents of a large cadre of accomplished women.

Now let's look at women's leadership in a global context, where a different pattern emerges. We live in a global society whose challenges include rising terrorism, the threat of nuclear annihilation, ecological degradation, population increases in areas of the world least able to feed their inhabitants, and antagonism between ethnic groups no longer held together by the existence of nation states.

At the same time, while rapidly developing scientific and technological advances have fostered mobilization and transformed our lives, it is increasingly clear that our ethical systems are unable to deal with many of the consequences of such transformation. None of these profound challenges respects political borders. They are truly global issues, creating, in the words of former Czech president Vaclav Havel, a world in which everything is possible and nothing is certain.

Who will lead us in addressing these global challenges? It is my contention that women will be absolutely crucial for two reasons. First, women are disproportionately affected by the global challenges I have described. The overwhelming majority of the 1 billion people around the world who live in poverty are women. Women constitute two-thirds of the global's illiterate people. Women frequently have no control over matters of reproduction and they are often denied adequate health care.

Women and children comprise 80 percent of the world's refugees. Women are frequently excluded from decision-making processes affecting the environment, despite the fact that as consumers, producers, caretakers and educators, they could play a crucially important role in sustainable development. For these issues to be successfully addressed, women must be part of the solution.

But there is a second reason that women are crucial to addressing the challenges of the 21st century. Women are particularly suited for the global leadership that is essential to the earth's welfare. Globalization is requiring all of us to reconceptualize our very notion of leadership.

Nancy Adler, a management theorist, has observed, and I quote, "Global leaders do not enjoy the simplified reality that their domestic predecessors enjoyed of speaking primarily to people from one culture, one country, one organization, or one discipline. Global leaders must be able to communicate in terms of what is common sense and commonplace for people worldwide. They must communicate in the most fundamental terms of humanity. What is important for 21st century leadership is that society, if it is to survive as a civilization, can no longer tolerate nor support the leadership of self-aggrandizement at the expense of the greater, now highly interrelated, whole, at the expense of the world's entire population and its physical, spiritual, and natural environment."

There is a large body of social science research suggesting that many women have the traits that are essential for global leadership. Women tend to have an orientation toward the collective interest and toward integrative goals such as group cohesiveness and stability, a preference for open and cooperative relationships rather than hierarchical ones, and an interest in actualizing values and relationships. Women tend, in the words of writer May Sarton, to see things whole.

By contrast, traits culturally ascribed to many men include being efficient, hierarchical, tough-minded, and assertive. They are more interested, she says, in taking charge, in control, and in domination.

Evidence of the efficacy of women's global leadership can already be seen in business. Some observers have noted that American women tend to perform much better in global business environments than American men. Why is this the case? Charles Hampton Turner, a Cambridge management scholar, has said the following. "America's ultramasculine corporate value system has been losing touch progressively with the wider world. It needs a change of values desperately or it will continue to underperform and continue to lose touch with the value systems of foreigners, which ironically are much closer to the values in which American women are raised. American women who are socialized to display values antithetical yet complimentary to American men have within their culture vitally important cures for American economic decline."

Women's leadership traits acquire particular importance in a world economy that is moving from mass production capitalism to customization. Adler writes, "Whereas the more typically American male universalistic approach, treating everyone the same according to codified rules, worked well for mass producing products such as jeans, Cokes, and hamburgers sold to a mass domestic market, a more typically female approach works best for developing products and services such as software, which must be tailored to the individual client and his or her particular needs."

Many have observed that women leaders are more likely to be driven by vision than by a desire for personal aggrandizement or status. Anita Roddick, founder and CEO of the familiar Body Shop, a successful global business, seems to understand this well. She says, "Leaders in the business world should aspire to be true planetary citizens. They have global responsibilities, since their decisions affect not just the world of business, but world problems of poverty, national security, and the environment. Many, sad to say, have ducked these responsibilities because their vision is material rather than moral."

Nothing has made the distinction between material and moral more obvious than the corporate scandals of the past two years. It is no surprise that Time Magazine's 2002 people of the year are the three women who, at great personal risk, blew the whistle at Enron, WorldCom, and the FBI, blew the whistle on corporate greed, malfeasance, and cover-ups.

The strength of women's leadership is also being seen on a grass-roots level, where it typically enjoys no formal authority. Jill Benderly, a journalist who covered movements for social change across eastern Europe, and who has developed programs across ethnic and national borders in Yugoslav successor states, observes, "Because women have historically been excluded from most forms of power, women often have a different view of power. They are less entrenched in structures and thus more willing to reorganize hierarchies or institutional affiliation, to cross ethnic or national boundaries and borders, and to foster alliances that decrease conflict and increase stability."

She notes that women in the Balkans, in Ruanda, and in the horn of Africa have often been the first to work across volatile ethnic and political borders.

Women's association with the values of empowerment, relationship, and community may also be the reason for the election of an unprecedented number of women prime ministers and presidents in countries around the globe during the 1990s. Interestingly, the 21 countries that elected them are diverse, including, for example, Sri Lanka, Ireland, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Norway, Nicaragua, and Ruanda, and they include four women prime ministers from Muslim countries.

What accounts for this rather astonishing ascendancy of women political leaders outside the United States, I would note? Adler believes that the election of women leaders symbolizes hope, change, and a desire for unity for the people and societies who choose them.

Ireland's Mary Robinson addressed that desire for unity and the bridging of differences in her presidential acceptance speech. She said, "I was elected by men and women of all parties and none. By many with great moral courage who stepped out from the faded flags of civil war and voted for a new Ireland. And above all, by the women of Ireland who, instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system, and who came out massively to make their mark on the ballot paper and on a new Ireland."

The election of Violeta Chamorro of Nicaragua and Corazon Aquino in the Philippines also illustrate the expectation that women leaders will bridge conflict. There seems to be no question but that the world needs women leaders and that they are well suited to the task of 21st century leadership.

But what does this mean for all of us in this room today, the heads of schools and colleges that educate women? I do not think it too grandiose to say that we have in our hands as educators nothing less than the future of the world. As we look out at our entering classes of girls and women each fall, we are very likely looking at many of the political and professional and spiritual leaders of the next generation. And because we are the heads of women-centered institutions, we have a special opportunity and a special obligation to shape the global leadership that is so essential to our survival as a civilization. For it is in our schools that women find their voices. Throughout history, beginning with the scriptural admonition demanding silence, submission and procreation, women have been denied their voices. In 17th-century America, women who engaged in disruptive speech were gagged or submerged publicly in bodies of water.

We are not so far away from the time that public speech was considered immodest and when women were denied the capacity to read and to write. Given this history, should it surprise us that researchers have found the teachers pay more attention to what boys have to say in the classroom, or that the three women who exposed Enron, WorldCom, and the FBI should be receiving personal threats?

But our schools begin with the assumption that women have important things to say. And that it is their right -- nay, their obligation -- to speak their minds and critically analyze the world around them.

Global leadership requires a strong voice. It is our schools that preserve the legacy of female leaders and scholars who came before through alumni networks and a curriculum that includes the history and achievements of women.

In our schools, every adult a young woman encounters, whether that adult is male or female, has the expectation that she will excel and that she will lead. It is assumed that she will successfully meet the rigorous academic standards that characterize our institutions. And it is assumed that she will take leadership positions as a part of her responsibility to her community.

What is especially powerful in women's schools is that all of the leadership positions are held by women. Whether on the athletic field, in student government, in clubs, in the classroom, or in community service, our students go forth into the world with full confidence in their own capacity to lead.

Finally, it is in our schools that students learn responsibility and ethics, learn their obligations to the entire human family, not just to themselves or their social class or their country. They learn courage. They learn the concept of honor. They learn compassion.

As Shep indicated, at Randolph-Macon Women's College we have made it our mission to produce global leaders. We have deliberately created a microcosm of the world with students from 45 states and 47 foreign countries, representing 24 languages and several religious traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism.

We have augmented our faculty with international scholars, and we have embarked on ambitious faculty development programs to ensure that all of our faculty have direct experience with the people and cultures of the rest of the globe.

We have created several interdisciplinary academic programs, among them environmental studies, that directly address global challenges, and an American culture program that includes the examination of our society's relationship to the rest of the world.

We have created the Pearl S. Buck Award to honor our most famous alumna, and to recognize contemporary women who exemplify Pearl Buck's values and humanitarian ideals. As a result, speakers including Corazon Aquino, former president of the Philippines, Sheikh Hasina, former president of Bangladesh, and Jahan Sadat, a proponent of Middle East peace and women's rights, are on our campus interacting with our students.

Randolph-Macon Women's College students live together, study together, and work together, as do many of your students, in a small residential environment that gives them daily practice in bridging cultural difference. We were not the least bit surprised that on September 11th students from all faith traditions spontaneously joined together to create a vigil that gave voice to the nonviolent tenets of their beliefs.

Our Muslim student group was recently awarded a competitive grant for the development of a workshop called "Pathways to Understanding," a dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims that was offered to 200 students and faculty from other colleges and members of the local community.

Approximately half of our students now study or do internships or do research abroad, and we intend to make that figure be 100 percent. We are greatly assisted in that effort by gifts of more than a million dollars from alumnae who understand the need for global leadership. Sixteen academic departments have created special international seminars for students in such places as Prague, South Africa, Tunisia, and China.

One of our juniors interned at a research institute of the European union in Brussels. Another student researcher was granted permission to be an observer at the Milosevic trial at the Hague. Two seniors are selected every year to teach English in Prague and two also in Shouzhou, China. It is our hope that when our graduates are asked where they are from, they respond as did Diogenes in the third century, BC, when he said, "I am a citizen of the world."

What gives me great hope is to look out at all of you in sister institutions, in full confidence that you are embarked in your own ways on creating educational environments in which women's global leadership is being developed and shaped. If you take nothing else from this talk, I hope you take an enhanced sense of the importance of the work that you do. For as secretary general of the United Nations Kofi Annan has said, the future of the world belongs to women. Thank you very much.

MS. LEE: Dr. Bowman is willing to take questions, and the microphones are on the floor if you would like to use them. Comments are welcome, too, she just said.

Well, I think we're all just speechless with admiration. Thank you so much.

Cocktails and dinner are at 6:30 in the main building, and we expect to see you all there, and have a wonderful time. We are really moving along at a rapid clip.

Sunday, February 23, 2003 OPENING BANQUET.

MS. LEE: If this were Dallas, I'd say grace now, but I'm not going to. I want to recognize several people who are here with us.

First of all, I want to recognize our honorary members who are here. And I'm going to do it in alphabetical order. I'd like you to stand. Hold your applause until the end. Diane Beebe, Evy Halpert, Nancy Kussrow, Joan McMenamin, Blair Stambaugh, Joan Twaddle, Aggie Underwood, and Julia Williams. Thank you for coming. We're honored that you're here.

Representing the Canadian Association is Susan Both, who's already a member, from St. Mildred's Lightbourne. Susan, please stand, so we can welcome you.

Now, we have had to change the program.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Women are very flexible.

MS. LEE: JoAnn Deak is unable to be here. So because it makes perfect sense, we are moving the panel called "How We Encourage Leadership: What Are The Barriers?" We're moving that to JoAnn Deak's time slot, which is first thing tomorrow, 9:00. And then Tasha Elsbach from Brearley, will talk about what inspires and supports emergent leaders. So it makes perfect sense.

And then we have Peggy Orenstein, who's the author of School Girls and Flux, and she is speaking on women trying to do it all. And then we're going to have, at 11:00, where the panel would be, an interpretive dance. Now, I am not going to tell you who is going to do the interpretive dance. I'm just going to tell you to be here at 11:00 and you will be riveted.

Now, I'm going to turn this over to Keith Shahan, who has an announcement. I don't know what his announcement is.

MR. SHAHAN: You may remember that the theme of this conference is women's leadership, inspiration and improvisation. This organization really only has two functions, and those are to put on this annual meeting and to sponsor the career seminar for women. Both are dedicated to serve the cause of women's education and enhance women's leadership in making the world a better place. Someday, when those of us who love this organization think back over the various venues and conferences, I believe we will remember especially fondly last year's meeting in Napa and this year's in Ponte Vedra, for many reasons, most notably, the fine programs and great locations.

In addition, however, these two meetings have had extra spark because they were held under the leadership of Liza Lee, our outgoing president.

Tonight, on behalf of the membership, I would like to thank you, Liza, for your leadership. We have already heard this afternoon how the world needs more women leaders, and given the present state of affairs, it is hard to argue with that. But given our experience with Liza and NAPSG, we certainly could use more leaders like her.

Liza, you are an incredible role model for the girls at your school, but also for all of us. You have a way of leading that makes people have a good time being led. You are firm, yet generous. You combine a sharp wit with a warm heart. You are dynamically persuasive, playfully imperious, sweetly irascible, constantly amusing, brilliant, energetic, and kind. You have been a great leader. I want to please have you accept this gift from all of us, and let's all of us show our appreciation for our outgoing leader, Ms. Liza Lee.

MS. LEE: I want to thank you all. I'm rarely speechless, but I am now. So all I can say is, thank you. What a wonderful evening. I only wish my children were here.

Susan Both is going to bring us greetings from the Canadian association. Thank you. Thank you.

MS. BOTH: Thank you, Liza, and good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and greetings from the Canadian Association of Independent Schools. We are delighted to be here.

We are here in number of about half a dozen, I believe, and we're delighted for three reasons, I think, to be here. First, because you have put together an outstanding program and we want to thank the conference committee for that great program. I'm waiting for the dance.

Secondly, we're here because we know that we have an opportunity as Canadians to speak with colleagues from across America and we're delighted for that opportunity.

And third because despite what Dr. Bowman said this afternoon, it's a lot worse in Canada. It was 18 degrees Fahrenheit at 6:00 a.m. this morning in Toronto, where I'm mostly from, and snowing, not raining. And as bad as 36 and rain is, 18 and snow is worse, Dr. Bowman.

So we are thrilled to be here.

The Canadian Association of Independent Schools includes amongst its membership 23 percent of its schools being devoted to single-gender education for girls and young women. We are 8,000 pupils strong in terms of the 17 schools that are single-gender schools, and we are learners, as all of you are, and delighted to be here tonight to be learners with you, and delighted with you to share in this camaraderie. Thank you.

I'm glad Deborah had a good time when she was in Canada. We are certainly having a good time being here with you. Thank you very much, and congratulations to you.

Monday, February 24, 2003 TASHA ELSBACH.

MS. LEE: Good morning. We have another change in our program, which is that Tasha Elsbach, who is one of the most flexible people you will ever meet, is going to start off our program. She will be introduced by Priscilla Winn Barlow, headmistress at Brearley, where Tasha works, but Carol has some housekeeping announcements.

MS. LANE: Those of you who signed up for St. Augustine will pick up your box lunches right out here, and the bus will be right in front of the Conference Center. I will ask you, if you have decided not to go on the tour, to please take your lunch anyway, because the buffet lunch is set up only for a certain number of people. That is, the people who are not going on the tour.

For those of you who are taking the buffet lunch, I believe that the resort is providing boxes so that you can put together your own box lunch from the buffet, if you'd like to take it out to eat it outside or whatever. The buffet lunch will be back in the dining room where we had dinner last night.

The cocktail hour tonight is a rather informal cash bar, and it will be in the regular bar of the hotel. We've not set aside a separate place because I know not a lot of you will be there. But you are certainly welcome to go into the bar and to overflow into the lounge for the time tonight.

I have made dinner reservations at two local restaurants for ten people each. The signup sheets are out on the registration table. If it's filled up, please don't add your name. The reservations are for ten. There are directions to get to the restaurants. They're not far away. I have eaten at both of them, and they are quite wonderful. But you will have to provide your own transportation. So you can put together a carpool or whatever you'd like.

In addition, there are sheets of paper out there that the hotel has provided, giving descriptions and phone numbers for local restaurants if you want to make reservations on your own. Also, there are two restaurants on the property, the one at the Golf Club and the Surf Club, just a little ways down the road here, easy walking distance, and the resort has offered to open that restaurant for us specially, because it's not usually open on Monday night.

But they do request, please, that if you're going to eat in either of the restaurants onsite, that you make reservations through the concierge.

I put yellow cards out on the table for you to jot down any questions or topics that you would like to discuss in your special interest groups, and if you have any ideas that you want to discuss, put it on the card, put the name of the group leader on the reverse side. Those names are in your program. Put it back on the table, and I will see that the group leaders get the cards for the topics to be discussed tomorrow.

Any faxes or anything that come in to you during the day here we will put out on the registration table, as well, so that you don't have to wait until you get back to your rooms to get them.

So I hope that takes care of everything, and if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them during the break. Thanks.

MS. LEE: Priscilla, I'm turning the meeting over to you.

MS. BARLOW: Good morning. Gosh. I think all of us have probably have had to be a little bit flexible and certainly I have, because I set out with a beautifully crafted introduction of Tasha. Then I guess I derobed and did everything else in security, decomputered, de-everything, and probably somebody at security at LaGuardia is now reading this lovely account of Tasha, plus the bylaws of NAPSG. I'm sure they're having a lovely time.

Anyway, I had to rewrite something, and here we go.

Tasha who is the head of our middle school, graduated from Yale with a BA in history in 1991. She had previously been educated in the New York area. She then decided to go out to California and taught at Branson as an interim position with the Multicultural Alliance. She then went to Marin Country Day for a year's sabbatical replacement, and then finally went to Presidio School in Presidio Hill, in San Francisco.

During her time there, she was granted a full year-long scholarship for the Klingenstein at Columbia. She was one of nine scholars across the country who were granted this full-year scholarship. She studied educational leadership and administration.

She then returned to Presidio Hills for a year and it was during this time, in 1999, that we at Brearley came across her and she is my first on-line hire. Wonderful. She was part of the diversity network, which is an on-line thing, and there was Tasha's name and it all looked wonderful, so we dragged her over to Brearley.

Once we met her, we realized what tremendous potential this young woman had, or at least many of us did. There are always naysayers. Aren't there naysayers at your school? They pointed out that she was probably only 30 at that time, that she had had a few years' experience but certainly not experience in a school like Brearley, and so on and so forth.

Anyway, there were those of us who stuck by our guns and hired her, understanding that it was a little risky, perhaps, to have somebody so young run the middle school. But I can tell you, the really nice ending of the story is that she proved me right. She has great potential, she's fulfilling that potential, and she is beginning now her third year as the head of the middle school, to form a most wonderful middle school community. Her vision, the vision thing, is working, and she is terrific.

So I'm delighted to introduce her, because I think she is one of the young and upcoming people in independent schools. Looking at the title of her talk, it says something about supporting and inspiring. And we'll see whether she thinks that we have supported and inspired her over the last three years.

MS. ELSBACH: Thank you, Priscilla.

Thank you. Good morning. I'm learning how to use this podium. It's all firsts for me, so give me a moment here to adjust.

It was June 6th, 2002, 8:00 a.m. I took one last look down at my suit jacket to see that it was buttoned properly and to confirm that I had a copy of my speech in my hand. Then I left my office and started down the stairs to the assembly hall.

It was an hour before the middle school Last Day ceremony, and the auditorium was already beginning to fill up with parents who were putting their coats on seats and saving them.

Next I walked over to Ken, the head of the computer department, to check on the status of the closed-circuit TV. I wanted to know if our tech crew had really managed, for the first time, to make it possible for the Last Day ceremonies to be simulcast from the assembly hall to the common room, the room being used for overflow parents. This was an important accommodation for me to make in order to smooth the pathway for the changes I had made to the ceremonious rite of passage.

Last Day is Brearley's name for eighth-grade graduation or stepup day. The event had traditionally involved a lot of preparation on the part of the students, the music department, and the head of class 8. All middle school families, fifth through eighth grades, were accustomed to being invited to attend this event, and over the years parents had organized class parties to take place after the ceremony as a way to say good-bye for the summer.

But in my first year at the school, I was troubled by several aspects of the way Last Day was handled, most seriously, the fact that there were two ceremonies, one for the fifth and sixth grade, and one for the seventh and eighth grade.

The reason they had been split was the lack of space in the assembly hall. The middle school had grown over the years and a new facilities director had finally cracked down. We were in serious violation of the fire codes. However, this legal justification did not relieve my concern, especially after I actually experienced the event myself.

The first fifth-and-sixth-grade Last Day left me dismayed. Very few faculty members were there, and the primary activity of the assembly was to sing and perform music. There were no meaningful speeches or poems spoken or read by the girls or by any teachers or administrators. The whole thing was over relatively quickly and I was left wondering what the purpose of it was.

An hour later I was back sitting in the front row of the auditorium ready to experience my first seventh-and-eighth-grade Last Day. This time I got really excited. In addition to all the other wonderful music, the eighth grade had a song they wanted to perform, as was the tradition. As they picked a particularly moving John Lennon piece, the girls all ended up in tears as they were reminded of the fact that a number of them would graduate and move on to co-ed and boarding schools.

My favorite part of the ceremony involved speeches given by the eighths talking about their memories of middle school. They were creative, idealized, raw, and funny. The girls had really been given a chance to say what they felt was important. By the end I was impressed and moved, and I turned to Priscilla and I said, "We are never going to have these separate ceremonies again. The fives and sixes should be here to experience this, and see their role models move on." Priscilla absolutely agreed with me.

Upon my arrival at Brearley, one of my goals had been to help the middle school carve out a distinct identity separate from that of both the lower and upper school. The symbolism of two separate ceremonies was absolutely antithetical to what I was trying to accomplish. The decision to reunify the ceremonies was my first significant exercise of authority as the middle school head at Brearley. I had decided to do this at the very end of my first year at the school, a year dedicated to learning and observing school structures, customs, and traditions. I wasn't giving much thought at the time to the ramifications of my decision, but certainly the challenges of making a change like this lay ahead of me.

I was never a person who thought I would be in this position of authority. So how did I get to where I am now, in this traditional girls' school, doing what I do?

I was asked to talk today about emerging leaders, and I'd like to talk to you about the path I have taken, the obstacles I have faced, the aspects of this work that inspire me, and the ongoing challenges that I face.

I grew up learning to be extremely critical and analytical of authority. I don't take what I hear for granted. I question it and need time to chew on it. Thus I have always tended to question authority and not take seriously the importance of status.

I think my parents, both consciously and unconsciously, raised me to be this way. My father is a white Jewish Marxist who was shaped by the '60s. He saw conspiracies and coverups of local and national governments, including Watergate. For my whole life I have listened to my father's stories of his trip to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, and what it was like to campaign for the first Puerto Rican city council member in New York City.

My mother, a social worker, who is African-American and grew up in Mississippi, came to New York in the '60s and listened to the dialogue of the counter-culture. I was raised listening to left-wing radio -- WBAI, for those of you who are real New Yorkers -- and to a lesser extent NPR.

Both of my parents raised me to question the mainstream and the establishment. Of course, their inter-racial marriage in 1967 was also a statement in itself about how they viewed society's messages of what was right and wrong.

In raising me to question organized hierarchical authority, my parents were also attempting to give me the strong message that I had the power to make change, and that my voice and opinions were important. My parents also reinforced this message by bringing the feminist movement into our home. They brought us books like Girls are People, Too. I really like that book, actually. And I distinctly remember the excitement around Billie Jean King's victory. I grew up truly feeling pride in being a girl, and I was also tuned in to gender inequalities.

I remember in high school confronting my beloved history teacher and cross-country coach about unequal treatment that we as the girls' cross-country team felt we were getting. We talked to him as a group, and it was a wonderful experience. He truly hadn't even noticed what he was doing, and he was apologetic and made real changes.

What we found that was happening is that he would go with the boys' cross-country coach to the start line. He would take their clothes for them, he would say, "Good luck," and for the girls he'd say, "Okay, see ya," and we would make our way out to the start line by ourselves and put our clothes in a pile. We felt like we were being neglected, so we felt like we needed to address this issue with him, and he was really wonderful about it.

My parents encouraged my sister and me to pursue whatever career path we were interested in. Of course, when I got to Yale, I found out that my mother was not as liberal as I thought, and that she did not mean to include the nonlucrative field of education, but by that point I had already learned her lessons too well for her to control me.

Regardless, between high school and college I envisioned myself doing various jobs that I imagined would help people and society at large. Thus at different times I imagined myself pursuing a premed path, prelaw path, but over time, I began to feel that those fields were too rigid and I thought I would feel stifled in those environments. Ultimately, I was drawn to teaching because I imagined it to be a creative job and one in which you could, as an individual, have a real impact on students and institutions.

I spent the bulk of my full-time teaching career as a middle school history teacher at Presidio Hills School, the perfect place for a person who considered herself to be somewhat counter-culture. Presidio Hills School is a unique progressive school in San Francisco. When I was there, it was a small and homey co-ed K-through-8 school.

This is where I began to develop a 360-degree view of schools, critical for doing administrative work. I was expected to get involved in life outside of my classroom. PHS was a teaching cooperative, which means that all teachers were also administrators. We worked cooperatively to both develop and implement plans for different aspects of school life. We worked with the whole school on issues such as curriculum mapping and development across the grades, diversity, the annual budget, and strategic planning.

Getting this kind of experience allowed me to gain insight into various aspects of what makes a school work and develop a true sense that schools should always be thinking about what is working and what should be improved.

Working on the budget, in particular, gave me a tremendous sense of ownership and responsibility. I still remember so clearly the experience of sitting with the budget and trying to decide what salaries and tuitions would be for the next year. This put us right at the heart of the question, who is the school for? Should we raise tuition 7 percent to help pay for a 4 percent raise? Trying to balance the interests of the various constituents, ourselves being one of them, was challenging work that we did not take lightly. We could picture the faces of all the families in our classes and know how raising tuition would affect their households. At the same time, we knew how hard we worked and how much we gave to our students, and we did not want to short-change ourselves or the program. We did not want to price parents out and we wanted to honor and value teachers.

Grappling with these issues forced me to look at the school from multiple perspectives. In addition to working on whole-school issues, the middle school team worked cooperatively without an appointed division head to plan middle school life. Thus, I had a tremendous amount of direct parent interaction. I did many parent conferences and worked on the high school application and placement process. I handled discipline cases and acted as the school counselor. There was no intermediary or firewall between the parents and me. Thus, over time I learned how to give honest, direct, and compassionate feedback.

What I didn't realize at the time was that although I was working in a consensus-based environment, I was actually building skills that I needed to be an authority figure. Equipped with all these beliefs about consensus, collaboration, and the hard work it takes to run a school, I headed off to New York for the Klingenstein Fellowship, something my head of school encouraged me to do. I planned to learn more about educational administration and bring this back to share with my school, as we were considering creating a middle school coordinator position.

The year at Teachers College gave me critical time for reflection and professional growth, something that we all know is difficult to do during the school year. It afforded me the opportunity to get off the stage of the daily intensity of work and step up on the balcony, a notion of Ron Heifiz', to get some perspective and frameworks for understanding my professional experiences. The small cohort of fellows reflected upon our own work in schools and broadened our understanding of the educational landscape. We did this through debating issues, visiting different types of schools -- public, private, parochial and charter schools -- and through the writing we did for our classes.

I became more knowledgeable about the skills needed to be an effective administrator and leader, and I became much more aware of the fact that there were many different ways to give students an excellent education.

In addition to all of this learning, something much deeper and transformative happened for me. My graduate school experience helped me to bridge the gap between how I saw myself and how I envisioned administrative work. My image of myself as being someone who worked outside of traditional authority was challenged as I began to have my stereotypes of authority and leadership shattered.

This paradigm shift or shifting of mental modules, as Peter Senge might call it, happened on a number of levels. One assumption I had made about administrators is that they were people who were essentially born with leadership character and skills. I definitely did not see myself this way. I saw myself as more of a bull in a china shop character. I tend to speak my mind, sometimes a little too passionately. I didn't think this way of being and lack of political savvy was something that school leaders had.

In grad school I met a variety of people in different stages of their careers and realized that aspiring leaders and practicing leaders had a wide range of personalities and experiences. I also found out that I could learn to develop certain leadership qualities.

The other stereotype I had about leadership came directly from my Presidio Hills experience. Working at PHS had shaped me to see power, titles, and organizational hierarchy as essentially evil. Okay. Probably my parents also had something to do with that, but through Pearl Kane's course on private school administration, I began to think about power differently. We spent a good deal of time talking about how to view organizations through different lenses, a la Bowman and Deal. I moved from seeing administrative positions as jobs people wanted simply in order to make more money and to have a title to impress people with, to seeing them as places from which one could potentially make significant organizational changes, as a way to give students more meaningful educational experiences. If one used one's power well, you could help empower others to grow and facilitate change.

One of the other images in my head that I had to overcome was that of the private school administrator as someone who was ethnically white. Even though I went to predominantly white schools and was never intimidated, nor did I ever feel that I couldn't accomplish something because of my race, I still had to move past thinking that independent schools might not be entirely welcoming of a young woman of color in a position of power.

Overcoming all of these stereotypes and assumptions was essential in my being able to see myself as being able to do a more traditional administrative job. And figuring out all of this helped me to see that there was potentially a place for a person like me, a person who loved working with students and loved problem-solving with parents.

After my Klingenstein experience when I went on the job market, I found myself interested in traditional schools because of what I now understood. I was interested in the challenges that a middle school head position would bring.

What are the obstacles I have had to overcome in moving into a more traditional administrative position? As you can imagine, and as Priscilla mentioned, hiring me was a bold move for a school like Brearley. My work experience could not have been, on paper, more seemingly incompatible with the expectations that a century-old New York private girls' school had for its next middle school head, one to follow the previous head of 17 years. I had no official job title other than teacher, and I came from this funky little school that took a paragraph to explain in my résumé.

But the beauty of giving someone an interview is that you give yourself the chance to be surprised. I too was surprised. I was interested in middle school head positions, but I wasn't sure that Brearley was the place for me. My assumption, based on Brearley's tremendous reputation and my San Francisco bias, was that the school would be a pretentious place that oozed elitism. Thus I went into my first interview on that snowy, I think, February afternoon, somewhat irreverent, thinking, take me or leave me but I won't pretend to be something that I'm not. I didn't think that would really benefit me, actually, or the school.

What I found was that I really enjoyed talking to everyone I met, faculty, staff, and students. There was an openness and willingness to talk about both what worked and what didn't. That impressed me. I ended up feeling that I actually had something to offer Brearley, that my experiences with middle school advisory programs, parent communication, and teaching in a way that honored and explored issues of diversity, could actually help Brearley move forward in its evolution.

Perhaps the biggest difference in my work, once I came to Brearley, was that as much as I wanted to use my collaborative leadership style, I had to do things on my own. This was difficult for me because I wanted to try to find places where I could use my collaborative work experience to empower others to assume and share responsibility with me. But my new colleagues seemed unused to working in shared collaborations. There were instances when they wanted specific clear-cut guidance and unequivocal answers from me. Imagine that. New adjustment.

I have continued to hold on to this vision of decision-making, but what I have realized is that leading requires a combination of both authoritative and collaborative decision-making. I have to keep learning how to develop others by sensing and taking care of their needs, bolstering their abilities, giving critical feedback, and building bonds.

Learning to cast off and make decisions based on my own hopefully good judgment doesn't mean that I haven't turned to others for help and support. I have been fortunate to work with an experienced group of administrators who have been very willing to think problems through with me. I also have a good group of friends, including a strong network of teachers and administrators of color, whom I have met through Klingenstein Fellowship, People of Color Conference, and even the ISM Middle School Heads Workshop, to whom I can turn for advice.

September 2001. The next school year I began to work on how to unify the two Last Day events. I first tried to figure out how we could logistically put all four grades together in the assembly hall. I worked with the activities coordinator to find out the maximum capacity of the hall. After working up those numbers and the approximate number of parents in all four grades, I found, of course, that we were way over the limit, just as I had already been told. I ruled out finding a larger space outside of the building after conversations with the upper school head, who had also ruled it out years before for upper school Last Day. That was senior graduation.

Then I came up with my first solution. Remove the fifth grade from the event and allow all students in the rest of the grades to have two members of their family attend.

When I approached the fifth grade home room teachers about this, I tried to sell them on the idea of having a more meaningful and cozier gathering with their students and parents, and explaining that this might make sense, that the parents had never been to a middle school Last Day anyway, and we could start a new tradition. As you can imagine, they hated this idea and felt like they were being excluded.

The plan I finally settled on allowed each eighth grader to have two family members attend, with more tickets given to divorced families, if needed, and all other middle school students to have one family member attend.

Next, I needed to work on writing a letter to the parents informing them of this change. I circulated a draft to all my administrative colleagues, who were extremely helpful and willing to give advice on everything from nailing down the exact wording of the pedagogical reasons for this reunification to the logistics of ticket distribution.

When this letter finally went into the mail, I calculated how many days of calm I had before the storm. I knew I only had a day or two. Even though the New York postal service is bad, it's not that bad. I wasn't exactly sure what the storm would be like. I knew the eighth-grade families would be fine, but I knew the rest of the middle school would be unhappy.

The storm began in the form of little raindrop notes written on the sheets families were supposed to return to my office if they wanted the one ticket available to them. What became typical was a form that had the box for one ticket checked, with a handwritten blurb next to it that went something like, "I disagree with this decision." Then more formal notes and letters were sent. "I am disappointed in this decision. This is putting my daughter in the horrible position of having to choose between her two parents. I hope you will reconsider this."

Another note read, "Our family has always attended the Last Day ceremony, as this is one of the few times we make it a point to stop our busy schedules and come to the school. It is our way of celebrating the fact that we have completed another year. We have so few opportunities for this."

Finally, some phone calls came in to my assistant inquiring if there would be extra tickets, and if so, could she notify them.

Fifth-grade parents seemed most upset. It seemed to them the final blow in a tough year of transition from the warm and welcoming lower school to the cold, distancing, and homework-laden middle school atmosphere. I tried to emphasize that this event was primarily for the girls. They needed this annual rite of passage to understand their own growth and to celebrate the successful completion of another year, and to watch their role models, the eighth graders, who were leaders and in all of the organizations they participated in. They needed to see them move on.

Well, ultimately, it was two fifth-grade class reps who came up with the idea of setting up a simulcast and using the common room upstairs on the first floor for any parents who wanted to come but didn't have a ticket.

There was a lot of pressure for that Last Day ceremony to go well. As you can imagine, I felt incredibly nervous, and thankfully, it did go well. The place was packed, probably due to the hype. The girls spoke incredibly eloquently about their experiences. I even gave a short speech, as I had promised Priscilla I would do.

After the event, many parents and faculty members congratulated me on how exciting the ceremony had been. One mother of a sixth grader said, "Now I know why you wanted to do this."

Parents who had watched the simulcast also enjoyed it. They said it gave them a chance to watch, eat, and socialize.

Certainly not everything was perfect. I did get a note passed on to me from the development office from a family explaining they were not going to give the money that they had pledged to the annual fund because of the new one-parent Last Day policy.

Perhaps I could have handled the PR part of this issue with the parents better. But regardless of how I had handled the situation, change would likely have brought loss for someone, and that can be difficult.

Through this process, I learned that I could draw upon my experience and knowledge as a middle school teacher and professional to make a decision and then, as an administrator, I could make it happen both through collaborative and authoritarian decision-making. In this situation, I was able to find the strength to stand up to the backlash I knew I would face. This is not always so easy for me, as a relatively new administrator, but I hope, as I continue in this job, to keep planting the seeds of my vision and trying to work with others to see that they can come to fruition. Thank you.

Q-and-A portion? I don't know if anyone has questions or comments. But I when I wrote this, I thought, okay, I'm speaking only for myself, but I hope that through my story, there are hints at what helps people to move into these type of positions. It was interesting because the end of my speech, the parts about Brearley, of course, were the hardest parts to write because that's the part of my life that I have the least distance on. So I kept grappling with what direction to go in, and I realize I didn't talk a lot about my experiences since I have come to Brearley and what that's been like, but I'm happy to answer any questions people have on any aspect of my life or job.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: A comment. Hearing you helps support those of us who want to hire young people sometime in a field and are skittish about it.

MS. BEEBE: It seems to me that one of the things that prepared you best for taking on this leadership role was your experience partaking in leadership decisions at Presidio, and how in some of our schools I think we spend so much time shielding our teachers from our parents, who appear to be very intimidating, very demanding, and clearly, that was a life-shaping experience for you, among many other things. But are you in the process of trying to incorporate some of that model at Brearley? And if so, how are people responding to that?

MS. ELSBACH: That's a great question. I never knew the word "firewall" could be associated with an administrative position until I came to Brearley. But when I came, what I began to understand is that Brearley was a school that had come from a tradition where the administrators truly were that firewall between parents and faculty members. And my understanding, as it's been told to me, is that Brearley really had been traditionally a school where parents were very happy to drop their children off at the door, they were so happy that they had gotten into this tremendous school, they would say, "Good-bye, I trust you," and that would be it. They'd come and pick them up at the end of the day.

You know, I wasn't there. I don't know if this is true or not. I'm sure there was controversy and strife. I'm looking at Ms. Halpert. I'm sure she would attest to the fact that there has been controversy and strife between parents and faculty for ages.

But I think we're at a time when that pendulum has swung, and obviously parents expect much more communication from the schools. I think at all schools, regardless of whether you do a weekly letter, a monthly letter, people want more. They want to understand better. And there seems to be this constant communication gap and rumor mill, at least at our school.

So now to answer your question about how I have tried to bring my experience to Brearley, I have. And I think part of it is that my job truly would not be feasible if I did every single phone call back to parents about a question about math, a question about history. So I think being new was helpful in that way, and I would say, "Oh, can you call this parent back? Would you mind?"

And as I got to know parents better, I was better able to figure out which parents were easy parents to call back, and I would say, "Oh, she's really great. There will be no problem. Please do this. They would love to hear from you. You'll do great." So I tried to do a lot of encouraging around that.

And at Brearley, I also do all the parent conferences, for the most part, and so there is that additional firewall that I have been trying to loosen up. My predecessor started to have the sixth-grade home room teachers do parent conferences with her, and I have continued that, and I'm trying to pull in other home room teachers and other teachers. So there seems to be a loosening-up of this firewall a little bit. I have been doing it on a case-by-case basis, really.

But I have also expressed my views about the absurdity of it at certain times.

MS. BENNETT: You spoke about how your parents influenced your attitudes about authority, but you didn't mention anything about schooling. I wondered where you went to school, grade school and high school, and how your ideas about authority were influenced by your personal schooling.

MS. ELSBACH: I went to public schools first. I was born in the city, and then grew up in Westchester County, and I went to public schools in Yorktown Heights and then Briarcliff. I went to Briarcliff High School, public school. And I loved school. I loved my teachers. I had a lot of close relationships with teachers, so I think I was one of those people who kind of broke down some of those boundaries. I had a lot of respect for my teachers, but I also really valued having closer relationship with them.

What else? When I was in high school; we used to think that Briarcliff Manor, although not a private school, was close to it, not that I knew anything about private schools. We used to talk about the fact that we thought it was a parentocracy -- we thought we were brilliant for making up this word -- because of some of the things that we started hearing the parents wanted to do.

I remember one time the track team went to some board meeting, I don't remember why, but it was about the track, but I think I was very aware of the fact that we needed to have more voices involved in the conversation, even when I was in high school, and I was pretty outspoken. And I didn't win the election to be student council president when I was a senior. So that didn't really help me. "It was a popularity contest."

MS. POWERS: Tasha, you obviously are very willing to move from one part of the country to take a job at a very different kind of school, and then to move to another part of the country, although back home, to take a job in another kind of school. What could we as school leaders do to encourage young people to take those kinds of professional risks, and what has been important to you as you move from one situation to another?

MS. ELSBACH: I think making the personal connection with the people who were applying is really important, making sure that those people who are looking at the resumes, are taking the phone calls, who are warm and fuzzy and are willing to really spend the time with those people who call to make the inquiries. That would be step one.

I think also some young people, including myself, have a really hard time projecting out what their career might be. I always hated doing that. I didn't want people to do that for me. But I think I really heard when people did try to say, "Well, if you do this, maybe you could end up here. I see this potential in you."

So I think if you're looking to hire new people or even if you're a head of school and you see talent in your building, I think telling people that is so important, giving the positive messages. It really goes a long way. And I'm hoping to be doing that myself. I don't know if I'm great at it, but what I have been trying to do is do more outreach myself. This speech is really kind of a landmark for me in terms of sharing my own personal experiences. But I think it's so important for us to be consciously aware of helping educate young people about career goals, about career paths, and what you see as their potential, because a lot of times people just have no idea and haven't thought about it, and so if someone takes the time to talk to them about it, it can really make a difference.

MS. UNDERWOOD: Going on just a little bit, one of the things we want to do, all of us, is to get young people to consider the career of teaching, and I do not know what your experience was at Yale, but a lot of the young women who graduated from my school that I talked to when they come back, at least in the 1990s, were talking about investment banking, law, and they looked at me as if I was nuts.

One time I had an assembly and it was Careers Day, and I was so stupid -- I was only 35 or 36 -- I said, "How many of you girls would like to be a headmistress?" Not one hand went up. Then I went on down to the teachers, where there were about three.

But I'd love your take on what people are -- are you an anomaly? We're hoping we can attract more people to the teaching profession and it may be easier now than it was in the '90s, but I'd love your comments on that topic.

MS. ELSBACH: Boy. I don't know if I can speak for everyone. Let's see.

I do think that the economy is changing things. I do think September 11th has changed things. I think world events are changing things for people. Not for everyone. There are people who want to make the almighty dollar. But I do think that my sense has been from reading newspapers and talking to, for example, Liz Fernandez, who runs the Diversity Job Fair in New York, that more and more young people are interested in teaching, more people are interested in changing careers, and I think it poses a really interesting dilemma for all of us because I think probably most of us in this room have really come up through the system. This is my twelfth year of teaching. I still teach a history class, and I'm of the view that, oh, the best way to get into this is for you to teach from an early age, and you keep teaching, and then you move into administrative positions.

And I think we have to somehow open ourselves up to this new wave like, for example, the New York teaching fellows. They are actually doing training of people who are moving from different careers, not dismissing those people out of hand like we do, when we look at their resumes and say, "Are you kidding me? Next," and looking for people who have the experience.

And you know, I struggle with this, too. I don't really know how we can do that, but I think we have to think about where our candidates are going to be coming from.

We have a wonderful internship program at our school, and I know probably some other schools do. I think that's been very helpful in giving people a chance to put their feet in the water in a safe way and teach and see if they like it or not. I think we have to give people a chance to experiment and not feel like they have to do it for the rest of their lives.

I don't know if you would agree, but I think our internship program -- we have it mostly in the lower school, but I know other schools have it. The Multicultural Alliance used to do this, where people had a lot of support and a chance to see what it was like to teach.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: How many of your faculty are considerably older than you are in the middle school, and has that caused any problem?

MS. ELSBACH: I don't know how many. A lot of people are older than me, definitely. Absolutely. I am ten years younger than any other top administrator at my school. And I definitely have faculty members who are older than me. But I think that our academic dean would say that she thinks that any issues have come more from the younger faculty members, not as much the older faculty members. And I haven't had so many issues. She probably knows more about it than I do. People will talk to her. I don't know anything. People don't talk to me. But it has been a challenge.

When I came to Brearley, I was 30 years old, moving to New York. I definitely had friends in New York, but when you spend 12 hours a day in one building, you would hope to develop some friendships with the people who work there. But I was very aware of the fact that I needed to keep some kind of boundary between me and the people who were my age. So that was a hard line to walk.

I think I'm more comfortable now with it, because I think, for me, I needed to trust that certain people were good teachers. Then if I knew that I was going to have to give them bad news, say that, "Oh, my gosh, this person shouldn't be teaching at this school," then I could kind of let down my guard and develop a closer relationship with people. But I think that has been for me a bigger challenge.

Definitely, though, I have those moments of being intimidated by certain department chairs and things like that. You know, I just called Kate the other day. I said I had had a conversation with the department chair about hiring, and I said, "Okay, I think this is actually the most stressful thing that happened to me all year. I can't believe it. I'm doing this, I'm doing that."

This conversation about hiring just wiped me out. It was a five-minute conversation about needing to broaden our applicant pool, look at a more diverse group of candidates, and she wasn't necessarily of that same opinion, or she was kind of dismissing me. She had all sorts of great arguments.

It was stressful. And I think part of that was the age. I'm thinking, okay, I might have confronted the person in a more hearty, more spirited way if they were my age. So that's been an issue.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I'd like to hear a little bit about another interaction that you had, and I know you spoke about creating a unique environment in the middle school, but at the same time I think there's that challenge of having a vertical understanding, K through 12. How do you interact with the other division heads and how do you interact administratively in your school, and how is that important?

MS. ELSBACH: There may be other schools in the room that have this particular setup, but Brearley's middle and upper school have cross-divisional teaching. Actually, we have that with the lower school. So all faculty members teach at both the middle and upper school, so in some ways the relationship is built in.

It gives all the faculty members a much greater sense of what's going on in that vertical stream of the curriculum. They see the kids in sixth grade, they see them in 11th grade, so they have a really good sense of where the kids are coming from and where they're going to.

In terms of the administration, it does make it challenging as a division head because departments rule the middle and upper school. So you have this kind of department organization, and then you have the division head who's supposed to be crossing over. So I have been trying to figure out, how do I have power? Who makes the decisions? And, you know, I'm still figuring it out.

In terms of meetings, we meet regularly with the academic dean and the division heads weekly. I also have a weekly meeting with the head of class 8 and class 9, essentially deans, and the upper school head, myself. We meet weekly. So that's actually really a supportive environment for problem-solving, but also for sharing knowledge about students, so that they're not lost through the cracks. Does that help?

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I would like to bring you some comfort. I am the mother of two Brearley daughters, and I have been struggling mightily to remember the middle school assembly. It probably says something more about me than about the assembly. But it does suggest in a funny kind of way, many of us in this room are from schools with great traditions and yet committed to change and that extraordinary balance between those two concepts. Would you make a few comments on the traditions of the Brearley School that you think should remain there, that will enhance its mission? I'll understand if you don't want to.

MS. ELSBACH: I feel on the spot. I don't know if I can really speak to that. I think there are a lot of great traditions at the school. And I'm still learning what they are. I don't have a lot of sense of what happens in the lower school, which has some wonderful traditions. I've still never seen this assembly where they assign teddy bear mascots to each grade. There's a lot of wonderful stuff about the school.

I think my role has really been to keep what's best of what's traditional in the middle school. Let me pause for a second. People have told me that it's not until year three that you can start to make any changes as an administrator. So I feel lucky that I have just recently put together what I'm calling the middle school task force, and really what we're going to be doing is strategically planning for the future of the middle school. And the first assignment for this meeting that we just had on Friday was for all the representatives across departments to have a discussion with their department about what they saw as the strengths and what they saw as the weaknesses in the middle school. So we've met and we have started to pool all of our thoughts and ideas.

So my goal is really to preserve what we think is best about the traditional part of Brearley and bring in and borrow from the best of the research that has been done in the last 20 years on middle schools and what works well for middle school age students.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Good morning. How are you?

MS. ELSBACH: Hi. I remember you.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I remember you.

This is a personal check-up, but also professional. Have you kept up with your Klingenstein colleagues, and are they in administration? Are they staying where they were? Are they moving around the country?

MS. ELSBACH: Yes. I think most people know that people who go to Klingenstein end up having transformative experiences that often bring them to leave their schools, which I know upsets some head of schools, but I think of my group, first of all, I'm in touch with every single person, all the nine fellows that were in my group, to varying degrees.

Of the nine, I think somehow five of us are now middle school heads, which is amazing. Three of us had started in middle school and were middle school centric, became middle school heads, and a few other people worked in upper school and middle school, and they became middle school heads. Another friend is getting her Ph.D. at Harvard. Another person is working at Harvard in administration. And another person is still teaching in math, but moved schools.

I think everyone had personal and professional transformations. I mean, divorces, splitups, coming-outs. All sorts of wonderful things happened. And it speaks to the power of educating yourself, but also having some distance on your life, being able to have that time to think.

If there are ways that we can figure out how to provide that for all of ourselves in the school year, I think it would make a difference. I don't have any answers to how, but I think it is so powerful, even if it's a week, to step back in the process. Priscilla said to me, "We're one of these professions we're trying to fix the boat as we're in the boat." We're constantly doing that. Then everyone goes away for the summer. So if there was a way to be able to step back and process during the year, it would be helpful. But yes, I'm still very close with all those people.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: This is kind of an anthropological question and it may take more time, but I'm one of those who have been in schools on the East Coast and the West Coast and more particularly New York and the Bay Area. And I think it becomes an okay question for this group because while we're an independent school, as independent school people all over the country, we know that there are geographical differences and climate differences in our territories but we also know that they're pretty common things in this rarefied world of independent schools and the people that circulate in them.

But my question really is in self--interest also, but what can you speak of in terms of the kids, the parents, the climate of California and your experience now in New York? In other words, what are real differences you feel, if there are any, and what are some of the common aspects of those two geographical areas?

MS. ELSBACH: Once I speak, everyone will disagree with me. I think the stereotypes are somewhat true. Your most structured traditional East Coast school or West Coast school, I should say, does not even come close to touching the kind of school culture that you walk into in New York City or a New England private school. They're not as old. They don't have that same -- actually, some of them are as old, but they don't have that same feeling to them. It's just my experience. Parents, students, all care, are all interested, are all well-meaning. My feeling is, I came from a very funky school, so I'd be interested to know what it's like at the University.

But there's more money. There is more old money and, you know, tuitions are significantly higher in New York. There's much more money there. I think there's a greater sense of privilege and entitlement. But that's going to vary from school to school. I couldn't have gone from one extreme to the other more boldly.

I don't know if anybody has any other ideas about this.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Pressures? Various kinds of pressure on you, on parents?

MS. ELSBACH: Well, I think some of it has to do with particular school and school image and reputation. Presidio Hills School for a long time was never particularly interested in selling themselves to the community. People didn't necessarily know of it, hadn't heard of it, but everyone who was there loved it. People who came to us loved it. They knew what it was about, and so no one felt particularly concerned about marketing.

Coming to Brearley is a place whose reputation resounds worldwide, and so I found that parents feel very attached to that, and that adds a whole other layer of film, I would say, over the issue, because people are so attached to this reputation. They feel they are buying their child's future by just having this word on their transcript, "Brearley." So that's a tremendous difference. It's very, very different.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I'm a middle school teacher at a co-ed school in Maryland. I just wonder if you could give me maybe the top one or two programs at Brearley that you're most proud of.

MS. ELSBACH: Top programs. I think one of the things that's wonderful that's happening at the school is that the history curriculum is being revised and rewritten. I feel lucky to be a sixth grade history teacher. I teach every single day still, and that's very challenging. And the course has been revised to be an excellent world history curriculum, so I'm very proud of that.

I'm also proud of the fact that many of the administrators also teach. While it's incredibly difficult, I think that gives us a lot of credibility amongst the faculty, amongst parents, and it breaks down the hierarchy in a really interesting way, because we're sitting in grade-level meetings talking about curriculum and tests and homework and what we struggled with and what went well. So I'm really proud of that, as well. So that's just off-the-cuff.

Priscilla is proud of the fact that we've introduced Chinese into the curriculum, both in the fifth grade and the ninth grade, which has been wonderful this year. So there's a lot of great stuff. I'm sorry I'm not coming up with much.

Ms. Halpert.

MS. HALPERT: You were talking about how rich the New York City parent community is. I wondered if you would see the scholarship program at Brearley as something to be proud of. I speak as a lady who gained 22 pounds over 22 years going to breakfasts, to lunches, little cocktail parties and little dinners, most of them raising money for financial aid. If you could just give us that background.

MS. ELSBACH: Absolutely. It's a school that gives more financial aid dollars than some of the other New York City schools, and that's absolutely critical. If we're going to have diverse student populations, economically and racially and ethnically, financially it's critical, and I think we have been very, very good and very dedicated to that program over the years. That has made our school community a much richer -- not in a money sense -- place. Absolutely.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Could you just speak for a moment about the fun you're having doing what you're doing? Are you having any fun? Sounds challenging, stimulating. You're doing a great job. Are you having any fun?

MS. ELSBACH: I am having some fun. It's interesting. I hate to use the word "trench" with all the military stuff going on, but it's the best thing I can think of at the moment. You know, all the administrivia that we deal with day in and day out, some of it is fun, some is not so fun.

But what I have been really excited about are the times when I get to kind of step out, pop my head out, kind of speak my vision, and see if people agree or disagree, and when I get to work on certain projects, like the middle school advisory program that we've been working on and developing curriculum for, that has been fantastic, and I have gotten to work with teachers on that, and planning that, and see the students' reactions to it.

I'm really excited about this middle school task force. It's been great fun to actually think about these kind of educational issues as opposed to the closed-circuit TV kind of issues, if you know what I'm saying. And I'm terrified of it, as well, because this is me needing to put my vision out there, and I have the potential to take some real hits for it and have some real serious arguments and disagreements.

So at the same time that I'm excited, I'm terrified, absolutely terrified. And I think that's one of the things that I'm interested in, is how do you support emerging fears as administrators, moving from that stage of simply trying to keep their head above water when they first come to the school, and dealing with the load that's been put on them? How do you help people move from that stage to the stage where you do get to be more visionary? And I don't have any answers to that, but I'm fascinated in the kind of learning curve that I have gone through in just two and a half years.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Could you speak a little bit about your middle school advisory program, such an important program for middle schoolers.

MS. ELSBACH: We're building on it. We've had a home room program forever and ever and ever, which has also changed over time. The home room component involved being with the girls in the morning for about 15 minutes. But what we have added this year is a 30-minute extended break time where the girls meet with their home room teachers and discuss issues that we think are particularly important, issues of diversity, issues of community, issues of academic honesty. And so this was really step one this year, in building this advisory program.

Next year we're going to have more time, a 55-minute block, which seems much more reasonable than having a meaningful conversation with girls in 30 minutes. And then what we're going to try to do is break the home rooms in half and appoint advisors, one advisor to each home room, so the groups are smaller. We would like to also increase the frequency of these meetings. And I think ultimately what we're going to be looking at is perhaps adding parent conferences to one of the responsibilities of the home room teachers and advisors. So we're in process.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Have you thought about where you will be ten years from now, both professionally and also grappling potentially with the issue of balancing what you do now with a family?

MS. ELSBACH: I knew that would come up. No. I actually don't know where I will be in ten years. At some point I would like to have a child, but who knows when that will happen? I'm not married. Who knows about that whole piece of my life?

Careerwise I also know right now I'm very happy to be in the position I'm in because I feel like I still have so much to learn. I have so much to learn about how to make change that I can't really see when I'll be at the point that I feel like I understand that. Maybe you all laugh and say, "You won't understand that," but there are many more years I feel I have in this job.

You know, the question about being a head of school -- I have no idea. You know, my knee-jerk reaction is, no way, absolutely not, because the question of balance and life and all of that intimidates me tremendously because I already feel like I have no life. But the fact is, I really don't know. If I did know, I wouldn't be here.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: That sort of addresses Aggie's question then. If someone has accomplished what you have done, feels this way, how do we address it for the next generation of leaders?

MS. ELSBACH: I don't know if I have the answer. You all might have that answer because you're going through it. Show us why it's great.

MR. GALBRAITH: As a person who just stepped out -- it is great -- I thank you for your presentation. We are watching you evolve, and it's really exciting. You have made your head very proud. But I would like to ask you, have you had any younger teachers question your authority? And now that the shoe is on the other foot, what differences have you noticed in how you perceive that?

MS. ELSBACH: Let's see. I'm gathering my thoughts. One of the things that I had to learn about coming and being in this position was that I could not continue to be probably the curmudgeon I think that I can be, kind of the complainer, the one that's always noticing what's not right, what's not working, why is this happening. I realize how destructive that is.

There's a teacher who is an expert at this, and she's quite brilliant. She started the same year. We're the same age, she's also a history teacher, and I remember having lunch with her finally after the second month that we started working. I said, "I can't believe this. You're more negative than I am. I have never met anyone like this."

And at that moment what I realized is, I cannot be like that. I realized how destructive it is to a school culture. So I'm not able to come up with an instance where I personally was confronted, that I can remember, but I do think that it is kind of a luxury of sort of being in the taken-care-of position, and I have definitely become very aware of needing to stop the negativity, because it really is infectious, I think. So did that answer your question? Maybe in some ways it does.

MS. ABBOTT: Tasha, I'm going to ask the last question and start by thanking you. This has been wonderful. You have been up there for a long time. As I have listened to you, one of the things that has come to my mind is that with entering school heads, when a school head enters a new school, there's often a fairly elaborate transitional plan, system, board committee that helps the head settle both personally and professionally.

In my experience, we don't do very much with that for middle management. And so I'm wondering if you can summarize two or three things that personally and/or professionally made a big difference to you in your ability to make such a big change from Presidio Hills to Brearley and find the ways to be successful.

MS. ELSBACH: Let's see. I have done a number of things both inside the school and outside to help me first move into the position and then keep growing. I did go to the ISM Middle School Heads workshops, which is was a good brush-up for me on issues of administration after my Klingenstein experience.

I also, last summer, went to the Harvard Principals' Center and attended the week-long seminar called The Art and Craft of the Principalship. That program was probably about 95 percent public school principals. There are some charter school and a few independent school administrators, but I really loved it. It still helped me. I mean, I really like exploring all sorts of educational issues, so it was inspiring to me in that way but, again, gave me the chance to step back and think critically about where I was. What I realized last summer was that I'm not new anymore and I couldn't hide behind that, and that I realized I had to ratchet up my expectation of myself for year three. So that was another thing that I did in terms of professional development.

Internally, right away, Priscilla and I decided we are meeting weekly, absolutely, and we had a really nice long chunk of time, so we got to just talk about everything and laugh, and that was so important in my day, and sustaining me on a weekly basis.

I think just the fact that the other division heads were right there on the other end of e-mail or on the other end of the phone to help really take the time -- no one ever rushed me. Everyone took seriously the issues that were coming up for me. How am I going to deal with this parent? Help me. This person wrote this hostile e-mail. Oh, this is my job to write back to him, even though it went to the department chair of history? Okay. Help. How do I do this? And I remember meeting in my office, people coming to my aid.

So I think that's what's most important, because you can anticipate some of what will happen, but things are coming at you so fast, you have to deal with them right away. So having that fast-moving action team on my side was really important to me. Some other people may also have good ideas about how to help that transition, but that's what's really worked for me, I think.

MS. LEE: Oh, Tasha, that was wonderful. It's very moving for all of us to hear you. Twenty-five years ago I was the head of the middle school at Brearley and all I can say, listening to Tasha, is, "Oh, lucky, lucky Brearley."

I also think it helps to have fun if you think of yourself as a visitor to a third-world country. It helps you just maintain that distance and maybe a little sense of irony about the denizens of the Brearley School.

We are now free until 11:00, and I'd ask you please to come back on time. We're going to have a panel of our own discussing helping young women like Tasha on their leadership paths. So please return on time. Thank you.

Monday, February 24, 2003 PANEL DISCUSSION.

MS. LEE: Please take your seats so we can go ahead and begin. Our panel today is a panel of our own, and the moderator is going to be Jessie-Lea Abbott, from Katherine Delmar Burke, and we are taking up really where Tasha left off, because what the panel is going to discuss is how we encourage leadership and what are the barriers to it. So with that, I'll turn it over to Jessie-Lea.

MS. ABBOTT: Thank you. It was so wonderful this morning, I almost feel as if there's nothing left for us to say, but we will have plenty to say.

I'm going to begin with just a quick overview to remind those of you who were not here last year, that one of the questions that kept bubbling up was this question of who is the next generation? Who are the people in the next generation of school leaders? And particularly who are the women and what is our role, what can we do to help identify them, mentor them, and give them reason to believe that this is a manageable, exciting, wonderful profession?

And so that was the context in which we framed this program. Inadvertently, because JoAnn Deak's plane collapsed and she couldn't get here, in changing the order of the program, we have actually emphasized something earlier in the design, which is using ourselves as resources.

Again, a theme in the conversations that I had with conference participants last year was that among us we have a wealth of information and experience, and in order to move from theory to action plans, one of the most effective things might be to share more of the information we have among ourselves to address exactly these issues.

So this conference has been planned to look at women in leadership roles from various perspectives, external as well as the internal, and this is one of the internals. Actually, it's a little bit of a blend.

On our panel we have Burch Ford, from Miss Porter's in Connecticut, who's going to talk a little bit about the career seminar for women, the NAPSG-sponsored women's administrative training program.

Bodie Brizendene from Marin Academy in California, who's going to talk about other kinds of mentoring and mentoring programs that she has experienced and come across that seem to be effective.

Mary Burke, from the Whitfield School in Missouri, is going to expand that conversation. Bodie is going to be talking a little bit about her own school and other programs, and Mary, I believe, is going to be talking mostly about some of the programs in her own school.

And then Joan Lonergan, from Castilleja in California, is going to take us from those realms into the large question of: What are the obstacles? What are the barriers? Why is it that with all this information and wisdom that we have, that we still find people like Tasha saying that -- I can't quote her exactly. What was her comment? When someone asked her, "Where will you be in ten years, will you be a head of school," "No way."

We need to begin to look at the ways that we can help people say yes, absolutely. This is something that's quite viable.

So before we begin, I'm going to ask you to spend a moment simply thinking and jot down two thoughts on those little yellow file cards that you happen to have. You do not have to hand them in, so you don't have to put any identifying features on them. These are thought points for you to return to later on.

Here are the two questions. First, an example of the best mentoring experience or program that you know about or have participated in to help inspire leadership from the ranks, leadership in education from the ranks.

And the second question is: One obstacle or barrier of which you are aware that inhibits that inspiration, that makes it difficult to inspire people to these leadership positions.

One of the things that I did not say is that our intent is to hold questions and discussion until each of the panelists has made their brief presentation. I hadn't thought of this earlier, but if you have a question for one person in particular, you could jot that down. You will have a chance to return to it, because we're hoping that this will generate a very active discussion among all of us. So thank you very much, and I'm now going to hand the mike to Burch.

MS. FORD: Thank you. Good morning. What I'm going to talk about is something that the wisdom of this group came up with almost 20 years ago at the February conference in Mobile in 1984. And at that time there were a number of members of NAPSG who were commenting on and were concerned about the paucity of women heads among independent schools. And they had a fall meeting at Dobbs and came up with the idea of this administrative leadership conference, which was launched at Garrison Forest in June of 1985. Actually, I attended that as did some other people in this room.

After that, this conference was given on an annual basis at Garrison for a number of years and then became a biennial conference moving to Dobbs, and for the last four years it's been at Miss Porter's in Farmington.

I think it's been an enormously successful program and I want to just tell you a little bit about it, because I think it addresses all the issues that we've been thinking about and concerned with now almost 20 years later.

First of all, the faculty of this conference are all women heads of school. The conference originally was a week long in June, and now it's about three days long over the Columbus Day weekend in the fall.

The purpose of the program is really to invite women in independent schools who may think that they are ready for a headship, who may have no idea but are just intrigued by the idea of a headship, and so they want to learn a little bit more about it. Or it may be that it's just been suggested by somebody in their school that they might want to attend.

Normally, it's been about 30 women each time. The program's goals really are to expose, to inspire, and to excite all of these young women about the possibility of running a school.

Let me just run through the program to tell you a little bit about it. The first thing that we do is to cover a number of aspects of headship, and we also have a lot of time to talk about what our own experiences are, and some individual one-on-one counseling.

We start with a presentation by one of the members of the faculty on leadership styles, a little bit about women in authority, and most recently the question about sexual orientation in headships has come up. So that was something that we also talked about and something that I think consultants and headhunters also have on their minds.

Next we have a presentation on the search process and on boards of trustees. And incidentally, each faculty member gives the presentation, the other faculty members weigh in, because, of course, all of our experiences are all so different, which makes it such a rich discussion. And then there's an opportunity, obviously, for the participants to have questions and answers and to talk about their observations from however close or however distant they are from any one of these issues.

The next thing we talk about is organizing an administrative team in the context of a school culture and how important it is to understand that culture before trying to organize the administrative team. I think we all know that we inherit those administrative teams often, and that can be as challenging as anything else.

The next thing that we talk about is reading and crafting budgets. Finance, investment. Again, all the things that everyone in this room has to deal with but generally has not much exposure to prior to our jobs; and then related development and fundraising.

At that point -- and by now it's towards the end of the second day -- we then have individual mentoring conferences and try to make as many of us on the faculty as possible available to as many members of the participating group, where we look at resumes, where we hear about what people have done so far, what they're interested in doing, and how near or far they may be from becoming a head of school.

That evening, the second night, we do something that I think is tremendously important and invariably is the most popular part of the program. Each one of us on the faculty talks about our own professional and personal journey and how we came to be heads of school, what all the pieces were.

No two stories are remotely alike. I think it comes as an enormous relief to all the members of the participating group, because I think often people have an idea from a distance, as do we all, about things about which we don't know very much, that there is this one way to do it right. And if nothing else, that particular part of the program dispels that myth.

I think that the other thing that is enormously enjoyable for all of us who participate in it is the tremendous candor, confusion, enormous humor, and also real affection for the work that comes across in all of those stories. We all love stories in any case, and this is literally a story-telling part of this program, and one that I think the women who are there really love.

The other thing that is clear about everyone's experience is that in becoming a head of school for every person, it was a leap of faith, and I'm sure that's probably true for every one of you all, as is true of probably all the important decisions that we make in our lives.

The next day we have a presentation on balancing the multiple constituents that all of you deal with: Faculty, students, trustees, parents, alumni, members of the community, friends of the school, and how all those things can be taken into account as we move from day to day, often reacting. We love to think about the fact that we do lots of reflection, but as has been already stated, often our energy is in dealing with things that no one could ever have prepared us for. And so those are some of the stories that we tell as well.

The other part of that -- which, again, never gets enough attention in our lives -- is how we also fold into the constituencies of our own families, which often we forget to mention until the end.

Then the last presentation is on strategic planning, and before everyone goes, there's another mentoring session. What we try to do is bring into focus the major aspects of our jobs, many of which could be learned on the job, but it's also to put it into a real, personal, individual context, again, that everyone in the group participates in.

I'd like to ask of this group, any of you who have been on the faculty for the administrative seminar, if you would stand up.

That just gives you a sample.

It's a great group. It's great fun, and we'll come back to that.

In terms of the participants, the women who come to this come from all over the country, although, naturally, predominantly from the East Coast, but also from the West Coast, from Canada. Some of them are assistant heads of schools and thinking immediately about the possibility of becoming a head of school. Some are department heads, some are division heads. Some are not in major administrative positions at all, but cover some range of administrative experience. Sometimes they are school counselors, sometimes they're admissions directors, sometimes development directors, sometimes athletic directors, but it covers an entire range.

Some think they're ready to be heads of school and after the mentoring session they think maybe there are other things they want to do before being part of a search. Some have no idea that, in fact, they really probably are quite ready to become a candidate.

One of the things that has been a filtering for the people who really are ready is that all of us, all of you, are called fairly regularly by consultants who are trying to expand their candidate pools, and it gives those of us on the faculty for this seminar an opportunity to identify some people who really are absolutely wonderful but had not yet necessarily identified themselves as ready to start thinking about this.

One of the things that I think is so important and that was also referred to in Tasha's remarks is that it's really important for a number of young women to start thinking of the possibility and start seeing themselves or to start considering their leadership potential. Because until that happens, I think it's really hard for them to start to put themselves out there.

In the 1985 seminar, when the faculty in that group started to tell their own stories, I was struck by the number of women there who had not really had a plan to become a head of school, but someone had said to them, "You know, you really ought to think about doing this. I think you'd be very good." And then they began do see themselves that way, and then pursued that path.

Of the people who have participated in this program, 26 are now currently heads of school which I think speaks to the efficacy of it, and I will say that the reviews that we get are always absolute raves, which is very satisfying because we all believe so much what it is that we're doing that it's very rewarding to hear that kind of a response.

Again, I would love to ask any women in the audience today, any of you in this group who have participated in the seminar, if you all would stand up, just to get a view.

Clearly, not all the sitting heads are here, but in any case, that gives you some idea.

We identified this need 20 years ago. It's an ongoing need. What I think is particularly exciting is that this past year it was very clear that the desire has also increased enormously; in fact, doubled from the usual. Generally, before the conference by the end of the school year preceding the seminar in the fall, we have a number of registrants but it's not full, by any means, and doesn't become full until probably the last week before the program. This year it was full by the end of the school year. By the beginning of the fall, because it was Columbus Day weekend and it's in New England, every hotel and everyplace to stay is pretty full. We were able to get ten more beds, so we had 40 registrants and we had 20 people on the waiting list, which was virtually double the usual amount of interest. I think that's really exciting because it certainly speaks well of the group that may be following behind all of us, which certainly we're all very interested in cultivating.

So as a result of that, in the council's meeting yesterday the decision was made that we will have a seminar this year. What we did in the last seminar was to consider whether or not this, instead of being every other year, should now become every year, and also if it should be bicoastal, if it should be in other locations than the eastern part of the United States, even though that's where the majority of the candidates for this seminar come from.

Anyway, Pam Clark, bless her heart, has agreed to be the host for next fall at St. Paul Academy & Summit School in St. Paul, so keep your eyes peeled for that mailing when it comes to you, because it will be one more opportunity for the young women in all of your schools to take advantage of this program.

When Tasha said this morning, "Show us what's great about the job," I thought that was really important, because that certainly is one of the things that we all try to do in this seminar. I know that everyone in the room tries to do it because we wouldn't be doing this work if we didn't really believe in it.

But in thinking about leadership, I just want to read a quote that some of you probably have heard, and I really love it. It's something that somebody gave to me when I was at Milton, so it's something that Bart Giamatti said when he was the president of Yale. And of course, he was talking about being a university president, but it's clearly about leadership. He said, "Being president of a university is no way for an adult to make a living, which is why so few adults actually attempt to do it. It's to hold a mid-19th-century ecclesiastical position on top of a late-20th-century corporation. But there are those lucid moments, those crystalline experiences, those Joycean epiphanies, that reveal the numinous beyond and lay bare the essence of it all. I have had those moments. They were all moments of profound and brilliant failure. But string those glistening moments of defeat into a strand, and you have the pearls of an administrative career."

I think that leadership, as you all know, is striking the balance between what to conserve and what to change and the wisdom to know the difference. As I was thinking that, of course, I was thinking about the 12 steps and a few other things. And we know that we don't always get it right, but what I think is really important is something that we're always telling our students, and that is, one of the important things about education is learning from your mistakes. I certainly think it's God's work. I know that everybody else does, and in spite of those glistening moments of defeat, I don't think there's any better job, and I think that's something that we all need to keep telling those who work with us. Thank you.

And now Bodie will take us to the next step.

MS. BRIZENDENE: When Jessie-Lea asked me to come and speak today, I thought about many of the same stories that Tasha shared, and I thought about what I would use to craft my little bit of words to you today. So of course, I put it in a little an alliterative form, and I'm thinking of modeling, mentoring, and making possible. I know that my own earlier English teacher mentors at the Bryn Mawr School would remind me that that structure is not exactly parallel, but I would get extra credit for the alliteration.

Some things in life only happen once, and where you begin your career, that first moment that you step into a school and you begin to do your work, is never ever recaptured again. And echoing Dr. Bowman's words and her point last night, would I not have started at the Bryn Mawr School, all girls, all women administrators, I am quite certain that my path would have been different, and perhaps I might not be here today speaking to you.

I'll never forget the day I was hired and Lila Lohr, then brand-new middle school head, herself a mother, new on the job, interviewed me, Brand-spanking-new English teacher with great ideals and no experience. I was also a mother of two young children, one just a year and a half old.

I went into her office and she handed me the schedule for the day. I had child care for about two and a half hours, and I was going to be there for about five and a half hours. So of course, I thought very much that I looked like the wonderful metaphor we use about the duck on the top of the water. Calm. All my Baldwin manners came into play. All the sense of composure, and underneath the duck legs were swimming fiercely. And I asked Lila, looking at her, if I could use her phone, and she knew. She just knew.

She left the office. I used the phone. I got child care covered, bit by bit. I had to use the phone two more times during the interview.

And the fact that she understood that, and herself as a model, is a lasting memory of making sure that we do offer that opportunity for a career and a life.

What I saw at Bryn Mawr School was compassionate, vibrant leadership, exciting educational energy, and I wanted to be part of it. I was deeply attracted to it. It looked ordinary, it looked purposeful, and it looked available. That attraction today is very important for us to give to other young leaders, especially given the landscape. The paucity of candidates for headship, women and people of color in particular, is outstanding and astonishing and alarming.

Blair Stambaugh and I in 1996 were on a panel where we talked about this very thing. We were reporting on Jan Scott's Klingenstein research about why there were not enough women heads, and Jan's research brought her to two pivotal points that we focused that workshop upon. One was that women were three times more likely to self--select out of a headship process than a man, and five times more ready than a man to say, "I don't know," if someone asks you if you want to be a head.

The accounting for this, the calculus for this, fell into three pivotal reasons. One was relocation. Family relocation, children in schools, husbands with careers.

The second one was support systems. Husbands, for many long, long years, had a cottage industry of support. The family went with them. And women were not sure about that support, so they would select out of the process.

And the last one, perhaps the most interesting and the one that still holds a certain irony of leadership now, they were fearful that they could not be as a man in leadership. They couldn't act like a man. And there were questions about style and power and authority, evocative, if you will, of Peggy McIntosh's wonderful and timeless article, "Feeling like a fraud." We need, as educators, to let leaders know that not being the expert perhaps is the best medium for leadership.

I'm not sure there has been a lot of change since 1996. I studied with Peggy McIntosh 20 years ago, and she used to say, "Remember, it's going to take 100 years." So I'm encouraged that we're down to 80, but we're not done yet.

The other part of this: Making possible. There are three programs I want to highlight. Three ideas, really. One is a new idea that is in its third year called the Bay Area Teachers' Development Collaborative and I have information about all three of these programs on the table to the right here. There should be enough for many of you to get copies. Again, this is a program in its third year. Jessie-Lea and I serve on the board. It was an idea spearheaded by a wonderful educator in San Francisco, Janet McGarvey, who works at Hamlin School, all girls, collaborative.

We brought heads of school together to say, what do we need for our teachers and administrators in this area for us? So we put together this collaborative, and the dues are nominal and very important. They, of course, are nonprofit, and we barely scrape even at the end. But they are $1,000 for schools, 250 enrollment or less, and $2000 for larger. And we designed summer programs, summer institutes where we do Project Zero. Last year we focused on children's development. This year the summer program will work on service learning. And we focus now increasingly on administrative leadership.

We started a program in its first year, which we open hope will continue year after year called the New Administrators' Program. It's a full-year program where we start off with the summer workshop for any newly appointed administrator and we give them a mentor, someone who is already a senior administrator at another school, and they work with their partners for the entire year.

Again, "partnership" here is the key word, and the opportunity to see leadership at its best we think is encouraging more people and more young people to pursue these jobs.

The second thing is that we can do a good job taking care of ourselves as leaders. To be good mentors and to model great and good practices, we need to make sure that we continue to be learners in leadership on our own. There are two things I would like to highlight on that. The Bay Area schools -- and Joan and I are in the same group -- work with a facilitator by the name of Debbie Freed, and she meets monthly with us. It's a three-hour session. And we talk about the trials and tribulations and the joys of being the head of school. These meetings, where you know that you can absolutely come together as a group of like people and leaders to be able to explore your own questions, are critical.

Debbie is putting together a series of summer retreats in California -- information, again, to my right here -- and she's doing this for seasoned and new heads of school, and it's called "Making Meaning Out of my Life and Leadership." There are a series is about five of them, and again, I encourage you to consider working with her in this level of coming together to improve our own leadership.

And then finally, something that I have stumbled upon -- it certainly wasn't something that I found through any wisdom of my own, but I love that it's happened -- is that I actually work with a leadership coach. It's a corporate model and came to me from a former board chair. The woman I work with is Penny Carter, and she works with an organization called Turning Points. Again, the model is corporate, but the interest is very much a two-way street.

She is interested in schools as interesting organizational institutions. We're a little different from the corporate world. I am interested in having her evaluate and work with me on my own leadership skills. The key here is that this has also worked its way into the senior administrative team, and she is now coaching or has coached the development director, the business manager, and the athletic director. Our language and our meetings have changed substantially from this work that we've been doing with Penny. We as a team more often talk now about our own leadership and about not only the "what," because you know that that takes up a lot of time, but the "how," and I see future leadership right there every Thursday afternoon at the table.

There is an expense to it, but because we are such an interesting entity for this group, she gives us a 40 percent discount and it's probably the best professional development funds that you can spend. So I encourage you to do that, too.

I want to end with a story. I love to tell stories. This is a story about my second year at Bryn Mawr School. I had just turned 30, and Barbara Chase, who thought I was in my 20s -- which was good -- came to me and said, "Would you like to be on a panel at NAIS?"

Well, I wasn't even sure what NAIS was. But again, because of the encouragements of leadership at that place, I said, "Yes, I would love to be on this panel."

The panel was three generations of women educators talking about their lives. I had no idea that I would be with Blair Stambaugh and Anne Healey, both long-term wonderful heads, mistresses of metaphor, and I was a young brand-new teacher.

Well, of course, I realized suddenly that I was with the gods and I needed to have an infusion of ambrosia very quickly to be able to hold my own, but the truth of it was, that wasn't true. They took me under their wing, we met two times for lunch. I was in awe of their leadership, their history, their lives.

We did a wonderful conference. I learned a thousand things, and it was that kind of mentoring and watching that helped me be here today.

There is a funny part to that story. I spoke last, because we went chronologically. So as they spoke, I got more and more nervous. I did this little thing -- I don't know if you all do this -- where I thought, Okay, Bodie, if you can pour yourself a glass of water and drink it without shaking and smile, you will be okay.

So I did one. And I thought, Okay, Bodie, if you can pour yourself another glass of water and drink it and smile and not be nervous, you will be fine.

So I continued to do this. I spoke. I was relieved. At the end of this NAIS presentation, my uncle, who's also a head of a school, came up to me and said, "Congratulations. I bet you learned a lot."

And I said, "I learned tons."

And he said, "Such as not drinking a pitcher of water before you have to speak?"

Humor, too, is important.

DR. BURKE: Well, as you notice, I'm not pouring any water.

Whitfield School is a co-educational secondary school for grades six through twelve, 450 students. In 1984 we embarked upon the great vision of cognitive learning theory and constructivism, joined the Coalition of Central Schools in 1986, and for al