MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2003 Tasha Elsbach, Head of the Middle School, The Brearley School, New York City, "A First Hand Account of What Inspires and Supports Emerging Leaders"

Ms. Elsbach. 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.