created for the purpose of benchmarking, or from one or more of the many national and international groups that have been working to ensure the availability of longitudinal data systems that report high-quality data at the individual student level.
■ Operating your organization in today’s sometimes competitive environment means you are facing strategic challenges that can affect your ability to sustain performance and maintain advantages, such as academic program leadership, unique services, or an optimal student-to-faculty ratio. These challenges might include your operational costs; an expanding or decreasing student population; a decreasing local and state tax base or educational appropriation; changing demographics and competition, including charter schools; diminishing student persistence; the introduction of new or substitute programs or services; rapid technological changes; and state and federal mandates. In addition, your organization may face challenges related to the recruitment, hiring, and retention of a qualified workforce.
■ A particularly significant challenge, if it occurs to your organization, is being unprepared for a disruptive technology that threatens your competitive position or your market. In the past, such technologies have included personal computers replacing typewriters, cell phones challenging traditional and pay phones, fax machines capturing business from overnight delivery services, and e-mail and social media challenging all other means of communication. Today, education organizations need to be scanning the environment inside and outside the education sector to detect such challenges at the earliest possible point in time.
Leadership (Category 1)
Leadership addresses how your senior leaders’ actions guide and sustain your organization, setting organizational vision, values, and performance expectations. Attention is given to how your senior leaders communicate with your workforce, enhance their leadership skills, participate in organizational learning and develop future leaders, create a focus on action, and establish an environment that encourages ethical behavior and high performance. The category also includes your organization’s governance system and how your organization fulfills its legal, ethical, and societal responsibilities and supports its key communities.
1.1 Senior Leadership: How do your senior leaders lead?
Purpose
This item examines the key aspects of your senior leaders’ responsibilities. It examines how your senior leaders set and communicate the organization’s vision and values and how they practice these values. It focuses on your senior leade