Seeing Beyond Today. A Vision for Our Future.

10/29/20—Now, more than ever, life in school has a day-to-day feel to it. In ways that are new to so many of us, proceeding successfully through a day—much less a week or a month—is a genuine accomplishment. While living this way can test the full extent of one’s emotional and intellectual depths, it can also be affirming. For me at least, it is clearer than ever that our work matters. What we do from here matters.

More broadly, girls’ schools matter. NCGS has long believed that our capacity to connect as a community, unified in support of our schools, makes a difference for our students and their capacity to better our world.

Way back in 2019, a few months before everything changed, Executive Director Megan Murphy asked the NCGS Board of Trustees to think beyond our day-to-day to consider an even more adventurous future for the Coalition. We poured over data from the 2019 membership survey, and in doing so, we learned our member schools are highly reliant and heavily engaged in NCGS offerings. This is a good place to start and also a reminder of the responsibility we carry. As long as girls’ schools matter, so does NCGS. Long before 2019—way back in 2012, to be exact—Megan and her team started the NCGS visioning process by commencing a Listening & Learning Tour that has not stopped since.

I am pleased to say the Board leaves our most recent tri-annual meeting having endorsed a vision for a future that recognizes the centrality of women’s leadership and sees girls’ schools as a distinct means to that end.

I have always believed that when we join forces as NCGS member schools, we do so on behalf of our students. And just like our work in our schools, NCGS does our best work when we build community across difference. At the restorative practices workshop I attended during the 2020 Virtual Educating Girls Symposium, Building Inclusive, Anti-Racist School Communities, I sat in a Zoom circle with colleagues from Johannesburg, Ottawa, Ohio, San Diego, Seattle, Texas, and Washington. A global pandemic has halted travel but not connection.

NCGS aligns itself with other educational leaders like John Sexton, President Emeritus of New York University (NYU) who asserts, “The great question of our time is how peoples around the world will respond to global compression, and the inclusion of unfamiliar elements, drawn invisibly from other cultures, into so many aspects of their familiar, local environment.” In a small, but important way, our Zoom circle eased into an authentic conversation across many time zones, attempting to give an answer to “the great question.” We took turns speaking and more turns listening.

NYU psychologist Carol Gilligan, best known for her research into the moral development of girls, “speaks of ‘radical listening,’ the kind that starts with the true desire to learn from the experiences of others and to discover what they know” (Sexton 2019). That is the charge of NCGS schools today. We need to listen to all of our schools’ voices, in particular those of our community members of color who have experienced marginalization. That is the sort of listening that has marked Megan’s remarkable tenure as our leader. And it is that “radical listening” that has us at this moment where we can speak to a genuine need to reach across boundaries, and a genuine desire to break down barriers, to pull all members into a vision that promotes the visibility and assures the vitality of all girls’ schools.

Paul Burke, President of the NCGS Board of Trustees and Head of The Nightingale-Bamford School