Vision is good, but it isn’t everything

{Read Part One and Part Two in this series.}

My third characteristic necessary for a school to achieve greatness is vision, but vision of a different sort than normally included in strategic plans. I don’t mean vision where you have to look the right direction and be going the right way. Where you fit the demographics and successfully serve the right niche. Great schools aren’t just one thing with one direction and one vision about where they’re going. But great schools do share the common trait of holding close to their hearts a vision for who they are.

I was privileged to be part of founding a high school, built on the solid foundation of a K-8 which had served faithfully for years. The high school was a new thing, and committing to it took the school community a one year trip through a strategic planning process and another year through an expertly led strategic visioning process facilitated by a parent in the school who did that work for communities for a living.

There was a vision for a high school, but substantial soul-searching about community competition, and even more about stewardship for being one more high school among several. We all knew a high school program of excellence requires significant resources. We asked ourselves about our vision and theirs, and the questions weren’t about where they were growing in the city, or the academic profile of the different student populations or any number of highly reasonable vision questions.

The question for us was about God’s calling, but more broadly for whoever is reading this, it was about the sort of school culture and student outcomes we sought, the kind of community we were committed to being. We sought a connectedness of relationships deeply caring about children, respectful and appreciative of each other as parents and teachers, and unified in a shared passion to seek worldview formation (a shared way of seeing and experiencing with unity, through clarity about each of our own valuable particularities) not only for students but among all who would comprise this school community.

It was a mutual pursuit rather than some set of propositions we began with. Ours was a Christian community so it included biblical belief and clear fidelity to Jesus Christ, but what was new and unique to this new school was the vision and reality which would be forming among us. If this was the kind of community we were seeking, then the answer was clear that no other school in town (or in the state, for that matter) was pursuing a similar vision. We weren’t just repeating one more edition – though different because we owned and controlled it – of the same thing which the broader community already had available in several other fine schools.

The sort of vision I’m talking about is not in the triumvirate of Mission for why and what we are, Purpose for what and how we are, and Vision for where we are going. That’s good, and serves schools well as they seek to improve. But for rare greatness, vision is not quite so pragmatic. (You probably need the pedestrian variety along with it, but can’t see greatness with only the normal kind.)

The vision considered here is not a desire for greatness as a school, though it’s not against it. Instead, this is a vision for flourishing of a web of relationships, a nexus of community, and for the good of every child and every family. This vision is less of a plan than an ideal or a value, perhaps even a dream and a passion. It is an ember-bright jewel to be sought as a way of seeing together as we are being together.