Chapter 10 --  The Jossey-Bass Reader on Educational Leadership
Educational Leadership for the Twenty-First Century
Integrating Three Essential Perspectives

Introduction

The ideal principal in the 1980s was an instructional leader who focused on four key elements of reform.

1. Responsible for defining the mission and setting school goals
2. Manage the education production function:  coordinating the curriculum, promoting quality instruction, conducting clinical supervision and teacher evaluation/appraisal, aligning instructional materials with curriculum goals, allocating and protecting instructional time, and monitoring student progress
3. Promote an academic learning climate by establishing positive high expectations and standards for student behavior
4. Develop a strong culture at the school that includes a safe and orderly work environment, opportunities for meaningful student involvement, strong staff collaboration and cohesion

Directions in Educational Reform Over the Next Decade

Standards for student results are increasingly going to be defined and assessed at the system level.

Customer satisfaction will matter more as competition for students increases and choice becomes more prevalent.

The shift from a rule-driven to a results-driven system will intensify.

Teaching and learning will change in truly revolutionary ways.

Performance standards will provide the assessment support needed to clarify how students are doing.

Political, economic, and social issues will evolve with rapid speed to accelerate the reshaping of schools.

Rethinking the Role of the School Principle as an Educational Leader

The old role of the principle as the solitary instructional leader no longer fits the realities of time and work load for principals.

Successful principals will evolve the role to include setting the strategic direction for the school.

The leadership role of the school principal will be reinvented within three perspectives:

1. The Cultural/School Transformation Perspective
   Transformational leadership in terms of three leadership components:  building, bonding, and banking.
   In these organizations/communities, leaders work from the middle rather than the top.
   Leaders are effective when they create a culture where practitioners can be successful.
2. The Strategic/Results-Driven Perspective
   Leaders in restructured schools typically work in educational systems tightly coupled around results and loosely coupled around means for attaining these results.
   Schools will need two types of strategic leadership that are not found in the transformational leadership:
   *  Leadership focused on results-indicators/accountability
   *  Substantive leadership for reshaping the school as an organization
   Reshaping the organization includes four interrelated segments:
   1.  Recognizing the need for fundamental change
   2.  Forming an organizational strategy to respond
   3.  Redesigning the work and structure of the organization
   4.  Implementing the design, assessing impacts, and refining and changing
3. Linking Management Support to Educational Improvement Perspective
   Traditional management functions such as personnel and budgeting will have to be redesigned in dramatic ways.  Characteristics of the new support system include:
   ~  Definition and design of the purposes of management function
   ~  System must be usable by staff and high performance teams:
       *  Access
       *  Educational program focused
       *  Synergism of support service
   ~  System must be highly efficient, use technology powerfully to provide information
   ~  Information must be accessible by external audiences
   
   Marsh found that school principals progressed through three stages in their ability to make these connections.
   Stage 1 focused on the "nuts and bolts" of school management.
   Stage 2 involves a greater capacity for carrying out management functions.
   Stage 3 includes the integration of management functions and educational leadership.    

Practical Applications and Competencies:  A View from the Future

Lessons learned as viewed a decade from now:

• Leading from the Middle Still Required a Substantive Leader
  Principals in successful schools combine both personal and positional educational leadership in their schools
• Reframe the Right Problems
  Successful leaders in highly effective schools had more guidance from the system about critical student outcomes and helped the school internalize the importance of those system results.
• Focus on the Best Results and Sustain the Focus
  Successful principals were able to combine system defined student performance results with local indicators of student growth and customer satisfaction.
• Developed Strategic Thinking/Planning That Mattered
  Successful principals developed strategic and system thinking in a way that was infectious across the organization.
• Restructured and Recultured in a Powerful Synergy
  Successful principals worked to restructure and reculture schools into high performance work teams before the actual changes in teaching and learning are carried out.
• Linked Management Support to Work Structures and Organizational Redesign
  Educational leaders had a holistic understanding of the interface of management supports to the educational efforts of the school as linked to strong student results and institutional success.
• Powerfully Expanded Teaching and Learning Linked to the New Results
  Successful principals knew the attributes of good teaching/learning and the pragmatics of what teaching and learning ought look line in various subjects and for various grade levels.
• Created Professional Capacity and Learning Communities Driven by Results
  Successful principals worked hard to help colleagues build professional capacity and effective learning communities at the school.

Conclusion:  A New View of Educational Leadership

Successful principals will have invented a new form of educational leadership.

They will have joined the transformational power of collaboration and leading from the middle to the high performance work teams where a new form of expertise and learning community driven by results are dominant.

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Jossey-Bass Publishers.  The Jossey-Bass Reader on Education Leadership.