"good school leaders
in the future are
going to need to be
more collaborative and inclusive in how they
think about their constituencies and
how they need to bring
those people on board
and get involved."

When evaluating the area of school leadership in today's schools, researchers at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University cast a broad net over a wide spectrum of people and positions.

Experts in the field say no single individual or office holder has a single key to providing the spark that starts the leadership fire burning. Rather, they said, each individual, whether the superintendent, a classroom teacher or a parent, plays a role in providing the leadership necessary to propel schools into the 21st century.

"We anchored all our work around the notion that whatever happens is related to outcomes for kids," said Joseph Murphy, professor and chair of Educational Leadership at Peabody and co-author of national standards for principals and superintendents.

"All the standards have that in them. The other thing we would argue is that good school leaders are heavily involved in learning and teaching aspects and dimensions of the schools and school districts. So, there's a very heavy impact there."

James W. Guthrie, director of Peabody's Center for Education Policy and professor of public policy and education, said the challenge of leadership lies in defining a goal without dictating how it should be reached.

"You need one voice, one leader on top to elaborate about the mission, but at the bottom you need multiple voices to discuss alternative ways of meeting the mission. What is counterproductive is for a leader to specify to followers how to achieve an objective."

Murphy said there is "certainly a bias toward the notion that good school leaders in the future are going to need to be more collaborative and inclusive in how they think about their constituencies and how they need to bring those people on board and get involved."

This includes teachers, parents, community members and those involved in school administration and government, he said.

"They need to be much more proactive in that kind of work than they have been in the past when our primary audience was in the chain of command in the bureaucracy," Murphy said.
Murphy and others stressed that changes in the composition of today's classrooms mandate changes in the approach that is taken toward leadership roles.

Ellen Goldring, professor of educational leadership and associate dean for academic affairs, spoke in terms of the challenges school leaders face today as opposed to problems.

"The challenges are the same challenges that teachers and all school personnel face such as a more diverse student body, the changing nature of the parents and other communal partners. There's an expectation from the community and from the parents and from the business community, for that matter, to be more involved in the schools than there was in the past. So there's an expectation of responsiveness."

She said research shows that all elements of school society must be brought together in order to provide the best possible environment for learning for students.

"The biggest challenge for school leadership is to orchestrate those components into a learning community or a community of learners," she said. "We need a common vision and purpose, a shared sense of mission, a shared sense of where we are going to promote learning for all children.
"That's an incredible juggling act for school leaders."

There are established basic standards for school leadership, Murphy said. One "says that school administrators and education leaders should promote the success of all students by acting with integrity and fairness in an ethical manner. We talk about a set of dispositions. The idea of the common good; the notion of a caring school community; the notion of accepting consequences for one's own action; to use the power of the office constructively in the service of kids in the community not just for your own self-enhancement."

Murphy said that the area of school leadership isn't a hard science; it involves less easily definable components like doing what is good and right with a view toward being a role model. The standards he and others have developed are one result of a collaborative effort involving 24 states and most of the major education associations.

"There are a half dozen ways to use the standards, and the idea is that this is a tool for each state to use them as they think best. The idea is that the standards are a powerful tool that can be used in a variety of ways. The idea is to strengthen the profession."

Asked who is responsible for implementing the standards, he said: "Everybody is responsible. That's the great thing about it. It's a series of levels and at each level different actors have to do different things."

Goldring said that the whole concept of school leadership is sometimes misunderstood.

"It's not about controlling people," she said. "It's about trying to control the conditions that can help people and support people to be successful. A classic example is the principal who helps the school write grants to get extra resources that then enable the teacher to implement a certain program or buy materials that are crucial to the success of the student. It's creating the supportive environment that allows teachers to teach and kids to learn."

She said that while the role of the school superintendent is vital, leadership doesn't flow exclusively from the top down.

"The superintendent sets the tone, the emphasis for the overall district goals," she said. "But, one would hope that in districts there are opportunities for ideas and innovations to come from the schools themselves."

Magnet schools often have more diverse leadership than other schools, Goldring said, because in magnet schools parents tend to be more involved, teachers often are at the school by choice and there's a sense of community and a common mission.

Research Goldring and Claire Smrekar, assistant professor of educational leadership, conducted in 1993-94 on magnet schools in Cincinnati, St. Louis and Nashville found teachers in magnet schools feel greater job satisfaction because the school climate reflected a sense of commitment, ownership and community.

A significant finding of the study, which was supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation, was that most teachers in non-magnet schools said they had no choice regarding their assignment to a particular school. However, magnet school teachers said the most frequent reasons for their selection of a particular school were its underlying theme or philosophy and its instructional program.

Goldring said the data "have some interesting implications in terms of motivation and energy for teachers. Magnet schools create a sense of ownership and cohesion for teachers that we do not always find in other places."

The study also found differences in the way teachers in magnet and non-magnet schools work. Magnet school teachers said they had more flexibility with the curriculum than those in non-magnet schools. In Nashville, magnet teachers were more likely to say their lessons directly involved the learner, encouraged student inquiry and employed different strategies to meet student needs. Non-magnet teachers in Nashville said they relied more on textbooks and short answers.

"Our research clearly shows that in many magnet schools, parents do indicate that they sense a shared purpose, a shared mission, a shared set of goals in magnet schools. They do sense that teachers are responsive to their needs and are willing to work with parents and students around the shared purpose," Goldring said.

The bottom line, Murphy and Goldring said, is that research shows that school leadership is a community wide issue and kids in the classrooms reap the benefit when the total community is involved.

Fred Sedahl