0.3 Allen, a., & Gawlik, m. (july 2009). preparing district and  (Page 6/10)

With nearly 4,000 charter schools across the country, we are faced with a similar question of leadership: how do we move forward preparing public school leaders for the options they face today and how do we do so in a way that unites rather than divides our delivery of public schooling. As a question of leadership, we examine the potential of charter school leadership programs to enhance a system of public schooling. Senge’s (1990) ideas of systems-thinking are appropriate in considering how school leaders might best be prepared for all of the options within the public education delivery system. Senge suggests five component technologies or core disciplines in organizations that will gradually converge them into innovative learning organizations. One of these disciplines is systems thinking, which as a conceptual framework, comes from a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years. Systems thinking is a way of envisioning a system as a whole, as opposed to viewing it as a sum of its parts. Much like Kuhn’s ideas of shared assumptions that underlie a particular paradigm, systems thinking requires a shared vision or understanding regarding the mission and purpose of the systems’ work (Senge, 1990). In this paper, we apply these ideas to a system of public education delivery, providing a new synergetic lens for considering the work of charter and district school leaders both in terms of practice and research.

Charting educational leadership for traditional and charter school programs

Traditional school leadership programs approach leadership from a bureaucratic perspective. School principals operate within a system of support, including a central office that typically handles board and public relations, relations with unions, facilities management, human resources, etc. Studies of educational leadership suggest that in the past principals were able to succeed, at least partially, by simply carrying out the directives of central administration (Perez et al., 1999). But management by principals is no longer enough to meet today’s educational challenges—instead principals must assume a greater leadership role. In fact, recent movements in the field have pushed for a greater focus on instructional leadership for school principals and less of a focus on school management (Brookover&Lezotte, 1979; Cotton, 2000, 2003; Edmunds, 1979; Goodlad, 1979, 1984; Marzano, 2003; Sergiovanni, 1992, 1994). The complexity of balancing and integrating dimensions of effective leadership in such a way that practitioners can comprehend and apply them is shown by the long struggle to reconcile two major dimensions: management and instructional leadership. Within the past 25 years or so, principal training programs have changed quite significantly and as evidenced by the ISLLC Standards mentioned earlier, both aspects of school leadership are still represented.

The leader of a school is one of the most important individuals to influence common educational goals yet the pivotal question is what do we mean by leadership? From a reform perspective, the greatest challenge for the educational administration field may very well be a shift in the mental model of what it means to be a school leader instead of a school administrator (McCabe&McCarthy, 2005; Usdan, 2002). The current conception of leadership supplies an opportunity to reconsider what it means to lead a school where student learning and not the management of daily operations, is the core of the work (Elmore, 2000). While instructional leadership has been infused into the traditional principal role, leading instruction and managing people is simply not enough. According to Senge (1990), radical action is required to maintain and expand capacity to create results where people are continually learning. The invention of new leadership roles around student learning requires these new challenges not to be met with old approaches and traditional roles (Boris-Schacter&Langer, 2002). Traditional principals have expressed that they are not being trained to deal with classroom realities, in-school politics, work with diverse populations and prepare for increased testing and accountability (Levine, 2005).