Non-Traditional Leadership in U.S. Schools

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Leadership issues in American Schools
The Nature of Leadership
Licensure Practice
Need for Reforms
New Leadership Agenda
Another Approach to Reforming Leadership
Conclusion
References

Introduction

Extraordinary challenges have been, and are still to be, faced by educational leaders, as the schools of the United States are struggling to keep pace with the growing competition. A broad set of criticisms has been raised that school systems, specifically in the larger urban areas are not good enough and do not meet the educational requirements. Through all times, the most basic goals of educational institutions have been to provide excellent education, encourage students for attaining high test scores, establish a high degree of discipline, retain students, and keep minimum absenteeism rate among them. When institutions fail to reach these basic goals, they’re said to be incompetent.

For schools in the United States, the basic fault lines in the recruitment system, the preparation, and induction system, that fails to train the leaders as required according to their position, that falls short in compensating them concerning their responsibilities, and that debars candidates having vital knowledge and capability.

Leadership issues in American Schools

A major problem confronting American schools is that it lacks effective leaders and practical and utilitarian leadership models. Leaders as principals have been observed to be unable to make strong decisions, delegate assignments and projects to staff and empower them, and have teachers engage in establishing policies and agendas. (Hess, 2003) It is the skilled and trained individuals, those capable of controlling and steering 21st-century schools and their systems, who are required.

It has been realized that the leadership of principals is vital to create inducements, motivation, and opportunities for teachers so that they learn. Heller and Firestone (1995) are of the view that the scope of the principal does just revolve around instructional leadership, as critically important roles are played by teachers and professionals. The formal leadership and the one that the teachers assume are quite different, wherein the latter; teachers are required to establish professional communities, develop trust relations, assist in learning, and support instructional change. (Bidwell, 2001) It has been suggested to consider leadership as a distributed phenomenon, extended across a manifold of actors in schools. (Spillane, Hallett, Diamond; 2003)

The Nature of Leadership

Leadership involves various forms of influence and power. Indeed, in instructional leadership, formal authority positions are vital, however, the assessment of the principal’s proficiency done by the teachers has also been found as critical. Principals have been required to lead in an interactive style so that the teachers are motivated to change. It has been observed that those principals who consult teachers for opinions and advice and praise them all along tend to motivate teachers better for instruction improvement. (Spillane, Hallett, Diamond; 2003)

“Leadership is both art and skill”. (Hess, 2003) It involves the ordinary skills of administering routine processes as well as the vibrant task of leading staff through high-tech, organizational, and cultural change. The managerial role differs from the leadership role in the respect that the former underlines planning and accounting, systemizing, staffing, and supervising, while the latter entails the capacity to establish an organization’s direction and then affiliate, encourage and inspire.

Licensure Practice

According to the typical trends, licensures are given to principals and superintendents before considering them as qualified and eligible applicants for a position. With 40 to 50 states running such a costly program, it’s so far been found out that not the least bit of contribution to the improved student learning has been put in by it. Generally, more than 3 years of teaching experience, achievement of an official degree program in the administration of education, as well as an internship, are required for principal and superintendent licensure.

Need for Reforms

A need for reforms has indeed been felt. However, according to the current reforms as stated by Hess (2003), the efforts include the setting up of entry barriers or recruiting only a small number of high-profile “superstar leaders”, those having careers outside the realm of education. Such an approach may work in the short run but it fails to address the challenges in the long run. It has been seen to fall short when it is about improving accountability, intensifying and strengthening the “talent pool”, and also when it is about making persistent support available to capable practitioners in the field. In this modern age of schooling, leaders must influence and give weight to accountability and radical and innovative technology.

They must also be able to contrive performance-based evaluation systems; re-design former outdated management networks; recruit, develop, and civilize non-traditional staff; run decisions with rational facts and data; establish professional cultures, and make sure that every child is provided with the best. However, studies show that for teachers to lead, no clear relation could be made between the teaching experience or training in educational administration that they have acquired so far with the degree of challenge-taking that is expected of them. Overall, in recent decades, traditional leaders or administrators have not progressed well in coping up with the required level of excellence.

New Leadership Agenda

Hence, to solve the educational leadership crisis, properly planned reforms have still been needed by systems; reforms that will exert a pull on leaders and develop them on a par with the challenge. As a replacement for the existing procedures and programs of regulations and restrictions, which are indeed occasionally perforated by loopholes, it is finally the time to implement a clear-cut three-point standard. As explained in detail by Hess (2003), it is required of the leadership candidates to:

have a B.S. or B.A. degree from a recognized and attributed institution and pass a thorough and precise criminal background check;
explain and make evident to the potential boss or employer experience necessary to demonstrate essential skills, temperament, and knowledge for the position applied for; and
exhibit expertise of basic fundamental technical knowledge and skills, to such a level that policymakers can identify and consent on certain specific and identifiable expertise without the personal authority of which an administrator is incompetent of efficient leadership, e.g. in fields of education law, special education, etc.

Of course, the second and third points from Hess’s ‘three-point standard’ will have different implications for leadership at the school level and district level. The structure for acquiring and strengthening proficient quality leaders stays consistent, even with the difference in challenges relating to the principal-ship of a small school and the superintendency of a large district. Hess in his New Leadership Agenda for America’s Schools says that these changes must occur “in tandem with a New Leadership Agenda” to:

revise the concept of leadership so that the role of a leader is not considered as one who has embodied an entire range of skills and knowledge that the organization needs;
generate the performance-oriented standard for employing and recruiting leaders;
establish firm approaches and techniques to check leadership performance and delegate responsibility to leaders; and
offer support systems and constant professional growth.

These steps may address teacher quality and shortage concerns, but they alone are not quite sufficient when it comes to education leadership. Considering teachers, the fundamental challenge is to provide a proficient, independent, and self-supporting professional to every classroom in the United States. It is essential to make use of an assessment scale to make sure that every candidate has gotten to grips with the chief and principle knowledge, which is because practitioners usually carry out their jobs independently in self-contained classrooms.

Plus, teachers are charged with well-defined responsibilities which can be smoothly assessed straightaway through the results that students have shown. In contrast, leaders operate as an ingredient of a leadership team and are supposed to face more unstructured kinds of responsibilities.

Teaching roles are fixed. The effort for teacher quality implies that every teacher must be a landmass of expertise and competence. In contrast, leadership roles are not. Due to this fact it is rarely required of each administrator to embody certain expertise or piece of knowledge and is only necessary that as a team, the members of that leadership team hold the vital skills as well as knowledge. Hence it can be observed how efforts to promote and support quality leadership are constrained by no such limiting factor at all.

The New Leadership Agenda is believed to benefit both students and school leaders. As more competition is instigated, this would certainly impose the payment of a fair rate for managerial and professional talent on the school systems. Also, this would force them to generate new opportunities for educational leaders to dominate and be in charge, as well as to attain the kind of professional support and esteem as possessed by their counterparts in other fields.

In addition to that, the New Leadership Agenda is expected to increase flexibility and open gates to new methods for the distribution of educational leadership. According to Richard Elmore of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, “distribution” of leadership, can be done throughout schools and systems in a manner “that taps into diverse expertise”. It may be said as a good kind of flexible thinking; however, it is more often believed to be curtailed by the restrictions and regulations of the way programs are running currently.

There is an imperative need to rethink and revise the administrators’ roles in a more general manner. Those administrators who possess only a very limited and narrow sort of ability to influence and mold their staffs, to compensate and approve of the personnel, or to distribute resources, are limited in their capacity to serve their students.

They cannot be held fully accountable for the outcomes of the organization. If it is intended that the educational leadership is to be truly professionalized, the educational leaders must be provided with the same tools and responsibilities that leaders in other vital fields possess and relish. Furthermore, a full stop is not to be placed after providing increased flexibility in job descriptions and authority. However, due consideration must be given to increased flexibility in compensation, as it is a vital component of motivation and encouragement among leaders and also it helps the organization to retain the quality ones.

It is important to note that the aforementioned agenda is not formulated to hit on the educational leadership; however, it is an assurance, a word to professionalize it. The concerned party that would be benefitting from these changes in the first place will be the thousands of brilliant, capable, and diligent principals and superintendents who have been unsatisfied with narrow job descriptions provided to them; and who face an inability to gather a reasonable and sound management team, an absence of support and esteem, and unclear or indefinite expectations.

Furthermore, compelling that the state licensure systems need to be passed or repaired does not imply that all or majority of the districts should immediately start hiring nontraditional candidates or reform leadership. Those districts where the current systems are functioning all right should not feel any obligation to bring about change. Even in those schools and school systems that need more flexibility for accomplishing their established educational goals, the New Leadership Agenda can certainly extend new approaches.

Another Approach to Reforming Leadership

Another approach to reforming leadership is to focus on the concept of centralization. Typically, and as seen above, leadership reform efforts suppose that it is the structural faults within the education system itself that cause the results from poor education. There is, however, a decentralization approach as well, which implies influencing parents and schools by numerous kinds of “site-based management and school choice arrangements”. (Eisinger and Hula, 2004)

But on the other hand, leadership reforms tend to roll exactly in the opposite direction. As aforementioned, they work toward centralizing the authority in the attempt to develop responsibility and prevail over the shortcomings and weaknesses of the “school board politics and bureaucratic inefficiencies” (Hunter & Swann, 1999).

Some centralizing initiatives have been taken across the nation. Examples include the school systems of Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago, where state and mayoral takeovers have occurred, or school systems of New York and Boston where school boards have been curtailed and even abolished, or in the systems of New Orleans, Baltimore, and Oklahoma where CEOs have been appointed instead of school superintendents as a way of highlighting the “need for tough-minded management”. (Eisinger and Hula, 2004)

One alternate of these reforms conceptualizing centralization presents a fascinating divergence from former practice. In the pursuit of strong, centralized leadership, some cities have settled on a certain recruiting policy. According to the policy, recruitment of such school CEOs or superintendents has been decided, professional backgrounds of whom rest completely outside of the realm of public education. Typically, the advancement in the educational field has required a higher degree from a school of education, plus a blend of both teaching and administrative experience in schools. Nonetheless, professionals with absolutely no connection with the education sector, like business executives, stockbrokers, attorneys, and retired military officers also appear prominent.

Known as nontraditional school superintendents, as Matthews (1999) put it, they come to their new offices and fail to differentiate “between a Carnegie unit and a cantaloupe”. Yet, cities are looking for such leaders for their presumed individuality, expertise in management, and decision-making capabilities, considering these characteristics as more vital than certified training and proficiency in public education.

Conclusion

Today, our attitude toward educational leadership falls short on getting enough of the leaders that are needed, the approach that presses effective teachers to foreswear their selected work for leading. The basic point covered in the paper is not the nontraditional leaders should be chosen over experienced educators. If the New Leadership Agenda was introduced a decade ago, it would have been rejected as radical.

As educationalists and policymakers increasingly emphasize “teacher qualification” and not on “teacher certification”, it no more appears far-fetched. (Hess, 2003) Indeed, in today’s time, the New Leadership Agenda looks like a sensible way of providing students and teachers with the competent, dedicated, and responsible leaders they truly deserve, and to endow school leaders with the flexible professional opportunities and esteem they merit.

Ron Brownstein said: “If improving the schools is a national priority, the nation needs to systematically funnel more of its talented people toward the challenge.”

References

Bidwell Charles E. (2001), “Analyzing Schools as Organizations: Long Term Permanence and Short Term Change.” Sociology of Education, Extra Issue: 100-14.

Heller, Marjorie F., and William A. Firestone (1995), “Who’s in Charge here? Sources of Leadership foe Change in Eight Schools.” Elementary School Journal 96:65-86.

Hess, Frederick M., (2003), “A License to Lead? A New Leadership Agenda for America’s Schools.” Progressive Policy Institute 21^st Century Schools Project.

Spillane, James P.; Hallett, Tim; Diamond, John B. (2003), “Forms of Capital and the construction of leadership: Instructional Leadership in Urban Elementary Schools.” Sociology of education 76, 1, ProQuest Education Journals.

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