Today's schools are too big. If smaller schools and classroom settings are beneficial and less costly, why do we continue to operate and build large schools? Perhaps committing to smaller schools would require us to rethink the leadership, management, and organization theories that dominate school administration. Authority should be vested in…

Educational administration must abandon its focus on organization, based on hierarchy, legitimacy, and self-interest and develop its own identity. Families, communities, and friendship networks constitute alternative collections of people. To understand schools as communities, educational administration would need to address new questions,…

Although both professionalism and leadership are prescribed as cures for school problems, the two concepts are antithetical. The more professionalism is emphasized, the less leadership is needed. Teachers become more committed and self-managing when schools become true communities, freeing principals from the burden of trying to control people.…

This book provides a view of community that educators can use to define and build community in their schools. Chapter 1 critiques the traditional view of schools as formal organizations and offers a theory of community as an alternative. Chapter 2 describes a pattern of relationships characteristic of communities, which can be applied to…

The Pyramid, Railroad, and High Performance theories of leadership are inappropriate for school settings. At root, school leadership is about connecting people morally to each other and to their work. The work of leadership involves developing shared purposes, beliefs, values, and conceptions associated with teaching and learning,…

Schools with character have unique cultures and are committed to developing academic and social capital. The principal's greatest challenge and primary responsibility is to develop a caring school community, a place where strong character emerges from shared purpose that encourages students to be successful learners. Contains 13 references. (MLH)

The politics of division arises from applying formal organizational theories of governance, management, and leadership to schools. Rational-choice theory and cultural pluralism lack the unifying power of civic virtue. Creating a politics of virtue requires that we renew commitments to our nation's democratic legacy. Principals must practice…

Educational administration has been shaped by the metaphor of organization. From organizational and management theory, and from economics, the parent of organizational theory, educational administration has borrowed definitions of quality, productivity, and efficiency; strategies to achieve them; and theories of human nature and motivation.…