Why Is School Leadership Preparation So Complex

^note: This module has been peer-reviewed, accepted, and sanctioned by the National Council of the Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA) as a scholarly contribution to the knowledge base in educational administration.

This chapter will make a wide sweep of leadership research, exploring some of the mysteries and attempting to define the term “leadership.” affirm the difficulties in linking leadership preparation in universities and executive development programs in preparing individuals to become successful leaders, examine what seems to be missing in leadership research, who is in charge when leaders back down and how do leaders keep the organization on the proper edge for productivity when faced with inevitable political tensions between members of the community, school board and school administrators?

    One More Time: What is Leadership?

    Any discussion about leadership returns to the tired question: are leaders born or made? Next come the issues about leaders' temperament, intellect, persistence, and values and why some individual's with great leadership potential never succeed and others with what appear to have limited leadership skills accomplish great things. The discussion can lead to personal charisma, gender, race, and physical attributes of strength and size and why some individuals perform better under pressure. Some leaders adjust to situations better than others, some are better test takers, others are more reflective, some leaders have an inner sense of when and how to act under pressure and how to guide others out of confusion. This inner sense of leadership was never more evident than during the horrible times at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp. Elie Wiesel (2006) a prisoner at age 13 stood starving and shivering in the cold darkness when a Polish Jew supervisor of the barracks smiled at him and the others. Wiesel recalls his words of hope. He told us “Comrades, you are now in the concentration camp Auschwitz. Don't lose hope. We shall all see a day of liberation. Have faith in life. Hell does not last forever” (p.41). Even though this young Pole was assigned by the Nazis to keep order in the barracks, he had compassion for their suffering and gave them hope for survival. Those were the first human words that 13 year old Elie Wiesel heard after being beaten and dehumanized for several days. In another classic display of leadership Winston Churchill excelled. During the devastating bombings of London in World War II, Winston Churchill strengthened the resolve of his people and the world with his daily messages of hope. He told the world (Rogers, 1986):

    We shall not flag or fail, we shall go to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. ( p.77).

     When Arthur Levine of Teacher's College and other critics attacked leadership education programs, this writer responded this way (Hoyle, 2005):

    University preparation of school principals and superintendents has never been better. Based on indicators of academic achievement, such as entrance exams, grade point averages, and ethnic and gender diversity, the talent pool of graduate students in educational administration improves each decade. (p. 1)

    When Gerald Anderson became superintendent of the Brazosport, Texas School district, he found a high failure and dropout rate among children of color and poverty. Driven by his Marine pilot determination and armed with the knowledge of mastery learning gained in doctoral studies and belief that all kids can learn, Anderson added training in the Edwards Deming's Quality Improvement strategies and within three years turned the district into a national success story. His belief that all students can learn led to a hard stance with teachers who thought otherwise. He told his entire staff and community that the district will make “no excuses” for failing to educate every child in Brazosport. Thus, a district wide effort was soon underway to diagnose every student in terms of prior learning, provide quality teaching and testing strategies, re-teach and re-test, and provide each student time to master the content. He and his staff created eight strategies that became a model for hundreds of other school districts faced with high failure rates among minority and poor children and youth. Other superintendents face similar overwhelming odds that Anderson faced but appear to accept the community norms that some students will never succeed due family history, cultural barriers, or lack of school funding to meet the needs of all students especially those most difficult to teach. Thus, some individuals in leadership positions fail to act on their “inner strength” of leadership during times of crisis. We witness some of these leadership lapses by individuals with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other national and state political figures when hurricanes Katrina and Rita slammed into Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi coasts. Why do some leaders find that inner strength to act and others wait for someone or some group to solve the problems for them? These mysteries of leadership continue to elude the most curious leadership scholars and search teams assisting organizations in finding the right person or persons to lead as the world becomes more complex and competitive.

    Changing Definitions of Leadership

    Leadership definitions are more plentiful than those who write about the topic. Warren Bennis indicated that leadership is like beauty, difficult to define, but obvious to. Each semester in my organizational leadership class, I ask students to define leadership. If 15 graduate students respond, I get 15 different definitions. Definitions of leadership have evolved over time. After the devastating World Wars I and II, America was regaining its industrial might and leaders of industry, education, and national policy development assumed a posture of aggressive top-down control. The leadership literature of the period of 1950-1970 centered on influencing people to do what you want them to do or, managing others to follow you in completing a project, winning a battle, or creating a new product. These definitions were hangovers from the _great man_ theories of leadership that recalled powerful individuals leading the industrial revolution and military campaigns emphasizing the anthropomorphic concepts of physical prowess and personalities of the powerful. Influential figures of the early 20th century, i. e., Andrew Carnegie, Cornellus Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and other prominent land owners and bankers created the image of what leaders did in terms of exercising power and controlling the industrial, financial, political, and military sectors of American life. This image of what leaders do was influenced by the writings of Woodrow Wilson, Fredrick Taylor, Max Weber, Herbert Simon, Raymond Callahan and others who led in the creation of the science of administration and management primarily viewed leaders as managers of people and things to accomplish a common goal of efficiency, turn a profit, and plan ways to be more productive. According to Bertram Gross (1964), French Industrialist Henri Fayol (1841-1925) added to the trend toward scientific management by defining administrative leadership as planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling. These terms have come to be known as “Fayol's Elements” which best defined leadership in the early to mid-twentieth century. Fayol's Elements and the definitions are as follows:

Although the appearance of these “Elements” is top down and controlling by management Fayol did make room for some degree of shared leadership. Gross (1964) found that Fayol believed:

    Administration was not the exclusive privilege or responsibility of a few people, but was spread out throughout the organization. Everyone should participate to some extent in the administration, but the degree of responsibility and participation increases as one moves up in the hierarchy. (p. 40)

    Thus, Fayol promoted a science of administrative leadership and believed that it should be taught as a discipline in public schools and universities in order to produce leaders in the industry and other orga nizations. It is not surprising that during this time of “organizational efficiency” in business, public school administrators came under attack for running inefficient schools. In 1913, John Franklin Bobbitt applied Taylor's scientific management to educational management and leadership. He believed that schools must be more efficient by creating a centralized authority with top down control of all operations and proposed that children in schools were the raw material for the organization, the curriculum clearly identified and uniformly taught and authoritarian leadership by school administrators was an absolute necessity to assure that schools were to be business like and efficient (Callahan & Button, 1964). This definition of school leadership remained ingrained in the behaviors and the literature of educational administration until the late 1950's when the human relations era emerged under the influence of Mary Parker Follett and to studies conducted by Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger, and Chester Barnard. These giants of the human relation movement provided insights into the relationships among formal and informal groups and the importance of linking the roles and duties of the jobs and the personalities, and needs of the people doing the jobs. Follett was a clear leader and pioneer in the human relations movement and within the past ten years has been given the credit she deserved for her influence in being the human side to organizations. She wrote that there must be a “harmonious” relationship between the job to be done and those doing the job and that conflict was a natural phenomenon in organizations. Follett (1924) conceived three ways to handle conflict and use it for the good: (1) dominion determines a win for one side or the other; (2) compromise directs each side and gives us something to bring some peace to the situation; and (3) integration guides each side toward blending conflicting views so that each side gains in the process (p. 300). The human relations era was a time to attempt some balance between the demands of the organization and its primacy for production with the needs and dispositions of the workers. Before the strong labor movement led by John L. Lewis, laborers had no protection from the captains of industry. In 1935 Lewis and his staff struggled to organize all workers into a single union and in spite the controversy surrounding his leadership strategies, the standard of living of most laborers improved. In spite of the labor movement, labor relations departments and hundreds of articles and books on organizational relations, the search continues for a proper balance between the drive for higher performance and needs and welfare of the employees in most organizations. Unions and labor relations organizations today have specialists trained to deal with labor issues including mediation, arbitrations, and legal services.

    Since the late 1950s the definitions of leadership have gradually changed from one of forcing others to comply to modeling the way for others though the use of empowerment, persuasion, professional development, and encouragement. The most dramatic changes in administrative leadership occurred as a result the Civil Rights Movement supported by the Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, women's rights, legislation for the handicapped and increased pleas for social justice in our legal, corporate and educational systems. These movements have raised the awareness of the injustices suffered by women, people of color and those caught in the web of poverty. National, state, and local efforts to provide equal opportunities to oppressed individuals have inspired political leaders, educational administrators, and community leaders to reconsider the meaning of leadership and personal obligation toward inclusion of others in sharing power and resources.

Thus, the definitions of leadership have gradually moved from the transaction to the transformational. That is, while transactional leadership is more of a stance of bargaining or agreeing to help others if they help you, transformational leadership is making organizations especially schools more caring communities by leaders guided by principle, morality, and service to others. This transformational and moral leadership style is an effort to lead others to toward greater organizational productivity preparing and empowering others to take personal responsibility in assuring quality in the entire organization (Bolman & Deal, 1993; Sergiovanni 1999; Fullen, 2003; Wheatley, 2002; Hoyle, 2002; Burns, 1978). This soul centered leadership style is the primary reason for high performing schools at all levels. In 2006, schools and school leaders are caught in paradox of high expectations from the government and community, yet trying to lead school staffs to create caring learning communities for each child and youth. Caught in this 21st century high stakes, test-driven education system it is imperative that educational leaders demonstrate unconditional love for all team members if they are to meet the high expectation of society and prepare young people with the character to promote social justice for all people. The Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General Pete Schoomaker, explained the difference between leadership and management and that the best leaders learn to merge the two. Leadership is “dealing with change, while management is about dealing with complexity. You do not `manage' a soldier out of the bottom of a hole to face danger, you lead them there” (Saturday, April 1, The Bryan College Station Eagle). Thus, the definition of leadership has evolved from “Telling others to do what you need done,” to inspiring and empowering personnel to seek quality for the organization and to help assure the welfare for all persons.

    What Leadership Research is Missing?

    How do we know that leadership training is worth doing? Researchers have found scant evidence that leadership preparation does prepare leaders. Since the work of Fred Fielder cast doubt on the effectiveness of leadership training and his provocative Least Preferred Coworker studies, researchers have become mired in the confusion of contingency theory of leadership. Others have joined Fiedler (1967), in struggling to find closer links between preparation and successful practice are Achilles (1988), Glass, Bjork, and Brunner (2000), Cooper and Boyd (1988), Murphy and Vriesenga (2004), Hoyle (2005), and Levine (2005). The pursuit of this link between leadership preparation and successful practice intensifies each year in university preparation programs and in staff development activates in the real world of schools and business. In educational administration, Martha McCarthy (2001) believes that challenges faced by leadership preparation programs include: (1) producing credible evidence that informs practitioners, scholars, and policy makers regarding effectiveness of leadership preparation programs; (2) deciding whether the standards being adopted for school administrators are the right ones, and if so how satisfactions with these should be assessed? Attempts to locate research studies that shed a positive light on the preparation-practice paradox, found limited, but credible “hard research” in descriptive form that revealed graduates' satisfaction with the skills and knowledge taught to them in their graduate programs (Hatley, et al, 1996; Hoyle & Oates, 2000; Davis, 1997; Jackson & Kelly, 2002; Zimmerman, Bowman, Valentine, & Barnes, 2004; Schmieder & Townley, 1994; Martin, Murphy, & Muth, 1998; Doolittle, 2003). These findings range from “hard research” from well designed qualitative studies to the use of survey methods. Graduate students at the University of Missouri and Texas A&M University reported that their graduate programs were very instrumental in helping them prepare for and succeed on the job. Other graduates reported a “clear, well defined curriculum focus reflecting agreement on the relevant knowledge base needed for school administrators in their first year, or first few years in the profession” (Jackson & Kelly 2002, p. 208). Professors at other institutions found that graduates became more scholarly in their approach to problem-solving which helped them solve the real world problems of administration. Martin, Murphy, and Muth (1998) found that th eir graduates were prepared to “integrate reliable formal knowledge with clinical knowledge theoretical and craft knowledge” (p. 152). Thus, while the evidence about the success of leadership preparation is limited it does include some important “hard evidence” that Murphy and Vriesenga (2004) failed to include in their exclusive literature search of only four journals in the field.

    New Research Initiatives

    As part of the ongoing search for the “holy grail” for evidence of successful leadership preparation, several promising initiatives are currently underway. First, a collaborative effort among the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA), National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (NC-PEA), and American Education Research Association (AERA)-Division A are producing a Handbook on Leadership Research edited by Gary Crow and Michelle Young. Ten domain leaders are working with other scholars to contribute chapters on a variety of leadership preparation topics investigating the links between preparation and successful practice. The primary aims of this effort is to (1) provide a foundation about existing research and theory in the field of leadership preparation; 2) identify gaps and new directions for research and leadership preparation; 3) stimulate more, better quality research in the field of leadership preparation; 4) encourage new and experienced researchers to undertake research in the field; and 5) provide a community of scholars for on-going conceptual and methodological work (Orr, 2006). Other initiatives are the new UCEA Journal of Research on Leadership Education (JRLE), the new School Leadership Review (SLR) published by the Texas Professors of Educational Administration (TPEA), and the NCPEA Educational Leadership Review. Unless, more compelling evidence is found linking preparation to successful practice, graduate programs in educational administration could face even greater scrutiny by professional administrator associations, university administrators, and policy makers at state and national levels. Unless research directs greater efforts to reveal more reliable evidence that the course work and related clinical experience prepares more effective school leaders other providers will fill the void with on-line and less expensive degrees and credentials. . The Broad Foundation, on-line universities, i.e., Phoenix, Devry, and others are making claims that their programs for preparing school leaders are as successful as the traditional graduate schools and departments and at less cost and greater convenience to school administrators in full-time jobs who claim time constraints bar them from entering traditional, research- based, on-campus graduate programs.

    Educational administration is not alone in lacking convincing research evidence that their graduate pro-grams produce successful graduates. Graduate programs in business administration, public administration, hospital administration, health administration, and sports management suffer from a lack of solid research evidence that their graduates become successful as a direct result of their graduate studies. Programs in architecture, medicine, agriculture, computer science, and engineering, and other professional schools claim to have tighter links between preparation and practice due to the more measurable skills and performance expectations of meeting professional standards. Thus, while educational administration continues to question which set of preparation standards are superior measures of successful practice, the gap remains between what skills are taught and what skills really make for successful practice. An expert panel was appointed in 2006 to revisit the ISLLC standards since 44 states have either adopted the standards or adapted them to meet state certification and degree requirements. Recent on-going inquiry into leadership preparation by UCEA, NCPEA, and AERA and individual researchers will provide greater insights into the preparation-practice gap. This writer with the assistance of Professor Mario Torres of Texas A&M University will investigate possible links to the gap during 2006-2007. First, we will visit 6 of the top 10 graduate programs in educational administration (ranked by U.S. News and World Report), to conduct interviews with graduate faculty, full-time students, and successful practicing principals and superintendent who graduated with doctorates from these top six programs in educational administration/policy/leadership. We will gather data on student admission, selection, and faculty mentoring procedures, curriculum requirements, instructional processes including the balance between traditional classroom and distance/web-based instruction, independent and group research activities, extent and variety of field/clinical requirements, types and extent of student progress assessments including course, entrance, preliminary, and final exams.

    Second, we will ask each program director or key faculty members to recommend at least five graduates of their doctoral program who are now principals or superintendents of successful schools or school districts. We will seek graduates who have been in the same position for at least three years in order to have some assurance that their influence is a primary factor in the success of the school or district. Criteria for the schools in which the graduate serve are as follows:

    1.High performing students based on state accountability exam scores in grades 3-11 since the administrator joined the school or district.

    2.Mixed race student and family wealth of campus and district student enrollments.

     3.Low teacher turnover since the administrator has been in place on the campus or in the district.

    4.Lower number of student drop-outs since the administrator has been in place on the campus or in the district.

    5.Extend of parent involvement in the school or the district since the administrator has been on the job.

    6.Number of advanced placement courses in the secondary schools since the administrator joined the school or district.

    Note: Decision rules about the six criteria will be made based on the data gathered about schools and districts of the graduates recommended by their program directors.

    Third, the researchers will contact each principal and superintendent recommended by their program faculty and after applying the seven criteria to the school or district, the researcher will make selections for personal interviews. The researchers will strive to interview five graduates from each of the top six programs and ask the following questions:

    1.Since you completed your doctorate, what experiences, people, and activities do you recall that have been influential in your success as a campus/district school leader?

    2.Try to recall specific courses in your major in educational administration/policy that have been helpful in your success and provide examples of how specific theories, models, strategies, or methods shared in educational administration seminars remain valuable to you today.

    3.Try and recall specific courses outside of the educational administration major that have been helpful in your success as a campus/district leader i.e., curriculum, instruction, technology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, business, accounting or public administration.

    4.Try and recall specific courses or research activities that help you today in collecting, tabulating, interpreting, reporting and distributing data to staff on student and teacher performance.

    5.Recall your doctoral program advisor/s and try and recall any words of wisdom, knowledge, interper sonal, or communication skills that have been key to your success as a campus or district leader.

    6.Recall any relevant contacts with your professors and classmates that have been of value to your on-going professional development and to the success of your school or district.

    7.What habits of scholarship is a direct result of your doctoral student experience? i.e., reading scholarly journals, seeking on-line research findings, book readings, conducting personal research, making research based presentations at state and national conferences, and publishing your research in state and national journals.

    Fourth, the researchers will analyze the data and codify information on the six doctoral programs, i.e., comparisons of admissions and program requirements, standards, curriculum, internships, research activities, faculty mentoring, class schedules, and committee structures in terms of faculty numbers and disciplines.

    In the last step of the process, interview data gathered from the approximately 30 successful graduates will include the use of mixed methods. First, the researcher will analyze the responses of the five graduates from each program and seek parallels in the responses about courses, professors, activities possibly directly linked to successful practices. Next, after identifying possible links between preparation and practice in each of the six top ten programs, the researchers will then conduct vertical and parallel analyses seeking across preparation and practice across the six programs. If these links emerge the researcher will apply both inferential and descriptive methods to investigate significance between preparation and practice. For obvious reasons related to socialization since completing doctoral programs these preparation practice links will perhaps be weak or missing. However, in spite of the difficulties in isolating the variables that impact successful practice the study could provide more clues to the mystery of leadership and how leaders can be better prepared to take charge and lead schools and school districts to become high performing.

    Who is in Charge When Leaders back down?

    General George S. Patton knew that leaders in charge should never back down. Endowed with limitless energy and even when he knew his men were extremely tired, he never let them quit. According to military historian Edgar F. Puryear (1971) General Patton got his men to overcome fatigue and give their all for him “to do just a little bit more than they thought humanly possible. He did it through his speeches in which he waved the flag, emphasizing that it was a privilege and an honor to fight and die for one's country. He told his men what a wonderful job they were doing, but they needed to do better; and in his speeches, he convinced them that their fame would never die” (p.285). The George Patton leadership style may not apply to being in charge of a school, school district or chairing a doctoral dissertation committee and advising graduate students, but the same premise holds leaders can not back down when pressure mounts. Patton was referred to as a driver rather than a leader and according to Puryear (1971), being a driver “was a technique which was fundamental and vital to his leadership success. It was a technique that brought him great success, but it also caused problems for himself and his senior commanders” (p. 287). This dynamic drive to lead and an excessive need to achieve can be a boon or a demon for individuals in leadership roles. David McClelland (Hoy & Miskel, 2005) created the n-achievement factor and hypothesized that individuals who are high in achievement motivation have three key characteristics: 1) they have a strong need to assume personal responsibility and tend to work alone to get the job done they way they want it; 2) individuals who have a higher need to succeed tend to set moderately difficult goals and take intermediate levels of risk. They like the challenge of difficult tasks that may appear to others to be unattainable; 3) high achievers need performance feedback about their accomplishments even if they fail in completing the task successfully. This obsession to take on difficult tasks by themselves and seek little outside assistance has its downside in terms of collegiality and teamwork. A driven leader can easily become known viewed as “compulsive” or “quick tempered,” demanding perfection in others and critical of any person who may appear to stand in the way of progress for his/her projects or for the organization. While George Patton took great care to assure that his soldiers were provided food, dry clothing, and shelter in combat, he also displayed a short fuse when any soldier failed to carry out his military duty. Puryear summed up Patton's leadership this way, “At best he was superb; at his worst he was impossible” (p. 288).

    Leadership behavior consists of a person's general personality, demeanor, and communication patterns in guiding others toward reaching personal and organizational goals. The balance between “taking charge” and “empowering others” is indeed difficult to maintain over an extended period of time. A school principal may organize for and believe in teaching to the test, but staff perceptions may view the principal as an authoritarian who refuse to discuss alternative teaching approaches. The literature reveals little empirical research evidence that answers why some leadership styles in specific situations are triumphant successes and others are dismal failures. Observers have pondered why some successful school leaders use a consistent leadership style in all situations and others use a more situational style. Moreover, research is silent in seeking answers about the impact of certain leadership styles across schools, school leaders, and situations. Some promising findings are emerging about how some leaders appear to read the school culture and adjust their leadership style to address critical racial and social issues that impact student learning (Lunenburg, 2003).

    Leadership research continues to undulate between leadership as “being in charge” to “being among the leadership team.” The literature includes leadership as a personal quality, a remnant of the “great man” theories of the 1950s when personality traits and human capabilities that gave individuals advantage over others. Writers cannot make up their collective minds about why it has been so difficult to move from the boss on the top to the boss in the middle model of leadership. Most writers avoid the boss on the top and write about the virtues of leadership as relational and as a moral quality. In the past five years leadership research investigates the power of love and spirituality in preparing tomorrow's school leaders. Thus, will organizations especially schools continue its search for higher quality when leaders back down? This author thinks not! While effective leaders understand that cooperation cannot be forced on others, they must be persuasive and lead others to destinations beyond their imaginations and gain their commitment to shared goals. The formal leader is vital in capturing the cooperation of others in seeking higher goals for themselves and for every student they teach and counsel. The school principal, superintendent and professor of school leadership must posses the drive of George Patton, the patience of Job, the persistence of Nelson Mandela, and the love of

    Mother Teresa.

    Keeping the Organization on a Proper Edge for Productivity in a Political Context

    The four months leading up to the D-day invasion of Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, visited twenty-six divisions, twenty-four airfields, five ships of war, and many other important installations. His friends urged him to slow down and not wear himself out before the invasion. However, General Eisenhower told them that the information he was gaining was valuable to the war effort and would provide an edge for victory over the Nazis. In his memoirs, Eisenhower told his reasons for these extensive pre-battle visits.

    Diffidence or modesty should never blind the commander to his duty or showing himself to his men, of speaking to them, of mingling with them to the extent to physical limitation. It pays big dividends in terms of morale, and morale, given rough equality in other things, is supreme on the battlefield. (Puryear, 1971, p. 231)

    Diffidence and modesty should never blind a principal, superintendent, or professor from mingling with staff, faculty, and students to bring encouragement, needed supplies and equipment, ideas to improve instruction or student assessment, and “sharpen intellectual saws.” This high visibility by the leader is not only a first step in creating a learning community, but it also reveals courage by the leader to become vulnerable as a member of the group. As a group member the leader becomes a peer who may not have all of the answers, but is willing to learn from the community members. While assuming learning community membership the principal, superintendent, or professor does not relinquish positional power, but gains in referent power necessary to move others toward team vision and programming.

    Gaining referent power in public schools is difficult for school administrators if the school board is playing political games against the superintendent. He/she can be very successful in leading a district to higher student performance and be given supportive annual evaluations by the board and not have his/her contract renewed. The best university preparation includes courses on education politics and interpersonal relationships. The best superintendent performance evaluation model based on the AASA standards are of little consequence when a board decides to dismiss their superintendent for “failure to communicate” or some other political reason. Preparing superintendents to survive in politically driven communities continues to be a hot issue in leadership preparation across the country. However, it is not unusual for a superintendent to create political power struggles among members of the school community. This writer served as a consultant to a Cincinnati area suburban school district to conduct a leadership climate study. One part of the study was to ask principals, assistant principals, and assistant superintendents to complete a self report instruments to evaluate the leadership of the superintendent. Two weeks later I called the superintendent and asked how the climate study was progressing. The superintendent replied, “Well Dr. Hoyle, every instrument has been returned except for the one evaluating my leadership skills. I can't understand what happened. I asked them to complete the form and sign it at the bottom before sending it to my office.”

    After a few moments of silence, I asked why he had asked his administrators to sign the instrument. He replied, “Well, I wanted them to be honest and tell me what they really thought about me as their superintendent.” I then suggested that he re-send it and tell them that it is not necessary to sign it. He forgot a little lesson about the use or misuse of political power in his position as superintendent. As a result of this change he had 100% return and some positive suggestions to improve his communication strategies with them and change other central office processes to help building principals gain access to better information sooner. General Eisenhower gained greater power by mingling with his men and sharing his fears and hopes about the invasion on D-Day. The Ohio superintendent discovered that if he wanted to gain referent political power he needed to open lines of communication, mingle, and ask for open anonymous responses from his leadership team.

    Keeping a keen edge is vital to sustain productive teams in academics or athletics. This sharp edge is created in order to meet accountability demands while striving to assure that every teacher is treated as a professional colleague. Richard Allington and Patricia Cunningham (2007) report a study by Ames and Ames that presents strategies to keep a sharp edge for improving performance. Selected teachers and the principal conducted sessions organized around data about student achievement, instructional process information, and school climate. They used standardized test data to determine how well different groups of students were performing (boys versus girls, economically advantaged versus disadvantaged, and breakdowns by ethnicity). They reviewed other measures of teacher satisfaction, potential of students, and other information. Next the team identified the strengths and weaknesses of the curriculum, testing procedures, and translated these findings into specific goals and action plans. Shared decision making was the norm as the team created a framework for analyzing instructional aspects of the school programs. Collegial and collaborative efforts among faculty improved and Ames and Ames found good evidence that shared decision-making provided the keen edge necessary to improve the school culture toward higher student achievement and lead to improved schooling for all students. There is significant evidence that school administrators who use control strategies for curriculum and teaching processes lose their edge for higher performance. When a school administrator relies on “teacher proof curriculum” or exhibits a patriarchal model of leadership little progress is made in terms of student's performance and teacher morale. In administrator “controlled” schools it is very unlikely that student performance will improve much because teachers are placed in a position of obedience and only teach what they are told to teach. They are fearful of teaching “outside the box” and become resigned to merely do the job and nothing more. Thus, to keep a keen edge toward greater productivity, mingling with those producing the product whether they are soldiers storming the beaches on D-Day or teachers striving together to liberate children from failure.

     Conclusions

    There is little doubt among scholars and school administrators about the necessary strategies to create high performing schools. The steps include clear compelling beliefs, an inspirational shared vision, clear mission, goals, assessments, and targeted staff development. High performing school districts include these key ingredients plus community support systems that include high parental involvement, adequate financial support, and respect for school teachers and administrators. However, school leaders must be prepared and mentored in the art and science of leadership, teambuilding, communications, interpersonal relationships, curriculum and instruction, and skills in research, planning, and evaluation. These school leaders need the skills of a political scientist to wade through the political puddles of power and their harmful and helpful elements. Successful superintendents can not only wade through these political puddles, but they create a belief that all students can learn. They lead and teach others the art and science of diagnosing every child in terms of prior learning, how to create quality teaching and testing strategies, and how to accept “no excuses” for failing to educate every child in the system. Why do some leaders find the inner strength to act and others wait for someone or some group to solve the problem for them? These mysteries of leadership continue to elude the most curious leadership scholars and search teams assisting school boards in finding the right person to lead in a world that continues to grow more complex and competitive. Scholars know what skills and dispositions are needed to prepare leaders for high performing schools. The mystery is in the personalities of school leaders and their compassion for becoming a servant leader who can balance politics with a clear vision and calculated steps to both keep the job and educate every student for a life of success?

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