ALBERT SHANKER INSTITUTE
Building a New Structure
For School Leadership
B Y R I C H A R D F. E L M O R E
Building a New Structure
For School Leadership
B Y R I C H A R D F. E L M O R E
Professor, Graduate School of Education Harvard University and
Senior Research Fellow, Consortium for Policy Research in Education
© WINTER 2000 THE ALBERT SHANKER INSTITUTE
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR AND NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF THE ALBERT SHANKER INSTITUTE
OR THE CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH IN EDUCATION, OR ITS INSTITUTIONAL MEMBERS.
P
UBLIC SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL SYSTEMS, as they are presently constituted, are simply not led
in ways that enable them to respond to the increasing demands they face under standards-
based reform. Further, if schools, school systems, and their leaders respond to standards-
based reforms the way they have responded to other attempts at broad scale reform of pub-
lic education over the past century, they will fail massively and visibly, with an attendant loss of
public confidence and serious consequences for public education. The way out of this problem is
through the large scale improvement of instruction, something public education has been unable to
do to date, but which is possible with dramatic changes in the way public schools define and practice
leadership.
Contrary to the myth of visionary leadership that pervades American culture, most leaders in all sec-
tors of society are creatures of the organizations they lead. Nowhere is this more true than in public
education, where principals and district superintendents are recruited almost exclusively from the
ranks of practice. As in the military and the church, one does not get to lead in education without
being well socialized to the norms, values, predispositions, and routines of the organization one is
leading.
Consequently, current education leaders are no better equipped than the organizations they lead to
meet the challenges posed by standards-based reform. (Lortie 1987) So relying on leaders to solve
the problem of syst