The usefulness of the symbolic dimension for understanding educational administration is described in this paper, which discusses how the interpretivist rather than functional perspective is a more fruitful way of looking symbolically at organizations. The symbolic aspects of school culture, particularly its types of discourse, story, and script, are crucial in determining a school's effectiveness. A case study of an Israeli secondary school that implemented a school improvement initiative, the Shevach Project, in Israel, compared how the organizational script changed upon the arrival of the new local education department head. Negotiation with the head, who planned to create a selective, high status academic track, led to the development of a new script in which school excellence was decoupled from elitism. A conclusion is that the notions of discourse, story, and script are useful for understanding the change process and for organizational planning, and that the quality of effective schools' symbolic worlds differs from those of ineffective schools. (Contains 22 references.) (LMI)