This article examines four leadership virtues: hope, trust, piety, and civility. When these four are at the core of leadership practice, the leverage needed for improving even the most challenging schools can be discovered.

This paper outlines a framework for moral educational leadership in an effort to get beyond the traditional ethical analyses of educational administration (Strike, Haller, and Soltis 1998; Maxcy 2002) and recent attempts to open up more synthetic and late modern perspectives (Starratt 1991; Shapiro and Stefkovich 2001). It attempts to identify a…

Leadership demands in American public schools have changed dramatically in the past 20 years. Whether--or how--the practice of leadership will change to meet those demands is an open question. The change in demands is largely a consequence of the introduction of performance-based accountability--policies that evaluate, reward, and sanction schools…

Educators in the United States are being asked to do more with less: school budgets are shrinking, principals are struggling to be instructional leaders in the face of huge management issues, and teachers are trying to meet the needs of increasingly diverse students at a time when a standardized, one-size-fits-all curriculum is mandated. The tenor…

One of the most significant events in the life of a school is a change in its leadership. Yet few things in education succeed less than leadership succession. Failure to care for leadership succession is sometimes a result of manipulation or self-centeredness; but more often it is oversight, neglect, or the pressures of crisis management that are…

Turnaround leadership concerns the kind of leadership needed for turning around a persistently low-performing school to one that is performing acceptably as measured by student achievement according to state tests. I first treat this question in the narrow sense, i.e., as a strategy for targeting low-performing schools, and then place it in a…

Many nations' governments are requiring schools to bring about significant, systematic, and sustained change to improve student outcomes in all settings, and have imposed mandates to ensure that schools are providing quality education and running efficiently and effectively. Consequently, national and state testing programs, standards-based…

The purpose of public schooling in this nation--a nation founded on principles of freedom, justice, and measures of happiness for all--is to educate the citizenry in understanding and abiding by these principles. Public education is rooted in a long tradition. At several important points in history (Kauchak, Eggen, and Carter 2001), through…

On July 1, 2000, the author became the first black dean of Education in the almost 100 year existence of the formidable University of Pretoria, South Africa. This essay offers a set of meditations on being a black dean in a white university at the birth of a post-apartheid democracy. There are many sides to this narrative. It is a story of leading…

School effectiveness and improvement research shows that leadership plays a key role in ensuring the vitality and growth of schools. Yet, there is growing appreciation (Elmore 2000, 2) that "public schools and school systems as presently constituted are simply not led in ways that enable them to respond to the increasing demands they face under…

Recent trends in the English curriculum--little more than changes in emphases--do not constitute a utopian "new English." In fact, one trend, revealed in some current studies of the high school English curriculum, involves a return to the "old" tradition of instruction in the great masters of English and American literature. The studies imply a…