Ethical Leadership in Schools

Creating Community in an Environment of Accountability

Kenneth A. Strike

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781412913515, 9781412913508
• eBook ISBN: 9781452280813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Discover the link between ethical leadership and successful educational communities!

In an age of accountability and transparency, principals are held responsible for everything from test scores to school finances. Because of this increased accountability, school leaders must regularly confront difficult ethical dilemmas.

Ethical Leadership in Schools teaches principals and aspiring principals the concepts that inform ethical choices in leadership roles. Using brief vignettes, Kenneth A. Strike explores common situations that principals are likely to encounter and presents questions and issues to help them determine the ethical path. As part of the Leadership for Learning initiative of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), this invaluable resource clearly explains complex ideas in an accessible, well-illustrated manner.

To help resolve the dilemmas that challenge every school leader, this book:

• Guides readers through the process of making ethical decisions
• Bridges ethics to issues of accountability
• Provides scenarios that reflect the difficult choices facing principals
• Supplies the tools to create ethical advice in varied contexts
• Examines the central principles of fair cooperation

The study of ethics should emphasize what makes a school a good educational community. By creating communities that are competent, caring, and collegial, school leaders will be able to maximize their resources and meet the growing demands of accountability.

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Moral Principles and Moral Principals?

An Introduction

A SCENARIO

The scenario that follows is the dominant example in this book. I will discuss some of its features in this introductory chapter and will return to it a number of times in the book, altering it as though it were about different levels of education: elementary, middle, or high school.

Imagine that you are the principal of a school in a large district. Your school, like your district, has a diverse population. It does not have the extreme poverty that characterizes a few of the schools in your district, yet your community is not wealthy. Students for the most part come from middle- and working-class families who own modest homes. The percentage of children on free and reduced lunch is lower than the district average.

Your school is successful in a district where many schools are not. You have worked hard to make your school into a learning community. Your teachers work well together. Parents and community members are included in some of the deliberations and feel they are valued partners in the school.

Under your leadership, your teachers have developed a curriculum and instructional strategies that you and they believe to be first-rate. While basic skills are not neglected, the program is designed to teach advanced cognitive skills and to develop creativity. Teachers cooperate in its implementation and meet frequently to discuss problems.

Your teachers did a great deal of background research on this curriculum, and they believe that the curriculum and their instructional strategies are supported by a significant body of educational research. Its merits have been confirmed through their own experience, and they have modified the program where needed. Parents understand the program, were regularly consulted while it was being developed, and support it.

Your state has a series of tests that the students in your school must take. Results are reported in the local papers, and there is much pressure on schools to do well. This has not been a problem for you. Your students do well. Moreover, while the program your teachers developed under your leadership was not designed to be aligned with these tests, it seems more than adequate to prepare your students to succeed on them. While some parents have complained about the amount of time their children spend taking tests, many teachers and parents have felt that the fact that their children score well on these tests is a validation of their efforts. They are happy to be accountable.

Moreover, the data from the tests have been helpful in the continuing assessment of and reflection on the program. Among other things, test results have helped make it clear that while your students perform well on average, it is not the case that all students do well. It has been of particular concern to you that those students who are on free and reduced lunch are overrepresented in the group of students who are performing poorly.

Other schools in your district have not done well, even on average. Your district is one of the more poorly performing ones in your state. That its central office, superintendent, and board of education have had a history of conflict and turnover has not helped it focus on the problem of educating its large number of poor and minority students.

After much soul-searching and a fair amount of squabbling, your district has produced a plan to deal with this matter. Among the provisions of the plan are three that will directly impact your school. First, the district has insisted that the curriculum in each of its schools be tightly aligned with state tests. This will require considerable revision of your current curriculum. Second, the district has mandated that review of released or sample test items be incorporated into instruction on a regular basis in all subjects for which there are tests. Finally, the district has required that whenever a test is to be given, during the two weeks prior to testing, significant instructional time is to be devoted to test preparation and taking practice tests.

The district justified these requirements by claiming that it believed that the state’s tests were good tests aligned with state standards; hence, educational practices that focused on them served to focus the attention of the district’s schools on teaching what they should be teaching and, if this amounted to “teaching to the test,” to do so was nothing more than to emphasize essential content.

The teachers and parents at your school were most unhappy. They did not wish to alter their current curriculum and instructional practices, and since their students were doing quite well, they saw no reason why they should. They did not agree that they were merely being asked to teach sound subject matter in ways that had proven successful. They claimed that they were being required to focus on rote memorization of facts rather than on higher cognitive skills and creativity, and they quickly (if not very originally) dubbed the pedagogy they were expected to employ “drill and kill.” Meetings were called, and contentious letters were written. (We will read portions of these letters in Chapter 5.) There was criticism not only of the wisdom of the board’s new policies but also of how they were achieved. A number of people argued that the board members were playing politics by attempting to divert attention from some of their own failings. They were more concerned with sound bites than sound education.

Eventually, demands were made of you. You were asked to return to the board of education and secure an exemption for your school from these requirements. Failing this, you were asked to lead an effort to work around these board mandates and, it was privately suggested by a few, to subvert them. Several interesting suggestions were made about the nature of “creative program characterizations” that might be made to the central office on various reports that had to be filed. A little imaginative reporting might secure the required autonomy needed by your school, and no one was likely to look too closely at the program of a successful school.

You were not pleased with these suggestions. You worked for the board of education. So did the teachers. While you understood the concerns of the parents and teachers about the changes, you also thought that they had overreacted and that the board’s strategy might benefit instruction in the district. Indeed, you wondered if it might not benefit some of your students. After all, not all of your students succeeded, and you were concerned that too many poor students were left behind. The teachers and parents of your school, you worried, were a bit too satisfied with their program and had not adequately come to terms with the fact that it did not work for everyone. You were also reluctant to misrepresent your school’s program to the board, even for a good and just cause. No one had used the unpleasant term lie when they suggested how you were to represent your school to the board, but it felt like lying to you.

PROLOGUE

In this chapter I will use the preceding scenario to introduce some issues about the ethics of leadership. I will also explain my vision of what ethics is about. Ethics concerns the fundamental question, How shall we live well together?

Ethics has often been understood to involve two basic questions: What is good? and What is right? The question on how to live well together focuses discussion of these two questions on the nature of good communities. “What is good?” concerns the fundamental aims of communities. “What is right?” concerns the principles and shared understandings that enable social cooperation. Good communities have worthy aims and a fair basis of cooperation. I will encourage you to view ethical leadership as the art of creating good school communities.

ETHICS AND LEADERSHIP

A number of ethical issues are embedded in the scenario with which this chapter began. I would suppose that most readers will have recognized the suggestion that you “creatively” characterize your program to the board of education as an ethical issue. May you lie for a good cause? Can you be deceptive even if you don’t actually assert something that is false?

Other candidates for ethical issues emerge from the suggestion that, while on average the students in your school are doing well, some are not. These students are disproportionately poor. Are there issues about equality here? There are several. One is equality of educational opportunity. What does it mean? What does it require? If some students are not doing as well as others, does it inevitably follow that they have been treated unequally? How would we decide this? What should we do about it?

A related issue is the ethics of resource distribution. You are worried that some of the less affluent students in your school are not doing well. Suppose you propose that to help these students catch up, you will provide them with additional resources. Is that ethical when this decision lessens the resources available to others? How would we decide this? What constitutes a just distribution of educational resources?

A third issue of equality concerns the nature of a community in which all are equal even though they are also different in many respects. What kind of community is this? How do its members relate to one another? How do we respect diversity and still promote a democratic culture? What is a fair basis of cooperation in a community in which there is much difference?

The scenario also raises a number of questions of legitimate authority. The parents and teachers in your school have raised questions about the board of education’s decision by challenging the merits of the decision. They think it to be unwise. But they have also raised issues about the legitimacy of the board’s decision. They have hinted that the decision was intended to serve the needs of the members of the board rather than of the children in its schools. If this is true, does it make the decision illegitimate? Need illegitimate decisions be obeyed?

They might have pressed the matter further. Why is the board allowed to decide these matters? The parents of your school’s children might argue that they should have the final say about how their children are educated. After all, these students are their children. They do not belong to the board of education.

Your teachers, in turn, might argue that they should be entitled to the most authoritative say about how the children under their care are educated. After all, they are the professionals, the ones with relevant experience, and the ones who work directly with the students and who best know what they need.

Both your parents and teachers might argue that the educational program at your school was achieved by a process of democratic deliberation and consultation involving parents and teachers, and it was the product of a consensus among these key actors. Why is a distant board of lay people who don’t know the local situation, who don’t know much about education, who may be using the board of education to further political careers, and whose interests are not significantly affected by how well these children perform permitted to override the considered judgment of those who know what is best for these children and of those who care most for them? Who elected them?

Of course the answer to the final question in most places is that the citizens of the school district did. Why do these citizens, who may not have children in your school and may know little about it, get to select those who decide what goes on in your school?

In these few sentences, we have begun to articulate a tension between two conceptions of democracy. One conception sees democracy as a process of local deliberation that seeks a reasoned consensus about what is good and fair for the community to do. When school leaders are asked to be democratic leaders, this is often the kind of democracy people have in mind. But another conception sees democracy as concerned with elections and representation. Sovereignty does not rest with the local community. It rests with an elected legislature. How do these conceptions fit together? Do they fit together?

Several different principles of legitimation are appealed to in these comments: decisions should be made by those who are elected by the citizenry to do so, decisions should be made by those most directly affected, decisions should be made by those most competent to make them, and decisions should be made via the deliberations of the local community. There is something to be said for all of these views. How are they to be balanced? When they conflict, which is to be preferred?

A closely related issue is the ethics of decision making. Ethical decisions must be legitimate decisions. Hence, to know when a decision is ethical, we must have a view of who is entitled to make it, that is, who has legitimate authority. But ethical decisions have other features: they aim at worthy ends, they treat people fairly and respect their rights, they respect evidence and argument, and they are transparent and open to debate.

Worthy ends? How do we know if our ends are worthy? Consider how this question arises from our scenario. Some of your parents and teachers have dubbed the board’s mandates with the pejorative label “drill and kill.” What does that mean, and why might one think that it is objectionable?

Very likely the phrase is meant to imply that drill is tedious and kills the interest in learning. Is this right? Perhaps, but something more is at stake. Educators often object to drills because they believe that the kind of learning that is of most worth aims at understanding and creativity and involves reflection, argument, and the appraisal of evidence. The teachers and parents of your school seem to believe this. Drills do not seem to involve reflection or aim at understanding or reasoned conclusions. This suggests that underlying the view that education should involve understanding and the assessment of evidence may be an ideal of character concerning what we want our students to become. We want them to be able to decide for themselves on the basis of adequate evidence. We want them to become autonomous, self-governing people.

There may also be an ideal of citizenship and democratic community involved. We wish for our society to be a certain form of political community, a democracy. Arguably, a democracy requires citizens who are able to engage one another in dialogue and to discover and support policies that are reasonable and sustain the common good.

If concerns such as these motivate the objections of parents and teachers to drill and kill, then they have raised some serious objections to board policy. While these objections may be mistaken, they appeal to values that are profound and deeply held. Their objections are not just about the nature of effective pedagogy or what is required to raise test scores. If these objections have merit, then the board is mandating a kind of education that rubs up against some of the deepest moral and ethical convictions of liberal democratic societies. Perhaps they have a mistaken view about how to educate children so that they (and we) can live well together in a democratic society. If these objections are wrong, then it is important to understand why.

ETHICS AND MORALITY: WHAT ARE THEY? WHAT IS ETHICS ABOUT?

Let’s consider the types of issues that we have raised. There are issues of personal conduct: Is it ever right to lie? There are issues concerning the aims of education: Should our schools aim at producing autonomous individuals? Should they aim at producing good citizens? And what do these aims mean and require? There are issues of rights: Do students have a right not to be indoctrinated? Do they have a right to equal opportunity? There are issues of legitimate authority: What is the basis of the school board’s authority? What is the basis of your authority? Who is entitled to a say about educational matters? To whom may we be made accountable for our actions? There are issues that concern community norms: What does it mean to be a democratic community? What does it mean to be an intellectual or an educational community?

Why are such issues ethical issues? Historically, ethics has been viewed as an inquiry into the nature of good living. It addresses the broad question, How shall we live? or, as I prefer, How shall we live well together?

Earlier I suggested that this broad question can be divided into two further questions, those concerned with what is good and those concerned with what is right. Each of these questions poses others.

Questions concerned with what is good are: What ends are worth pursuing? What activities are worth doing? What kinds of lives are worth living? What is the nature of human flourishing? What kinds of people must we become if we are to live well? How can we educate so as to produce people of this sort? What kinds of communities and societies do we need if people are to be able to lead good lives? and How can we create people who are able to sustain and function in these communities? These questions start with a concern for the nature of those goods and activities that are intrinsically worthwhile or worthwhile for their own sake. Every view of education presupposes answers to such questions.

Questions about what is right involve many issues about personal conduct: May I lie? May I steal? and May I kill? But there are other questions: What is the nature of legitimate authority? When must I obey the commands of another, and when must others obey me? What rights do I have? What duties and responsibilities do I have? How are social resources justly distributed? and How are decisions fairly made? Such “ought” questions concern ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Series Introduction
• Preface
• About the Author
• 1. Moral Principles and Moral Principals? An Introduction
• 2. What Is Education For?
• 3. Constitutional Essentials, Part I: Intellectual Liberty, Religious Freedom, and Intellectual Community
• 4. Constitutional Essentials, Part II: Equal Opportunity and Multicultural Community
• 5. Constitutional Essentials, Part III: Democracy, Community, and Accountability
• 6. Ethical Decision Making
• 7. Professional Community and the Ethics of Accountability
• References
• Index