Profiles of Leadership in Education
Daniel Fram
University of Mississippi
Allow me to preface my observations on the following educational leaders by stating that the purpose of the inquiry is not altogether clear to me. The text to be studied consists of biographies; by examination of these life stories, what is to be gained? A man is born into certain circumstances and with a personal bent and becomes influential in his field, building upon prior experiences as he develops and pursues a vision. I suppose we might hope to gain some understanding, through comparison, of what such men have in common, if anything. Perhaps we can speak to the question of whether leadership is a born talent, a learned skill, or some other thing, but it is inevitable that contradictions in terminology will become distracting. Leadership, like love, has no agreed upon meaning. Still, as a beginning, I will review the biographies of several leaders with an eye for currents and themes.
I. Biographies
Albert Shanker
This man knew what it meant to be an outsider in a community and also was influenced at an early age to believe that it is right and necessary to agitate for social change, that the larger problems of the world's societies were his concern. He also demonstrated an early aptitude for bravery in presenting his own ideas. Encouraged in this, he came to see himself as validated in leadership. Further encouragement from his mother allowed him to take the challenge of organizing his own workforce seriously. He didn't hesitate to commit personal resources to this struggle well beyond his individual duty. As the struggle continued under his leadership, Shanker was faced with a major decision which he “agonized” over; however, like an expert poker player, he was able to see what was at stake and to take the enormous risk once he became sure that not to do so was to fold his hand. His gutsy and energetic moves made him a leader. Later in life, he showed further abilities that may be important: he was able to build bridges across disparate communities, unite people in common struggle, and avoid radicalism. Finally, Shanker seems to have been perpetually open to potential, to the re-thinking of how things get done.
Prof. John Goodland
The disorganization of the text and its lack of emphasis on Goodland's maturation and career make it difficult to discuss his work in Shanker's context. The article focuses more on Goodland's substantive notions of what is needed in schools, school systems, and teacher training programs. His ideas on leadership may amount to this: leaders in the schools need personal skills, a desire to stay and pursue long-range goals, and the freedom to look beyond test scores in deciding what is worthwhile. Goodland's own long experience as a teacher and administrator convinced him that people with such immediate experience have leadership potential in them. The leaders are those who do and understand what constrains how it's done.
Ernest Boyer
Boyer was clearly interested in communication per se. Like Shanker, and perhaps to a greater extent, he learned to think of himself as a leader through the esteem of teachers and peers. Perhaps because he was less touched by hardship than Shanker was, Boyer devoted himself more to intellectual reflection and the ultimate purpose of education. He shared with Shanker and with Goodland a commitment to human relationships and individual contributions. Again like Shanker, Boyer was a creative thinker who always wanted to know why things couldn't be done another way. He is remarkable for his effectiveness at combining liberal thought with political influence. Perhaps it is important to note that for Boyer, finding the appropriate milieu for his activity was essential to his success as a leader.
Madeline Hunter
While outstanding for her intellectual accomplishment and vision of how teaching practice can and should be reformed according to psychological insights, Hunter is not exactly a leader; she is, rather, an intelligent person with a popular idea. Like Boyer, she questioned the presumptions of every situation she found herself in, and again like Boyer, she didn't begin to make a major impact until she found a situation in which her insights and questions could bear fruit. In fact, she seems somewhat helpless to control the use others make of her contributions, more like the researchers she admires than the administrators who take her seriously.
James p. Comer
Comer's story highlights another common thread among the leaders so far discussed: the genuine concern with fully understanding the causes of a social issue or problem. His background exposure to class and race tensions, which seem only to be fully felt by those whom they obstruct, raised questions in his mind which he finally felt compelled to take significant time in answering. Like other leaders, he seems to have not only taken the health of his community seriously, but to have found it impossible not to. His leadership echoes the strain of individual involvement: bringing people together and forging community was central to his style. Unlike some others, however, Comer's leadership ideas focused on creating guidelines for the self-governance of others. Rather than seeking an audience for his own vision, Comer pursued a vision of structures that would allow the visions of his followers to grow.
Ed Hirsch Jr.
Whether he is a leader or not remains to be seen! His willingness to present his own, carefully considered views in the face of opposition, his willingness to rethink the inherited tradition of what is necessary continue a theme that many of the above leaders touched on. Beyond that, it is not so much his quality as a leader but the quality of the idea he champions that must begs consideration. As it happens, my own speculations have been moving in a similar direction for the last few weeks or longer. Attempting last Wednesday to teach students about the experiences and observations of Bartolome de Las Casas on his visit to the Indies in the sixteenth century, I inadvertently discovered that several of my students did not know whether the U.S.A had a king, as Spain did at that time. Furthermore, I witness daily the hindrance that insufficient background knowledge poses to my students when confronting novel literature. Providing such background knowledge has begun to seem like the hidden element of my curriculum which, according to the state, is entirely focused on abstract skills generally applicable. These skills the state will test at the end of the year by presenting students with unfamiliar passages and short writings concerning subject matter that they may have no prior experience with. I am convinced that their scores will reflect this poverty of background knowledge as much as it reflects their digestion or retention of the skills I cover during the year. I would even go so far as to propose that the state might consider testing this very content, rather than the abstract skills it has chosen to emphasize. If students can prove that they have memorized and mastered key facets of major poetical and prose works, I will feel confident that they have also learned the abstract skills required to make such substantive gains.
Theodore Sizer
Sizer's exposure to people from backgrounds that differed significantly from his own seems to have played a significant role in enlarging his conceptions. He learned “the importance of culture”, which Comer learned in such a different way. His perception of community dependence in the army and of community variability in Australia showed him that, in many important respects, we pull as one. With that background, Sizer entered a lively community of questions and debates, which helped him to keep an open mind as he went in search of grounding experiences. Ultimately, however, it was his original insight that returned to him: individuals are shaped by communities, but the successful community is flexible to the individual's needs. Motivated by that complexity and with the certainty that solutions are possible, he set to work. Like the other leaders we have discussed, his work was motivated by inner questions and visions. The leader emerges as a particular kind of theorist: one who cares too deeply about people to try his theories on plants or stars. Worth noting is that this particular kind of bent requires a respect and even a love for the imprecise, variable, shifting nature of human community concerns. Sizer, among other leaders considered here, was not ambivalent about dedicating his intellectual gifts towards what is no science at all but more of a glorified hunch.
II. Theories
John Gardner, “The Cry for Leadership”
Gardner's re-categorization of leadership as a subtopic in the field of the “accomplishment of group purpose” unites the themes explored above in two ways. On the one hand, the leaders we have examined so far have tended to see leadership in terms of building coalitions, negotiating consensus, bridging disciplines, etc., all of which involve strategies for the creation and direction of groups of people. Secondly, Gardner's formulation incorporates the contributions of those pioneers who allow group action to proceed from the seeds of their thinking: the “innovators, entrepreneurs, and thinkers” take their place in the field of leadership so defined. This second group is, presumably, much more vulnerable to the crisis which troubles Gardner so much. Seeing the leader as dependent upon the capacities of the led, Gardner worries that we lack “a capacity for sustained commitment.” Such capacity is a clear component of the strongest leaders surveyed above.
Gardner makes two major contributions to the discussion of leadership. Radically, he defends the major premise that leaders are not born, but made and dependent upon external preconditions. Even more radically, he proposes that it is the non-leaders who provide these preconditions; their quality both as followers and as trainers of leaders is decisive to the quantity and quality of the leaders created. Al Shanker's mother comes to mind, as do the teachers and peers of Ernest Boyer. Such unnamed educators were surely responsible for much of the leadership ability ripened in these two men. The specific factors that Gardner considers as blockades to the discovery of leadership ability are precisely what many of our leaders were able to avoid. Hunter, Comer, and Hirsch stand out as leaders who were never “drawn off into the byways of specialization.” Shanker and Comer both learned at an early age “how much the society needs what they have to give.” Such relevance to the formative experiences of successful, positive leaders gives support to Gardner's views.
James MacGregor Burns, “The Crisis of Leadership”
As Burns says, “It was not always so.” The crisis in politics he speaks of may justly be compared with the crisis of science considered by Husserl, for it was Husserl's concern with viewpoint of the positive sciences that informed Leo Strauss' critique of modern political theory. Like Burns, Strauss saw the crisis most immediately in the failure of this theory to account for, predict, or even interpret the phenomenon of Hitler. Again like Burns, Strauss was led from this to seek perspective from the ancient philosophers. How the political philosophers of the Enlightenment diverged from these ancients, and the implications of their divergence, became the source of Strauss' life work, and is difficult to summarize.
One major starting point for Strauss was the distinction between facts and values advocated by John Dewey. On the basis of this distinction, political philosophy was given up in favor of political science; rather than deliberating upon the good of societies, serious men took up the question of what was merely measurable. Prior to such a distinction, Plato was able to rank the forms of government from kingship to aristocracy to oligarchy to democracy to tyranny, with tyranny at the bottom. Such a ranking would currently be impossible, for no value-free explanation could justify such enormous difference between these extremes. Kingship differs from tyranny only by evaluation of the motivating goals of the ruler; in either case, power is measurably absolute. It is because our current framework rejects what is unmeasurable that “Leadership as a concept has dissolved into small and discrete meanings.” It is not irrelevant to Plato's critique that democracy holds hands with the rich and the tyrannical. In a tyranny all of the goods of society are devoted to the pleasure of one man. In a democracy, it is very difficult for men to identify any common goal besides partial tyranny for themselves and theirs. Democracy is not so much a constitution as a set of rules by which the pursuit of tyranny may be deemed fairness. Hence we do not demand that our leaders demonstrate how society enables us to reach our human potential, we merely ask that we be given equal opportunity to participate in the cock fight of our world.
Richard A. Couto, “Defining a Citizen Leader”
Couto's observation that leaders “have a deeper sense of responsibility and higher sense of authority that comes from the trust others have bestowed . . . upon them to act on behalf of the group” goes to the heart of what Plato considered in the philosopher-king of the Republic. The question is how, considering the limitations of man, anyone could be trusted to act with a group purpose rather than a selfish purpose in mind. Some would question whether that is even possible. “All interest is self-interest,” as I have heard said. Does the leader draw a line between his self-interest and group interest, or is the latter finally reducible, perhaps with the help of Darwinian instincts, to the former? Couto's notice of the reluctance of citizen leaders is reminiscent of Plato's observation that no philosopher could ever be convinced to exercise the kingship that the community needs of him. Cervantes' Sancho Panza illustrates the dilemma beautifully when, in Part II, he finally obtains rule of the island he has so frequently longed for and cannot stand the burden, despite being incredibly adept at the role.
Robert Greenleaf, “Servant Leadership”
I have no idea what Greenleaf is talking about; Camus' depiction of Sisyphus is anything but motivating towards social action. Instead, his interpretation of the myth signifies acceptance of the absolute impotence of our efforts. I cannot imagine a more depressing perspective from which to contemplate leadership. I have just considered the tension of self-interest and leadership, but I cannot in any way fathom the responsibility of service that Greenleaf admires. It is possible that man grows great only as a social animal. It is unthinkable that servitude is in itself a virtue.
Bernard M. Bass, “Concepts of Leadership: The Beginnings”
How can one disagree with Bass that leadership has been considered by many great minds?
Lao-tzu, “Tao Te Ching”
Good advice.
James Burns, “Transactional and Transforming Leadership”
I see no reason why Hitler would not fit with this man's formulation of leadership.
Kirpatrick and Locke, “Leadership: Do Traits Matter?”
This article could be contrasted with Greenleaf's theories about servant leadership, but to do so seems irrelevant. Rather than considering the qualities of leaders, Kirpatrick and Locke consider the qualities of those who are successful, who rise to fame and fortune above the common herd. They assume that leaders are those who win the cock-fight.
Gardner, “Leaders and Followers”
I find it depressing to consider leadership in the context of business. The question of ends is left as an unstated assumption: somebody would profit by certain behaviors in a group. This is not about group purpose or societal concern: this is about interested parties and profit. What it takes to “lead” people to do what will benefit the stock holders of a particular company is of no real concern. Let those who have such an interest busy themselves thus. There is no rational investigation pertaining to the exploitation of others, only guide books on the manipulation of free men towards slavish ends.
During this past school year, I taught English II, the state-tested sophomore year of English, largely without a complete map of when I would hit each objective. My district was in the process of composing its first ever pacing guide, and my peers and superiors often had differing opinions about how to proceed. In the third week of school, my principal told me that I was to teach only grammar for the first nine weeks, which I dutifully began to do. However, during a meeting with the administrators at my district's central office during the fourth week of the term, I was shown the finished district-wide map, which turned out to differ somewhat from my principal's interpretation. As the year wore on, I met with mentor teachers at the district's other high school, who tried to steer me towards their own plans of action, which also differed from the district map in some ways. It wasn't until the third term, with the state writing test looming upon us, that I discovered that the district map gave the bizarre directive to teach essay writing in the fourth nine weeks, after the writing test would already be over. I realized, somewhere around this time, that I was on my own to map my curriculum sensibly, and I did my best to cover what was left in the time remaining.
Mapping the English curriculum offers distinct challenges from the other disciplines. These challenges come in several forms. Mathematics teachers can reasonably teach new types of content in a specific order. Math skills, generally speaking, either build upon one another vertically or have no bearing upon one another at all. As is also true with history courses, the textbooks themselves may offer a logical course of study, so that I would be surprised if teachers of these courses worry much about the order of their units.
English, however, is not simply cumulative. The four competencies of the Mississippi curriculum - vocabulary, reading, writing, and grammar - may be discussed in isolation but are truly learned in combination by most students. Even a glance at the suggested teaching strategies attached to the frameworks suggest that the objectives are inseparable. Vocabulary objectives are to be taught in the context of text study, grammar objectives are to be taught as editing skills during the writing process.
Furthermore, the English skills studied during the elementary years do not differ significantly from those studied in the secondary school. Students are reminded of the same topics year after year, which places the burden of novelty on the teacher to structure the year according to increasingly difficult, but interesting, texts and writing assignments. The teacher is given two textbooks of such length that simply planning to work through both from beginning to end is largely impossible. Instead, the "curriculum" in an English classroom must be constructed by painstakingly culling selections from the textbook and uniting these selections into cohesive units which cover all four competencies.
Some of the confusion I experience in this regard may be the fault of the MS frameworks themselves. Although I haven't had the chance to study any other state's frameworks thoroughly, I suspect that a more rational vertical alignment and integration or definition of purpose is possible. But I also wonder whether the entire concept of an English curriculum in isolation from other academic goals doesn't need rethinking.
English is the medium, or the primary medium, of our thought, and we do, of course, possess the ability to reflect upon this medium, but there is not necessarily a single "English" purpose, as there is a purpose for the study of math, history, and science. English, in other words, is not a body of knowledge in the same way that the other arts and sciences are. Instead, the topics we today understand as English would seem to correlate with what classical eduction would refer to as the knowledge preparatory to the activity of learning. To this end, the introduction of text study prior to the complete mastery of grammar would seem to be irrelevant. Not that no books should be read, but that the purposes of reading be cast with sensitivity to cumulative goals is what I'm suggesting. In the present case, the Mississippi frameworks seem to require the mastery of far too many objectives at every level of development, resulting in the extremely mediocre attention paid to each.
Writing the curriculum map for the Holly Springs Summer School's Middle School English course has been enlightening and rewarding. It has been the first time that I could, with the benefit of some knowledge and experience, reflect upon the logical connection between the framework's objectives, and I am eager to discover how my choices play out over the summer.
