Overview

Leadership in Crisis? Restructuring Principled Practice focuses directly on the needs, interests and concerns of school principals as they respond to a turbulent, unpredictable and under-resourced shift to school-based management. It addresses the implications of a wide range of aspects of the current systemic restructurings of Australian state schooling, with some comparative aspects (England, New Zealand, Asia-Pacific) for educational leadership. It surveys and analyses current developments, drawing on case-studies and other research in the field, and it is sensitive to the opportunities as well as the limitations of the current situation.

Accepting that principals are the key to the success or failure of the whole enterprise of schooling reform, and that the business of educating the citizens of the future must continue to be carried out, this book seeks to outline and justify principled practice for principals engaged in school-based management. Hence, while it acknowledges the specificities of local contexts and the particular forms prescribed by state and national frameworks, Leadership in Crisis? attempts to establish broad principles for leadership which are generalisable beyond the Australian situation.

The driving force of the book is a stress on leadership over management, and its call for principled, humane, ethical leadership.

Table of Contents

Reviews

...What sets this collection of essays apart from others of similar focus is its attempt to go beyond criticism, offer (alternative) principles for dealing with the 'hard times, new times' of rapid change in education... these are not simply calls to return to a mythical 'golden past'... the authors are not content to think within the bounds of 'what is' but to broaden these debates to consider 'why now?' and 'what now?'... And what might the parameters and particulars of a reconstructed educational leadership look like, which foregrounds principles of care, responsibility, respect and knowledge? As one author notes, 'these are not simple issues'. The sketches found in this collection, however, make significant contributions to their understanding.

Trevor Gale