The Crowd in the Principal’s Office 31students). They highlight disagreements about purpose, making it more difficult for the
school-leadership profession to show that it works in the public interest. And they threaten
the influence of the profession by practically ensuring that, no matter what improvements are
implemented, some powerful groups will remain dissatisfied enough to attack the profession’s
ability to produce needed results.
Education leadership shares these challenges with many other professions. For a variety
of reasons, the public seems less confident today that professionals work in the public’s
interest or reliably achieve goals that the public values. This eroding public trust means that
practitioners increasingly lack the influence and autonomy they need to succeed. Not
surprisingly, the institutional structures of the profession—university preparation, licensure,
and professional associations—are threatened as well. It thus seems clear that in order to
sustain professional status, our field’s contract with the public begs renewal, with a
commensurate new foundation of reliability and purpose to earn public trust (Sullivan, 2005).
As long-standing efforts in school leadership attest, one familiar response to the prospect
of declining profession influence has been to intensify efforts to strengthen and communicate
the field’s knowledge base (Hoy, 1994; National Council of Professors of Educational
Administration, 2004; Thompson, 1993). Along with other professions, efforts in education
leadership have been guided by historical public values of rationality, science, and efficiency,
so that a stronger knowledge base has meant greater professional legitimacy and influence
(Kimball, 1992). In essence, our collective efforts assume that if the knowledge in
educational administration provides practical guidance for school leaders and if our
preparation programs are successful in helping new principals learn what they need to know,
then public confidence could sustain the professional status that we believe is important to
successful school leadership (Forsyth, 1999). This focus on a professional knowledge base is
not without important criticism. Scheurich (1995) and Donmoyer (1999), for example, noted
that knowledge is incomplete, disconnected from practice, biased by methodology, and
necessarily privileges some kinds of content over others. The concern that specifying a
knowledge base could lead to unwarranted standardization in preparation programs still
echoes today (English, 2003). Nevertheless, widespread discussion of what knowledge is
important for school leadership and how that knowledge should be organized and taught does
underscore our field’s general commitment to strengthening the field’s knowledge in order to
legitimate professional influence (Forsyth & Tallerico, 1993; Mitchell, 2006; Murphy, 2002).
A second response to declining professional influence has been to clarify the values that
underlie professional practice. As concern has grown that the goals of practice are left
implicit in the development and application of technical knowledge, efforts to define a set of
values that could give direction to professional practice have intensified. In Sullivan’s (2005)
formulation of the professional-public contract, articulation of these values is a critical part of
any profession’s effort to reconnect its practice to public values and ensure greater integrity in
pursuit of those values. The education-leadership literature now hosts a stimulating dialog
about underlying ethical dimensions of school leadership (Goodlad & McMannon, 1997;
Starratt, 2003) and specific values that should guide leadership practice (Cameron-McCabe,
1999; Larson & Murtadha, 2002; Lindsey, Robbins, & Terrell, 1999; Riehl, 2000).
The crowd in the modern school office adds new dimensions to both knowledge-based
and values-based strategies for strengthening the profession. My exploration of these
possibilities builds on a particular perspective on principal practice, so I provide a brief
overview of that understanding before proceeding. Using this understanding as both reference
and context, I then explore ideas that move us outside comfortable institutional boundaries