36 INVITED CHAPTERS
ESTABLISH CIVIC COLLABORATION AS A CENTRAL NORM OF
PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE
School leaders cannot succeed without public trust—trust that the school is organized to
achieve the public’s goals and trust that school practices conform to strongly held values. For
individual principals, operating schools in ways that support learning for all students typically
requires more authority and influence than educators can exercise on their own. Unless
parents trust school leaders enough to join with them to ensure that homework is completed,
school rules are followed, and attendance is maintained, even the best school practices are
unlikely to be sufficient. Public trust is also needed to give principals enough autonomy to
act in ways that are not always popular. Unless the public gives some authority to principals,
such as supporting teachers’ grades, disciplining students, and eliminating unsafe practices,
schools cannot operate. The licensing and university preparation that characterize professional
work also require public trust, since these depend on continued support for related public
policies.
Traditionally, cultivating the public trust needed for professional practice has meant
demonstrating that practice was guided by values and ethical commitments that are shared
across the profession. By deliberating about these values within the profession and adopting
ethical standards, professional groups have provided assurance that practice is responsive to
public values. Public trust then sets the foundation for autonomy in professional practice,
which figures prominently in typical conceptions of professionalism (Halliday, 1985; Haskell,
1984). Autonomy with respect to clients occurs as trust in professional commitments leads to
a certain deference to professional judgment. Autonomy with regard to employers ensures that
practice is buffered somewhat from political or organizational considerations (Bledstein,
1978).
But public trust has declined. Lacking confidence that professional commitments serve
public interests, society is also less willing to grant the usual autonomy to professional work.
In response, professions from architecture to medicine have begun to shift away from a vision
of practice guided by general professional ethics to one that gives individual clients a greater
voice in deciding the goals and values that guide practice (Designer Secrets, 2006; Irvine,
1999).
Even this client-centered approach to restoring public trust presents difficulties for school
leaders, because public education’s “clients” include individual students and their families as
well as the larger community. While all families want their children to learn at high levels,
families with different circumstances frequently want quite different things from their
schools, and their interests often conflict with those of local businesses, universities, and
religious organizations. In communities as diverse as ours, one group’s priority is all too
often another’s crisis, and this makes it particularly difficult for the school-leadership
profession to demonstrate its responsiveness to public values.
In particular, this diversity of public views about educational goals and values casts doubt
on the ability of the school-leadership profession to restore public confidence by espousing
any general set of professional values to guide practice. On the contrary, educators risk losing
public trust anytime they make value-laden decisions about school goals on their own. No
matter how well reasoned, proposals for universally applicable values to guide school
leadership are likely to prompt divisive attacks rather than foster public confidence. Gelernter
(2007), for example, sees such a liberal bias in public schools today that he characterizes their
teaching as an effort to “contradict and correct the religious and moral instructions that
parents give their children” (p. 7).