The Crowd in the Principal’s Office 37If the trust needed to support professional influence is unlikely to come from a broadly
accepted set of professional values, what are the alternatives? A useful strategy is implied in
several recent recommendations within the educational-leadership field. Bull and McCarthy
(1995) and Gutmann (2000), for example, argue that ethical action requires school leaders to
engage families and the larger community in civic deliberations about alternative approaches
and to respect the results of those deliberation. Furman and Starratt (2002) offered a
conceptual foundation for this orientation in their analysis of democratic community as a core
organizing principle for schools, and Mathews (2005) took the argument a step further by
arguing for the public to take responsibility for establishing goals for schools as public
institutions.
Of course, even a commitment to using democratic processes for important decisions
engenders some questions; as a people we disagree about both the values that should guide
education and those that should guide civic dialog (Stone, 1997; Strike, 1999). Nevertheless,
a professional commitment to making important decisions through democratic dialog appears
to offer the most promising strategy for renewing the public’s trust that school leadership is
designed to achieve publicly valued goals. In this approach school leaders share responsibility
with other public managers to serve as trusted facilitators of local democratic processes
(Nalbandian, 1999), not just as persuasive advocates of professionally sanctioned goals and
values (Halliday, 1985; Soder, 2001).
Implications for university programs. As we consider reliable civic collaboration rather
than generally applied ethical principles as the foundation for public trust in the goals of
school leadership, two challenges emerge for the profession’s university arm. The first is
systematic preparation for principals to lead civic deliberations as a complement to the way
we address ethical and critical issues. Most current preparation programs include an
emphasis on helping candidates clarify the values that they bring to the principalship (Lee,
2001; Muth, Murphy, Martin, & Sanders, 1996), apply general ethical principles
(Hodgkinson, 1991; Shapiro & Stefkovich, 2001), recognize values that are implicit in normal
operations of schools (Ryan, 1999), and assess the moral dimensions of particular situations
and actions (Willower & Licata, 1997). The shift may be only subtle in some programs, but
reaching decisions about school priorities through collaborative dialog involves transferring at
least a part of the responsibility for many ethical and critical decisions from the profession to
the public. In order to lead these civic discussions, school leaders need a broad understanding
of the many value positions that are likely to be present in a community and how these might
be reflected in advocacy for different school conditions.
To illustrate with the conceptual frameworks outlined above, the quality features of each
school accomplishment are defined in part by each community’s expectations and values
about schooling. Consequently, in order to describe what constitutes successful school
conditions, a principal needs broad knowledge of competing public and private purposes of
education and accurate understanding of local values and conflicts. This is possible only
when the principal engages in conversations that help the community include as many value
perspectives as possible, confronts value conflicts productively, and develops a commitment
to act on those values (Chrislip, 2002; Heifetz, 1994). This kind of engagement with
community values also requires preparation to lead civic discussions, using skills in
identifying communities of interest, assessing the extent of agreement, estimating the capacity
for change, identifying leverage points for addressing an issue, and creating opportunities for
democratic deliberation about school decisions (Chrislip & Larsen, 1994; Furman & Starratt,
2002).