The Crowd in the Principal’s Office 39FRAME SUCCESSFUL PRACTICE AS A LOCAL CONSTRUCTION
Another ideal underlying conventional views of professional practice, and certainly the
one motivating much current federal investment (U.S. Department of Education, 2007),
involves relying on research-based practices that can be applied in practical situations. In this
view, the quality of the research that links practices to results provides the primary basis for
public confidence that the profession can reliably achieve important goals. Although such
positivist assumptions have been broadly criticized in academic literature, Donmoyer (1995)
notes that they nevertheless provide the dominant logic for many efforts to strengthen the
professional status of school leaders. Critics of the field rely on the same logic: Unless we
can demonstrate that our knowledge base contains research-based practices that have broad
applicability, they see no rationale for a professional infrastructure in the field, including
requirements for certification, university preparation, and ongoing professional development
(Hess, 2003).
Although uncertainties always accompany application of professional knowledge
(Kennedy, 1987), school leadership seems particularly challenged by differences in the
contexts of practice, with corresponding limitations for research-based practices.
Uncertainties of school leadership result, on the one hand, from differences among school
situations, and on the other, from current expectations for near-universal proficiency. Local
variability arises because different priorities and constraints emerge from the civic process of
setting goals and because each school presents a unique and ever-changing blend of student
backgrounds, teacher abilities, school resources, and community connections. The
expectation for universal learning adds to these uncertainties, because even the most
thoroughly researched practices succeed with only some students. None has demonstrated the
level of reliability that principals are now expected to show in student learning (Bellamy,
Crawford, Huber-Marshall, & Coulter, 2005). Consequently, even when research invites
adoption of programs developed elsewhere, principals still need to construct local practices
that serve students who do not succeed as planned.
Whether one interprets these uncertainties of practice as necessary in a socially
constructed organization (Littrell & Foster, 1995) or as inevitable because research simply
cannot address all the complex interactions among variables that are present in schools
(Lindblom & Cohen, 1979), the consequences are similar. Knowledge in school leadership
provides few prescriptions that work uniformly or systematically across communities. There
are indeed practices that have been effective in some communities and principles that have
proven to be useful guides for practice under some conditions, but, as many critics have
noted, evidence to support application is weak or missing. Even our best research-based
programs do not come with guarantees.
If our professional knowledge provides so few prescriptions for practice, then principals
must construct successful school leadership on location. And, if successful school leadership
depends on local construction rather than knowledge-based prescriptions, then the profession
must find new ways to ensure that practice will reliably solve the problems for which school
leadership is responsible. This means renewing our profession’s implicit contract with the
public to emphasize that reliability can come from strategies other than prescriptive programs.
One way to achieve reliable results in the face of uncertainty is suggested by organizations
that operate in high risk areas, where failures make headlines. Studies of organizations that
succeed with these expectations for extremely high reliability emphasize the importance of
understanding and responding to local circumstances more than the implementation of
prescribed procedures (Roberts, 1990). Noting that standardized procedures often fail when