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K-12 LEADERSHIP PRACTICES
Leader Values-Needed and Student Values-Held:
Dilemmas for Leader Educators
JoAnn Danelo BarbourWe are asking much of our education leaders at the turn of this new century. We ask them
to lead change, yet ask them to keep schools secure and stable. Asking for creative visions, we
want artistry, attitudes of leaders, but expect bean-counter accountability of student learning,
more indicative of manager behavior. This last expectation is important, because if attitudes
are predicated upon value systems (Wilson, 2004), then by extension leader attitudes are also
predicated upon values. The synergistic relationship between a leader’s values and the values
of the organization is very important (Irby, Brown, Duffy, & Trautman, 2002).
To help future school leaders reflect upon and understand the importance their values hold
in their work as administrators, this researcher conducted an exploratory, descriptive study,
that employed a mixed method approach, to answer four questions: What values may be
needed in order to lead schools in the 21st century, according to the literature? What values do
graduate students hold most deeply as they enter a program for school leaders? How closely
aligned are the values-held and the values-needed? Finally, what can educators do to
influence future leaders to maintain or develop values needed for 21st century leadership? In
this paper, I discuss the literature, research findings, and implications for educators of future
leaders.
RATIONALE FOR STUDYING VALUES
The most distinctive and important properties of culture are its values (Kroeber &
Kluckhohn, 1952; Kuper, 1999). Consequently, to understand a culture, even an
organizational work culture, scholars attempt to assess the values, and, in order to assess the
values, they attempt to make meaning of symbolic aspects of the culture. In fact, “... values
provide the only basis for the fully intelligible comprehension of culture, because the actual
organization of all cultures is primarily in terms of their values,” (Kuper, 1999, pp. 57–58).
When one speaks of values, one notes that which is relevant and important; when one’s
focus is on administration, the discipline is both value-laden and value-saturated
(Hodgkinson, 1978). Values are central to the field of administration because much of the
practice of school leaders requires choosing one course of action over another, and there is a
need for values to gain greater attention in the scholarship of administration (Willower, 1992,
1994). Because of the large component of value judgments in administrative practice and
since administrative action affects the quality of organizational and extra-organizational life,
education administrators ought to possess knowledge of values (Hodgkinson, 1978, 1983).
Considered together, values form a value system, "an enduring organization of beliefs
concerning preferable modes of conduct or end-states of existence along a continuum of
importance" (Rokeach, 1973, p.5). Leaders possess value systems upon which they make their
JoAnn Danelo Barbour, Texas Woman’s University