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INVITED ADDRESS, THE WALTER COCKING LECTURE 2007The Crowd in the Principal’s Office:
Strengthening a Collaborative Profession for Contentious Times
G. Thomas BellamyHarry Wolcott (1973) completed his classic ethnography of the principalship almost 40
years ago. Despite his remark at the time that the principal’s job was structured by “having to
constantly meet the expectations of a multitude of others” (p. 318), one suspects that
Wolcott’s “man in the principal’s office” would be quite surprised at just whose expectations
count today and how much more crowded the office has become. Already used to sharing
leadership with teachers (Smylie & Hart, 1999), principals now find that other decision
makers have crowded into the front office—from family members and local officials to state
legislators, chambers of commerce, university researchers, teacher educators, school board
members, and union officials. Their demands and questions have broadened the stakes for
education and imply new ways of thinking about principal practice. These in turn invite
speculation about new strategies for university programs to strengthen the school-leadership
profession to more reliably fulfill the public purposes of schooling.
This paper offers and explores some new, unconventional, strategies for university-based
leadership programs. Specifically, the paper builds on conceptions of principal practice that
Colorado colleagues and I have been developing to suggest how typical efforts to strengthen
the profession might be extended in response to current participation in school leadership
decisions.
PARTICIPATION AND CONFLICT
Principals and their schools succeed only when enough coherence emerges from the
community’s varied expectations, and this requires far more than the public relations and
professional persuasion that seemed to work as Wolcott’s principal interacted with the
community. Dealing with conflict about education has always been a part of school
leadership (Tyack, 1974), but the current manifestation of this historical reality assumes its
own unique character. Although perhaps overused as metaphors for change, global economic
integration and changes in information technologies provide a useful way of thinking about
today’s challenge. For policymakers, international competition in an information-based
economy has thrust education to the forefront as a means of ensuring national competitive
advantage. Policymakers from across the political spectrum have responded with a press for
educational productivity through content standards, regular testing, and school sanctions
(Karoly, & Panis, 2004).
Now-familiar advice to focus more on instruction and align school experiences with the
content to be tested will probably help principals meet these policymakers’ expectations for
learning (Elmore, 2000). But annual tests address only a fraction of what various groups want
from schools, so broad participation in school leadership decisions makes it unlikely that prin-
G. Thomas Bellamy, University of Washington Bothell