38 INVITED CHAPTERS
The second challenge that civic engagement poses for university programs is to organize
professional knowledge for public use. If school quality depends in part on the goals and
priorities that are set through civic dialog, then the knowledge that participants bring to this
dialog is important. Organizing knowledge for collaboration means highlighting and
informing the issues around which discussions are likely. Public dialog about school
leadership is seldom about technical matters for which “objective” research or academic
theories provide easy answers. Instead, civic and moral questions dominate the discussion in
the crowded school office: which groups of children should get special attention, what to
teach (or not teach) in sex education, how to address language and cultural differences, and
what kinds of behavior should be expected. Professional knowledge can support local civic
dialog about such matters by clarifying what is at stake in school leadership decisions and
helping participants understand how they can contribute to the educational goals they value.
The organization of knowledge in medicine provides a useful example. As Hills (1978)
noted, medical knowledge is organized around organ systems and diseases, illustrating why
each is important and the consequences of their malfunctions, as well as practices for their
treatment. Public trust in the knowledge base is not just a matter of believing that problems
within these systems can be reliably solved—in fact, we know that medical knowledge is
incomplete and uncertain (Riehl, 2006). But organization of medical knowledge does help
patients understand how to participate in maintaining their own health, insurers predict likely
health risks, and elected officials evaluate alternative prevention policies.
Education is similar, in that many different groups could benefit from a clear framing of
the primary responsibilities of school leaders and the possible consequences of different ways
of addressing these responsibilities. How we frame these issues is important, as Heifetz
(1994) demonstrates in his discussion of adaptive work. If any single value or viewpoint is
imbedded in the way we frame school-leadership responsibilities, we limit participation in the
conversation and risk uncertain foundations for the work that school leaders build on the
decisions that a community reaches. For example, a discussion about, “What kind of climate
do we want students to experience in our school and what are the consequences of various
alternatives?” could engage broad participation, while framing the issue as “How can we
reduce competitiveness in the school?” might eliminate from the discussion those who are
committed to gaining special credentials needed for admission to selective colleges. By
avoiding imbedded values, we can frame responsibility categories in ways that facilitate and
inform open dialog about the mix of values that a community uses to define quality in these
responsibilities.
The recommendation that colleagues and I made to use school conditions to organize the
profession’s analytic knowledge offers one possible approach. In our framework, successful
school leadership involves stewardship for the nine school conditions illustrated in Figure 1.
Because each of the nine is defined without specifying quality criteria, they can serve to
organize information about competing notions of quality and support broad participation in
discussions of what is desired. Knowledge about these conditions and the characteristics that
make them useful in achieving various kinds of results can help all participants in school
discussions. Each of the nine accomplishments also has practical significance for the
profession’s critical collaborators. Parents and policymakers understand the importance of
learning goals, instruction, climate, school resources, and so on, and they make decisions in
their families and political institutions that relate to similar issues. Just as the organization of
medical knowledge around diseases and organ systems makes intuitive sense to the public, so
might organization of educational administration knowledge around school conditions
increase public trust, access, and use.