The Changing Landscape of School Leadership

The primary focus of the book is to emphasize the major changes in the leadership responsibilities of the school principal and to underscore the necessity for them to gain new knowledge and skills in order to direct their leadership toward meeting the new changes in school-community goals and objectives. M. Scott Norton emphasizes the fact that contemporary issues and problems must be viewed as symptoms of change. The symptoms represent administrative tasks that must be attacked by implementing the primary reason that the school principal is hired, that of leading on-going change. The leader’s responsibility focuses on school purposes as set forth in a viable school mission statement. The school’s mission statement, that all too often is set forth as a public relations perspective, must instead set forth answers to questions such as, “What is our purpose?” “Why does our school exist?” “What is our reason for being here?” “How do we meet the on-going changes that face us educationally?” The leadership of the school principal “attacks” the symptoms of change by collaborating with the school’s faculty to set forth a mission to which all members can commit. Collaboration infers a unification of members’ commitments toward the primary purposes of the school. Collaboration and opportunities to confer on an on-going basis are established. Although the school principal’s hands are often tied by such factors as lack of resources, underfunded/unfunded mandates, inability to hire and retain highly qualified personnel and constantly changing program requirements related to student testing and teacher performance evaluation, this book places emphasis on the principal’s need to become a visionary change agent in order to “attack” the ever changing symptoms of educational change.