Refocusing School Leadership

"When the standardization movement has run its course, Jerry Starratt's Refocusing School Leadership will be the shining light for a renewal of the human spirit in schools. His focus on education as the true and primary function within human development could well become our field's signature pedagogy."-Fenwick W. English, R. Wendell Eaves Senior Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"This exceptional book reminds us that the best leaders are deeply concerned with the human condition and that they understand the importance of building powerful relationships. This book exudes moral purpose and it draws upon the essential humanity in all of us to make a difference."-Alma Harris, Professor and Pro-Director of Educational Leadership, Institute of Education, University of London, UK

Some school administrators and teachers have come to think of their leadership as promoting higher test scores without attending to the teachers or the students performing the work, but this focus can corrupt and frustrate the very goals these educators espouse. Refocusing School Leadership departs from the more traditional conceptualization of leadership, looking behind the daily routines of human resource leaders to highlight the assumptions and values and beliefs they bring to their work as well as the values and meanings embedded in the various contexts of school life.

Starratt explores how educational leadership is grounded in one's own humanity as well as in a deep appreciation of the richness, complexity, and enormous potential of people, and he attempts to restore the centrality of human development in the work of educating the youngùeducation is not simply about educating minds, but about developing whole persons. Starratt argues for a refocusing of educational leadership on affirming and enabling those talents, dispositions, interests, life experiences, and cultural proficiencies that comprise their humanity to enrich the work of learning. Refocusing School leadership embraces the more recent theory and research around distributed leadership and proposes a much more generous and system-wide distributed understanding of human resource development. Every person in the school system who has responsibility coordinating, and supervising is a human developer and leaderùincluding principals, teachers, counselors, coaches, department chairs, leaders, and librarians.

The vision of the school should speak of the extraordinary possibilities for human achievement in our young people, as well as the talents of their teachers to nurture those possibilities. Starratt's focus on leadership as human resource development the efforts of faculty, staff, and students to improve the quality of learning-the primary work of schools. This book is a valuable resource to prepare aspiring leaders, whether administrators or teachers, to deal with the way schools are currently run and create better ways to promote quality learning for all.