Challenging School Leaders to become Adventurous

Dr. Mike Rippy is an Asst. Professor in the department of Educational Administration and Leadership at the Troy University, Dothan, campus.


Email: tmrippy@troy.edu

Key words: I.B., Holistic, Adventurous Leaders, Global Education, Change, School Leaders,

SAT scores have remained at low levels for many years. SAT scores may reflect the effectiveness of education in this country. (Zagier, 2008). School leaders must be instructional leaders and adventurous leaders to improve schools. Leaders should be willing to take chances to deal with the changes that are needed for our schools to progress or even survive in the future.
This article is an opinion piece that deals with the leadership needed to promote innovations.

Introduction
Public schools need adventurous leaders that have visions and are willing to take chances. If leaders are not adventurous and innovative then public schools may not exist in the future. To be adventurous, a leader needs to understand the change process and be willing to explore new curriculums such as holistic learning, International Baccalaureate curriculum, and Global Education. Schools can not afford status quo leaders that just manage schools. Management is still needed but it is not enough for a principal to just be a manager or even just be an instructional leader.
Do we want imaginative adventurous leaders? Will the communities
support adventurous leadership? The lack of imaginative leadership has been
one of the reasons for the weak leadership in our schools. The challenge is for leaders to be adventurous and innovative. Adventurous leaders can change our schools and our nation. Adventurous leadership will bring back the elite that have forsaken the public schools because of their belief that public schools are and will fail. Adventurous leadersmust change the culture and this belief system.
Edwin Friedman (1999) says that adventurous leaders will form solutions to help our nation get unstuck. He believes these leaders should be chance-takers. He poses that Columbus was an example of a risk-taker. Columbus’s adventure helped to get Europe out of the Dark Ages that they were stuck in for so long. I believe that we need the same type of adventurous leadership in public schools today.
Are our schools stuck? What will it take to get them out of the quagmire? Schools need adventurous leaders that have the ability to weather the many trials and tribulations that will come with being adventurous risk-takers.
Our schools are chronically anxious. Students demand that their goals and wishes be met immediately. They do not see themselves as having to work for long
periods of time to accomplish these goals. Leaders need to recognize the symptoms that reflect this chronically anxiousness in our students to be able to deal with changes that are needed for the learning process to occur. Leaders have to train students to understand that quick-fixes do not work in the long run. Leaders can not be like parents that give into their complaining children.
Another problem that adventurous leaders must face is the herding mentality of schools which is dictated by the state and federal departments of education. These departments believe that all schools should perform at certain levels. Kowalski, Lasley, and Mahoney (2007) poses that leaders are instructed to behave in a predetermined uniform manner which doesn’t allow for innovation. Why should all schools be expected to perform at a certain level when each school has different students with different abilities? How can all leaders lead the same?
Adventurous leaders must contend with a lack of funding. Federal laws such as PL 94-142 (Ysseldyke, Algozzine, & Thurlow, 2000) dictated a free appropriate education and funding for children with disabilities. The law has merit but it has been used to take funding away from average and advanced children. Schools are being funded for weakness and not strength. More money is spent on special education students that can never lead, than we spend on other students. Since N.C.L.B. has been established, the government has provided more funds for remediation. Federal funding reveals that their priority is to decrease the performance gaps of between student groups. Should this be done by not providing funding for average or above average students? The performance gap will decrease when the bottom groups are prioritized. The top achievers will become more mediocre so the gap will lessen. Most public schools are demanding that their teachers teach by using direct instruction which does not allow for teachers to be innovative. Their lesson plans are at the knowledge level on Bloom’s taxonomy and not based on higher order thinking skills.
A major problem that our public school leaders must face is the interference of courts in the educational setting. How can an innovative leader lead our schools from the court room instead of from the classroom? Our courts are more interested in enforcing their beliefs than in ruling on what is right. Schools have suffered from frivolous lawsuits that may help an individual child but these litigations are harmful to the overall school. Leaders have to analyze solutions to school problems after considering the extra variable of will their decisions land them in court. Leaders should be able to frame and analyze school problems from the standpoint of whether their decisions are best for the overall progress of the school and not from the perspective of what is good for the individual student.