Education, K–12

Educational leaders are those people who guide, manage, and, when need be, transform schools. Sometimes educational leaders have been chosen and given power (superintendents, principals, chancellors) and sometimes they are people within the school community who gain power or influence through their personalities and actions (students, parents, teachers). In some few cases, people outside the school system or community lead through their ideas (influential authors, for instance). Schools present unique challenges to their leaders, and understanding educational leadership requires a deep and detailed understanding of how schools work.

A school principal is certainly at the core, if not always the leader, of a school. One principal tells the following story about her job and her school.

Although the above example does not capture a moment of educational leadership that brings tears to one's eyes or astonishes one with the leader's vision, strength of mind, or charisma, it does convey what is special about educational leadership. The direction of a school often is determined by many seemingly mundane decisions. Vision, in most schools, is manifested in oblique ways, and often reveals itself only implicitly. For this principal, the overriding goal of every decision, big and small, is to ensure that students are learning as much and as well as possible, and that the conditions of the schools are conducive to that goal. From her perspective, the students' dissatisfaction with lunch was distracting them from their work, and from their ability to attend classes (when those classes conflicted with their friends' lunch period), be prepared for classes, and get to classes on time. She felt that the lunch issue had a direct bearing on the students' ability to learn, and therefore she changed the lunch schedule to optimize the students' learning. In so doing she affected the lives of everyone who spends time in the school building. Thus the quote demonstrates at least one of the ways in which schools differ from other institutions: Schools serve one constituency (in the case of K–12 schools, young people), but involve many different people. Often an educational leader's crystallizing moments unfold in the most unlikely spots, such as the cafeteria.

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