Education: Overview

Predominant Traditions

Traditional studies of leadership in education have tended to focus on two dimensions: the traits of individuals who occupy high-level administrative roles, and the nature of the organizations within which they do their work. Indeed, research on leadership in education has yielded a high volume of largely descriptive writings on college presidents, deans, and department chairs, and on superintendents, principals, and, since the 1980s, teachers who assume quasi-administrative roles as teacher leaders. This body of literature has proceeded on an assumption that the work of education leaders is best understood in organizational terms, that is, as molded, if not essentially determined, by the nature of the formal institutions within which they carry out their roles. Taken together, these defining characteristics constitute a now sixty-year-old tradition of work that has tended to bind studies of leadership to school- or university-based, role-related, organizationally insular processes. Additionally, while some scholars have attempted to address the orientations, experiences, and insights of women and minorities in various administrative positions, the bulk of the mainstream literature has accepted rather than problematized the prevailing power structures that have dominated educational administration at all levels of the U.S. education system. The result has been a literature that focuses on a relatively narrow sampling of white men in formal institutional settings.

Beyond this sampling limitation, the literature on leadership in education also reflects theoretical constraints that have limited scholars' ability to capitalize on the full range of opportunities that the field of education offers. For example, studies begun in the 1940s and continuing to the present have focused on identifying and analyzing the individual traits, organizational tasks, and characteristics and behaviors that distinguish leaders from non-leaders or effective leaders from ineffective leaders. But this approach has yet to produce the theoretically consistent, empirically verifiable profile of individual qualities and task competencies that proponents of this approach had hoped to develop, notwithstanding the emergence in the 1970s and 1980s of a line of work that incorporated more complex, contingencyoriented constructions of leadership that took account of situational conditions as well as individual traits and specified tasks. What has emerged instead is an array of mix-and-match models that indicate which “leadership styles” might be more or less effective in various organizational circumstances. Through this construction, leadership becomes a function of the fit between the traits and behaviors of individuals, features of the task, and characteristics of the organization, including at times the organization's relationship to its broader, external environment. While this type of work has generated a great deal of research and debate, it has also reinforced the tendency to concentrate on formal actors, notably school administrators, in fairly traditional institutional contexts.

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