From Compliance to Collaboration

By Tony Wagner

Despite all the rhetoric about shared decisionmaking, top-down, compliance-driven school leadership still seems to be the norm in many communities. The reason is that most school boards still expect new superintendents to come in and "take charge." And superintendents often expect the same of their principals. But these behaviors and expectations are badly out of date.

Compliance-driven models of leadership work--more or less--when maintaining the status quo is the goal. But now, when fundamental improvement is the goal, a very different kind of leadership is required.

Public schools are now expected to educate all students to much higher standards than ever before--at a time when many teachers report that it is harder to motivate students to learn than in the past. Despite the simplistic rhetoric of many politicians, there is no "off the shelf" reform to fix this fundamental contradiction. Educators are caught between a rock and a hard place as never before, and no amount of order-giving and -following is going to get us out of this jam. We must, literally, reinvent American public education if we are going to meet the challenge of preparing all our students...