Chapter 8

Artful Performance and

National Standards
Presented by
William Allan Kritsonis, PhD
 The Art of Educational Leadership

The main focus of this book is

attempting to balance artful
performance with accountability
within educational leadership.
 Artful Leadership

Pg. 5 Leadership is an art because it involves

a purposive construction of self
Pg. 11 Leadership is an acquired set of
habits and skills
Pg. 33 Campbells Universal Leadership
Journey
Pg. 40 Leadership is about culture and is
stirred along the lines of cultural traditions
Pg. 53 The core values of a leader help him
or her know how to respond, which
challenges to accept or to ignore, and how to
shape the practice of leadership in schools
 Artful Leadership

Pg. 65 Humans cannot perceive outside of their

own humanity and its linguistic/cultural and
contextual frame.
Pg. 89 The inescapable dilemma of every leader is
the gap between deeply held personal beliefs
concerning right and wrong, good and evil, and the
requirements of working in environments in which
these principals become muddled in a messy world.
Pg. 121 Leaders are constructed by engaging in
dramaturgical performance emphasizing the traits
popularly associated with leadership: forcefulness,
responsibility, courage, decency and so on.
Pg 187 Servant Leadership: The Mind and the Heart
as one
Currently the national standards for
evaluating preparation programs for
educational leaders focus on
accountability and assessment
strategies that are not reflective of
the actual practice of educational
leadership.
 National Standards
The ISLIC
(Interstate School Leaders Licensure
Consortium) has been adopted by nearly
30 states and has become the basis for a
national exam known as the School
Leaders Licensure Assessment
Standard Area
s
A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the
1 success of all students by facilitating the development, articulation,
implantation, and stewardship of a vision of learning that is shared and
supported by the school community.

2 A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the

success of all students by advocating, nurturing, and sustaining a
school culture and instructional program conducive to student learning
and staff professional growth.

3 A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the

success of all students by ensuring management of the organization,
operations, and resources for a safe, efficient, and effective learning
environment.

4 A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the

success of all students by collaborating with families and community
members, responding to diverse community interests and needs, and
mobilizing community resources.

5 A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the

success of all

6 A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the

success of all
Producing an Unequivocal Platform for the
Normalizing Gaze and the Policing Function
For sanctions to work, those who can
be disciplined must consent to the
process. For such possibilities to be
accepted, the actions have to be
perceived as unambiguous,
nonpolitical, and fairly applied.

Additional standards page 195

 Retracing the Steps in the
Development Process
Step 1: Reductionism, Rationality, and
Core Technologies

Job Standardization eliminates or

severely erodes the primacy of
professional preparation in university
settings. It also eliminates any unique
university approach to professional
preparation.
 Retracing the Steps in the
Development Process
Step 2: The Erasure of Context So One Size
Fits All
When the administrators job can be simplified
and narrowed, a generic test can be employed
to assess a candidates competence. When a
common set of standards applies to not only
all principalships, but all formal leadership
positions as averred, then all administrators
become interchangeable parts, and jobs that
have been de-skilled can be filled cheaply.
 Retracing the Steps in the
Development Process
Step 3: Stifling Research Dissent by the
Vicious Circle Principle (V.C.P.)

The national accreditation process headed

by NCATE welds the enforcement of the
ISLLC/ELCC standards into a confluence of
agencies, each of which erodes the
autonomy of every preparation program in
the nation by insisting on an approach of
uniformity.
 The Other View
Efficiency in operating schools
requires tight connectivity between
means and ends, inputs and outputs.
School management and the
preparation of school administrators
needs to be vigorously redirected
toward the enhancement of the
outcomes of schooling for children.
 The National Debate on Educational
Leadership Preparation
Cell A The Pipeline Scenario: Not
Enough Quality Leaders for the Schools
Increase candidates by lifting the need for
licensure or previous kinds of experiences
school leaders are believed to need.
Erasing the requirement of leaders to
have had prior classroom teaching
experience, and the recruitment of
leaders from business and the military to
run schools.
 The National Debate on Educational
Leadership Preparation
Cell B The Real World Scenario:
Universities Are Too Removed From
Reality to Prepare Educational
Leaders Well
University programs must retool to
become more relevant, partner with
school districts, use research-based
practicesthat will have the greatest
impact on student achievement.
 The National Debate on Educational
Leadership Preparation
Cell C Some Schools Are Broken
Scenario: Leaders Need
Incentives/Competition to Fix Them
The way broken schools are fixed is by
providing them with leaders who are
sufficiently motivated to take charge and
holding them accountable for results.
School inadequacy is entirely a human
problem with the lack of insufficient focus
and unmotivated faculty.
 The National Debate on Educational
Leadership Preparation

Cell D The Social Justice Scenario:

Leadership Is a Distributed Function
The achievement gap is built in to
existing schooling operations. It will not be
removed by making schools more efficient
and no amount of accountability for results
will change that. Schools have to be
remade and reworked to fundamentally
alter what they do.
Writing in Your Personal Reflective Journal

How do you reflect on your leadership?

what workswhats meaningfulwhats

rightwhy lead