From Social Movement to Professional Management: An Inquiry into the Changing Character of Leadership in Public Education

In this exploratory essay the authors interpret changing forms of leadership in public education by locating them within the context of developing values, institutional structure, and broad social, political, and economic change. They advance two basic propositions. The first is that, during most of the nineteenth century, leadership in public education primarily took the form of guiding a decentralized social movement. In that era, they argue, the chief task of leaders was to create common schools across the nation through mobilizing opinion and effort at the local level. In stressing the importance of the rural, mostly unbureaucratized mainstream of public education, they depart from much recent historical literature which has focused on cities, growth of state power, responses to industrialization, and bureaucratization. Their second proposition is that at the turn of the twentieth century much of the direction of the educational system devolved upon university experts and professional managers. These new leaders sought to depoliticize decision making by shifting power inward and upward in buffered systems. This change gave private individuals at the top of professional hierarchies an awesome power: the ability to define what was normal or desirable in educational thought an lier task of creating the common school increasingly gave way to the work of establishing new structures and processes of schooling that would enable public education to mesh smoothly and efficiently with a corporate society. The authors stress, however, that there was overlap between the two modes of leadership. In a brief epilogue they suggest that in the last generation new challenges have arisen both to the public philosophy of education fostered by the common school crusade and to the ideal of leadership by buffered experts.