Building A New Structure For School Leadership Elemore

Reading Richard F. Elmore’s article on “Building a New Structure for School Leadership” has provoked many thoughts I have about our modern era in education, the Standards-Based ERA. In order to better explain what impressions this article made on me, I will be answering the following four questions:

1. How relevant is this article to today?

2. What do I agree with in this article?

3. What do I disagree with in this article?

4. How do I see the ideas presented in the reading in my current educational environment?

How relevant is this article to today?

This article is very relevant to the way the educational field operates today. Unfortunately, based on my experience in the Stamford school district, we have not progressed much further than

“Standards-Based Reform explicitly localizes accountability for students learning with the school and the people who work in it and it carries the increasingly explicit message that students learn largely as a consequence of what goes on inside schools” (Elmore, 2000, p.9). I think No Child Left Behind also played a great role in this but in a large district like Stamford it could be easy for a poor preforming school to hide among higher achieving schools if we examined the district as a

Stamford considered a large learning organization in Ct. There are 13 elementary, 5 middle and 3 high schools and if I had to rate our performance against the five principles I would say we have much to work on as a district. Theory one, “The purpose of leadership is the improvement of instructional practice and performance, regardless of role” (Elemore, 2000, p.20). Our school system runs on a managerial type of leadership where the administrators spend most of their time putting out fires instead of promoting what “good” instruction should be. Theory two, “Instructional improvement requires continuous learning” (Elmore, 2000, p. 20), we still struggle with collective learning and sharing of ideas. We continue to work on creating a culture of Professional Learning Communities and Instructional Data Teams. Theory three, “Learning requires modeling” (Elmore, 2000, p.21), our leaders do not model what is expected; most of the time they don’t know what is expected. Most administers do not attend professional development and those who do are usually on their isolation devices, hardly looking up to engage with the presentation. Theory four, “The roles and activities of leadership flow from the expertise required for learning and improvement, not from the formal dictates of the institution” (Elmore, 2000, p.21), as a district we