What Would Peter Drucker Say About Education Leadership?

What follows is a quote from Peter Drucker, but with an Education Innovation twist. I have removed words like business, company, executive, and economics; and replaced them with school(s), education, and principal.

“Schools prefer not to abandon the old, the obsolescent, the no-longer-productive; they’d rather hang on to it and keep on pouring money into it. Worse still, they then assign their most capable people ‘defending’ the outworn in a massive misallocation of the scarcest and most valuable resource—the human resource that needs to be allocated to making tomorrow, if the school is to have a tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow always arrives…It is always different. And then even the mightiest school is in trouble if it has not worked on the future. It will have lost distinction and leadership—all that will remain is big-education overhead…Not having dared to take of making the new happen, it perforce took the much greater risk of being surprised by what did happen…And this is a risk that even the largest and richest school cannot afford and that even the smallest school need not run.”

“The principal has to accept responsibility for making the future happen…It is the willingness to tackle purposefully this, the last of the educational tasks in education that distinguishes the great schools from the merely competent one, and education builder from school principal’s office occupant.”

Comments

[Codrin Kruijne]

One of the problems in education is that people make the 'Fatal Assumption' as described in The E-Myth, by Michael Gerber. The "Fatal Assumption is: if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work." If you are good at teaching or doing research, it does not automatically make you good at running an organization that provides education and does research. We need more entrepreneurial people in education leadership.

[K.M. Walton]

Principals must have a clear vision of where they want to take their teachers and subsequently their students. When I say clear, I mean clear as in crystal clear, and with realistic, attainable goals with measurable outcomes. But the overall vision is key, crucial if you will. Without the school simply sails down the path to mediocrity or worse...failure. Who suffers? Why the students of course. Let's be honest, it should always be about the students and pushing their thinking out of the park regardless of race, gender or socioeconomic background. How does one do that? The vision, the training or professional development, the measuring/re-adusting, the celebrating.

Just started a new blog myself: http://wecanfixeducation.blogspot.com
Stop by!

[Rob Jacobs]

Codrin,

That is an excellent point. While Gerber's E-Myth correctly points out that what an organization understands the work, it may not be a great provider of that work. It is sad to think that the best organization or schools spend their days preparing students for the future, do not themselves, prepare themselves for the future.

[Rob Jacobs]

K.M. Walton, you description of what a principal must do is spot on.

However, I would add that a principal must develop the values that will be needed to reach the vision. Values will defeat every attempt to build, create, and reach toward a vision or a mission. Values trump mission, vision, and plans. Get the values right and nothing will stop the vision from being accomplished.