Cultural Leadership - book review

School Administrator, Jan, 1994 by William G. Keane

How do we improve schools? Pass legislation? Move to site-based management? Adopt new curricula? Empower teachers? The search for the "magic bullet" to improve education has a long and largely futile history.

Cultural Leadership: The Culture of Excellence in Education offers a compelling argument that lasting improvement in schools will occur only after a sustained effort to help teachers and principals take individual responsibility for their own personal development. This activity will lead to organizational improvement, the authors claim, if staff see how such personal growth contributes to a more effective institution for themselves and for students.

The book is an outgrowth of the School Administrators Fellowship Program sponsored by the Danforth Foundation since 1973. Authors Donn W. Gresso, associate professor of educational administration at East Tennessee State University, and William G. Cunningham, professor of educational leadership and counseling at Old Dominion University, say they had "a strong desire to analyze and document the underlying reasons for the success of this very popular and effective program."

The first two chapters discuss the context of American education and the culture of selected school systems that were successful in implementing excellence. The next nine chapters analyze the cultural attributes that appear to encourage and support continuous improvement.

The book's editing leaves something to be desired. Milbrey McLaughlin, cited in one chapter, becomes Mifrey McLaughlin in another and Mifrey McLaughlin in the name index. McLaughlin, a woman, is identified as a man.

(Cultural Leadership: The Culture of Excellence in Education by William G. Cunningham and Donn W. Gresso, Allyn & Bacon, 160 Gould St., Needham Heights, Mass. 02194, 1993, 285 pp. with index, $39.95 hardcover)