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

Abstract

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 ...