Leading Through The Quagmire

School leaders are constantly challenged by diverse students and conflicting interests between faculty and staff. They are often called upon to make sense of ethical quagmires, where rules might conflict with desired outcomes or personal values clash with professional obligations. Negotiating these dilemmas can be challenging, but democratic ethics can offer an effective process to work through them. Drawing from the writings of John Dewey, Leading Through the Quagmire advocates his notion that democracy is an appropriate response to the multitude of conflicting interests, needs, and values in educational settings. Moreover, Enomoto and Kramer propose an inquiry method to harness democratic ethics for engaging in fair deliberation and conflict resolution. This book provides the foundation for understanding tensions, as well as the methods and applications to navigate through them. Stories and examples are provided to enable readers to understand such terms as utilitarianism, ethical tensions, religious attitudes, and eco-feminism in meaningful ways.

At a time when America's schools face many of the most difficult challenges ever, the authors of Leading for Democracy: A Case-Based Approach to Principal Preparation return the reader to an agenda for democratic leadership for schools. Emphasizing the need for leadership preparation programs to reexamine existing and more traditional approaches to principal preparation, this comprehensive book draws to the foreground the need for a case-based approach that reflects the real-world problems and challenges faced by principals in schools today. In particular, Leading for Democracy emphasizes both a case-based pedagogy for principal preparation and the democratic ideals that provide the foundation for democratic schools, bringing into specific relief the work ahead for professors of educational leaders in preparing principals ground in democratic practice. Equally important, Leading for Democracy provides practical insight to the challenges of today's principal, offering a set of pedagogical tools for professors to guide students of leadership in learning and understanding the difficult work required of leading democratically, set against the backdrop of a changing America.

The increased focus on raising standards in education requires leaders to engage in complex decision making about teacher assessment, mandated accountability measures, and the collection and use of large amounts of data. Showcasing exemplary practices of school and district administrators, Decision Making in Educational Leadership covers issues concerning the role of emotion, ethical and legal ramifications, the use of data, and complexity in decision making. Chapter authors in this research-based volume explore what administrators and school leaders actually know about educational problems, how they draw upon and revise theories of action for responding to problems, and which theories are tenable in educational decision making. This important resource provides a broad and international perspective on effective models and methods of educational decision making and shares valuable knowledge about how theory can be translated into practice in a variety of school settings.

Advocacy Leadership lays out a post-reform agenda that moves beyond the neo-liberal, competition framework to define a new accountability, a new pedagogy, and a new leadership role definition in education.

Maximizing productivity without regard for human consequences, the quest for profit above all else, the stifling of individual personality and creative expression, a competitive atmosphere-these are the reigning features of the modern workplace. Although many writers have called attention to the debilitating effects of this dehumanization of the working environment, solutions have been less in evidence. In The Anatomy of Ethical Leadership, Lyse Langlois frames the problem in terms of ethics, pointing to the fact that managers are often uncertain how to integrate ethical considerations into their process of decision making. She explores the instrumental, often highly legalistic patterns of thought that pervade modern organizations and proposes instead a new emphasis on dialogue and on modes of reasoning that make room for the complexity of ordinary reality. To that end, she outlines a trajectory for ethical, responsible, and authentic decision making--the TERA model-that managers --

In Morality, Leadership, and Public Policy, Eric Weber argues for an experimentalist approach to moral theory in addressing practical problems in public policy. The experimentalist approach begins moral inquiry by examining public problems and then makes use of the tools of philosophy and intelligent inquiry to alleviate them. Part I surveys the uses of practical philosophy and answers criticisms - including religious challenges - of the approach, presenting a number of areas in which philosophers' intellectual efforts can prove valuable for resolving public conflicts. Part II presents a new approach to experimentalism in moral theory, based on the insights of John Dewey's pragmatism. Focusing on the elements of good public inquiry and the experimentalist attitude, Weber discusses ways of thinking about the effective construction and reconstruction of particular problems, including practical problems of public policy prioritization. Finally, in Part III the book examines real-world examples in which the experimentalist approach to ethics proves useful, including instances of "bandwidth theft" and the controversies surrounding activist judges in the US Supreme Court.

Focused on the particular needs of superintendents of districts of fewer than ten thousand students, the chapters teach students critical frameworks for thinking through and addressing the problems and practices superintendents encounter daily, allowing them to form a detailed and practical understanding of administration and leadership.

Quagmire shares a range of voices—men and women, military and civilian—and a range of perspectives from the homeland, the combat zone, and war’s aftermath covering fifteen years of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.