Starratt, Robert J. (2003). Centering educational administration: Cultivating meaning, community, responsibility.

	Starratt, Robert J. (2003). Centering educational administration: Cultivating meaning, community, responsibility. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Pp. 224 $59.95     ISBN 0-8058-4238-1 Reviewed by Eric Jabal Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto November 2, 2003 Robert Starratt’s (2003) Centering Educational Administration is a veritable tour de force. Erudite, thought-provoking, and compelling, it effectively marshals the many strands of social, pedagogical, and organizational theory to weave its main message: in the noble service of the next generation, educational administration can uphold education’s humanistic value by cultivating meaning, community, and responsibility. For Starratt, one of education’s most encyclopedic and articulate public intellectuals, this entails moving beyond simply considering the “discrete functions of administration” and towards engaging “the essentials of administering.” Much as the overtones of Starratt’s argument may have W. B. Yeats turning in his grave (i.e., there is a center to educational administration... that can hold), it should be heeded for its critically normative orientation and purpose: to move educators and institutions from what is to what ought to be. The book does so by centering educational leadership on the cultivating and monitoring of a learning agenda that begins with the self and students and extends to teachers and the community. Our ecological interdependence means that "School communities do not exist in isolation from their surrounding communities. What and how they learn needs to be in dialogue with their surroundings" (233). To this end, Starratt explores the separate and intersective synergy of theory and practice, teaching and learning, of individual and community, to organically develop a vision of school as “a humane and socially nurturing environment in which the pursuit of academic learning would go hand in hand with social learning” (96). He extends the conceptual foundations for ethical education first developed in Building an ethical school (1994) and engages substantive aspects of moral leadership, keeping students at the centre of the educational enterprise and offering perspectives to help educators through this late-modern era of high-stakes accountability, diversity, and uncertainty. In his inimitable way, Starratt achieves this ambitious purpose through thoughtful organization of material, clear, vivid prose, and rich illustrative examples. The eight chapters of Part I, Elements of the Leader’s Vision, take readers through the conceptual foundation of his argument about what school renewal looks like, why it’s needed, and how it can be achieved. As the book’s sub-title suggests, Starratt’s vision for a new centre of educational administration comprises three main themes: cultivating meaning, community, and moral responsibility. Positioning this triumvirate against the work of leading peers in the field, Starratt argues that the core work of educational leaders goes beyond “transformational leadership” and “learning organizations” respectively espoused by Leithwood, Jentzi & Steinbach (1999) and Elmore (2000). In cultivating curricula of meaning, community, and responsibility, Starratt maintains that educational leaders engage with what should be the core of their practice: nurturing quality learning for all students. This point of emphasis takes Starratt’s triumvirate deeper than Murphy’s (1999) trilogy of educational reform, whose centre-piece is institutional – i.e., school improvement – and from which a democratic community and social justice are supposed to emerge. For Starratt, school renewal is fundamentally about enriching and enhancing the learning of the schoolhouse’s many selves – student and staff – in relation to their physical, social, and human worlds. It is about nurturing “moral excellence” in all learners, a sense of being responsible to, and for, what one learns. To this end, educational administration’s core is therefore about cultivating personal, public, applied, and academic meaning-making by initiating “conversations among teachers about the basic meaning behind what and how they teach, and the meanings that are implied and assumed in the curriculum" (224). Part II, Bringing the Vision to Reality, builds on the opening section’s conceptual foreground to demonstrate how the active learning of all students, and the facilitating of this work by teachers, can take place in classroom, school, and district practices. Its six chapters apply Part I’s lenses of moral philosophy, critical sociology, and cognitive science to refract and cohesively connect theory, policy, and practice. With carefully selected examples, each chapter helps illustrate the interdependency of Starratt’s main themes in practical and workable situations. The site-based activities that conclude each of the book’s fourteen chapters are especially useful in Part II. Clearly rooted in Starratt’s vast experience as a scholar-practitioner-leader, they encourage readers to deepen their understanding of the many learnings through action research that is situated in the dynamics and structures of schools. Through this gestaltian marriage of theory and practice, readers are encouraged to reflect and operationalize the book’s many rich concepts. The book’s 57 site-based activities would make it a valuable addition to any graduate program in educational administration that seeks to integrate the scholarly with the practical. Given Starratt’s interest in the intersection of ethics and educational administration, it is not surprising that he concludes Part II with a familiar refrain: know thyself. Its final two chapters revisit his previous musings on the nexus between education and the self-definition journey, and cast a more constructive reading of the late-modern condition. We are not merely fragmented individuals in a pluralistic, contested world of increasing social diversity, but rather “are responsible to ourselves, to the gift that is our life – both personally and socially” (229). For Starratt, addressing the individual-community dialectic, the tension between isolated individual and artificial community, should frame all that schools do. This perspective means fostering student growth from “interpersonal responsibility to a more collective sense of responsibility for the everyday life of the school" (115) – and staff development through an understanding that “accountability to oneself as an individual educator and an individual human being” (242-43) is key to school renewal. Cultivating such “internal accountability” requires heightened reflexivity, a critical trait of those undertaking the challenging work of educational leadership. Starratt suggests that such self-scrutiny forces educational administrators “to an intellectual depth and a critical moral stance with ourselves” (250), making school administration an existential, autobiographical process – with all the attending pain and pleasure, setbacks and successes, ambiguity and clarity that characterize human undertakings. With that said, Starratt’s book goes a long way to help aspiring and current educational administrators marshal brain and heart to the service of cultivating meaning, community, and responsibility in the leadership of schools. Part I’s philosophical and sociological frameworks provide the intellectual orientations to this enterprise. Starratt’s emphasis on the social production of knowledge underscores its fundamentally human dimensions, connecting students and educators, individuals and communities, schools and society within a complex ecology. Part II’s framing of Starratt’s three main themes in the day-to-day, organizational and institutional life of schools shows how educational leaders can address quality learning for all students. Doing so requires an interdisciplinary view of educational administration, one that integrates an ethic of justice, care, and critique within a multidimensional framework and cultivates a responsible community of empowered people with the capacity for individual and collective agency. For Starratt, educational leadership is therefore about nurturing various forms of empowerment (e.g., bureaucratic, professional, moral, and existential) to build commitment and to energize meaningful teaching and learning. In this optic, educational administration is thus reframed "within a larger framework, in the service of that work of the school community, rather than in the service of some kind of abstract organizational efficiency" (181; emphasis in original). As stewards, educational leaders can and must make a difference to the lives of children and schools – and without lapsing into technocratic, cookie-sheet approaches to educational administration, Starratt’s text offers much to achieve this goal. As a former teacher and administrator turned doctoral student, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Centering Educational Administration. It challenged my thinking, forcing me to iteratively revisit eight years of professional experiences through Starratt’s tripartite conceptualization of centered educational leadership; and it extended my scholarly experiences, developed over 16 graduate courses in educational administration. Most helpfully, it enabled me to connect meaningfully my many scholar, practitioner, and leadership learnings of the last decade, honed as I moved in and out of schools as an educational administrator and the academy as a graduate student. Consequently, Starratt’s latest will definitely find a place close at hand on my bookshelf of important educational administration texts and readily used, particularly given its clear, two-part structure, 21 explicatory diagrams and figures, and helpful author and subject indices. However, going with it will also be three Post-It notes that mark the places where my thinking and experience caused me to diverge from Starratt’s. The first concerns his apparent mitigation of “youth culture” influence on student readiness for school learning: “school learning occasionally has to engage that culture, look beneath that sometimes silly surface expression of that culture…” (170; emphasis is mine). It would seem to me that since the popular world so entices young people today and increasingly shapes their identities (see e.g., Kenway & Bullen, 2001), educators should be striving to better understand it. Instead of approaching it tentatively, disparagingly, educators should be engaging it critically, ethically, as crucial parts of their work with young people. The second concern stems from Starratt’s suggestion that “Peer assessments should not be entered into the final grades of the students being assessed” (174). Once again, it would seem that involving youths in all aspects of their educational journey is paramount to nurturing meaningful relationships rooted in transparency, respect, and reciprocity. These aims should frame every stage of the teaching-and-learning enterprise, including assessment. The third Post-It marks the places when Starratt tends to overuse lexis from the semantic field of religion. Much as I fully support his ethically-rooted value system of educational administration, I prefer it framed inclusively – i.e., humanistically – rather than religiously. For example, when describing educational administrator’s interactions with external constituencies, Starratt’s extended metaphor portrays the educational leader as a preacher in a “dialogically bully pulpit” (175). Why not a public servant in the discursive arena of schooling? My concern with such religious phraseology is that it may deter more secularly-minded, but humanistically-rooted, educators from welcoming the full extent of Starratt’s message. This would be to the detriment of all, given the richness that Starratt has to contribute to the much-needed conversations about inclusively re-centering educational administration. Overall, I am nevertheless heartened by what Centering Educational Administration contributes to the field’s knowledge base. Much as “educational administration is not a work for the faint-hearted” (242), Starratt shows how educational administrators can connect leadership to teaching and learning and education in the service of the community and wider humanity. Both aspiring and serving school leaders, specialist and non-specialist alike, interested in school renewal would gain from its conceptual and practical perspectives on cultivating meaning, community, and moral responsibility. I therefore tip my hat to Starratt – and highly recommend he be read – for helping to re-centre educational administration. References Elmore, R. (2000). Building a new structure for school leadership. Washington, DC: The Albert Shanker Institute. Kenway, J. & Bullen, E. (2001). Consuming Children: Education, Entertainment, Advertising. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Leithwood, K., Jantzi, D. & Steinbach, R. (1999). Changing leadership for changing times. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Murphy, J. (1999). The quest for a center: Notes on the state of the profession of educational leadership. Columbia, MO: University Council for Educational Administration. Starratt, R. J. (1994). Building an ethical school: A practical response to the moral crisis in schools. London: Falmer Press. About the Reviewer Eric Jabal is a PhD candidate in Educational Administration at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.