School Leadership-Balancing Power With Caring

Abstract

School Leadership - Balancing Power with Caring by Kathleen Sernak Teachers College Press, New York, NY 1998. $22.95, ISBN: 0-8077-3762-3, 0-8077-3761-5 Is it possible to reform public schools by looking at test scores, curriculum strategies, pedagogy, and district demographics without giving merit to the importance the relationships among the constituents involved in public education? For schools to effectively restructure, they must become caring places that foster trust, connectivity, and community. It will take educational leaders who have a clear vision for the school and the ability to work collectively through ambiguous and often challenging periods of change. These educational leaders must foster conditions in which caring relationships will thrive and recognize that can be used to support the potentialities of people within the organization. This recognition, along with curriculum and pedagogical changes, will lead to improved public education. In the book, School Leadership - Balancing Power With Caring, Dr. Kathleen Sernak builds a case for understanding care as a relational attribute of educational leaders. While much has been written on characteristics of caring relationships, little has been done on the linkage between caring and power. As a participant observer utilizing qualitative techniques of data collection, Sernak originally intended to examine educational leadership and organizational structure in relationship to an ethic of caring through a case study of a low income and culturally diverse high school. Instead, the result is a story linking caring and power, and the need to use one's to establish a foundation from which caring can grow. The book begins as an intriguing story of a principal, Matte Johnson, whose sensitivity and warmth initiates Sernak on a journey to discover the relationship between caring and school organization. Sernak followed Johnson to Division High School where she expected to find a staff who would respond with admiration to her caring and nurturing spirit, and through site-based management be willing to take responsibility for implementing school improvement efforts. Yet what unfolds is a story of the struggles the principal, teachers, and staff face in trying to create a caring school community and the unfolding notion that caring involves power. Sernak states, My story, then, became a story of caring and power, for I began to see the impact of on caring and the integration of and caring, and caring with power (p.2). Chapters one and two present a short analysis of the ethic of caring from the perspective of caring within leadership, caring as a female ethic, caring for a collective, and caring as a cultural concept. When caring becomes a basis for organizational and leadership transformation, it quickly becomes politically charged because of the potential shifts in power. This can translate into distrust and resistance by the staff to accept any perceived acts by the leader as caring. Sernak also ferrets out the underlying story of the connection of and caring from a feminist perspective, and the dichotomy often created by gender in leadership roles. Women, primarily, discuss school reform in terms of caring, while a preponderance of men speak in terms of power, albeit in the form of empowerment (p.158). Yet, caring goes deeper than empowerment, seeking to not only involve the staff in decision making but also asks them to constantly be aware of their position in relationship to others. The ethic of caring must be viewed not on a limited or individualized basis, but requires a climate of collective good, one that encourages all members of the school community to see themselves in relation to others and working in unison to transform schools into caring places. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 65 citations exist upstream.